Nine Days (19 page)

“That’s great,” I said.

“And she told me: ‘Ti-Anna, it was his decision to go back. We can try to help him, but he’s responsible for his choices, like all of us.’ ”

“And that made you feel better,” I suggested.

“I guess,” she said. “It’s funny, though. Now that I know he’s alive and I can picture where he is, I’ve really been missing him.”

“I get that,” I said. “You didn’t have time to miss him while we were looking.”

Ti-Anna pulled two containers of rice and vegetables out of her shoulder bag, and two pairs of chopsticks.

“My mom made one for you,” she said.

“You’re kidding!” I took my sandwich out of my pocket. “Want this?”

“But then what will I do with mine?”

“You know,” I said, “it takes a surprising number of calories to get around on crutches.”

“I don’t know why I even asked.” She sighed and handed me both containers. “So am I going to get to read your masterpiece?”

I said yes, of course.

“I was going to go back, take out some of the embarrassing details, put in some good values the judge might like,” I said. Since her mother had never reported her as missing, Ti-Anna wasn’t having to deal with the judge like I was. “But I’ve decided not to change anything. After all, we were trying to do the right thing, right? What happened is what happened.”

But when I offered to email it to her, she hesitated.

“Don’t forget what Brian warned us,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “In fact, I think I might save them the trouble and put it all online. I figure there isn’t much
they
don’t know already. And since I’ll have to admit at the end that there’s nothing much more we can do for your father, I can’t imagine there’ll be anything in there to worry them.”

“You will?” Ti-Anna said. “I mean, there’s not?”

“Well, let’s be honest, are we going to engineer a jailbreak fourteen thousand miles away in Kunming?”

Ti-Anna looked like she wanted to answer, but she didn’t. I finished the first container and pushed the other one back to her.

“You know, on second thought, I’m kind of full,” I said.

“You?” she said. “You’re—” Then she stopped, and gave me one of her little half smiles. She slid the lunch back into her shoulder bag and put her hand on mine for a minute.

We stood up, surrounded by the buzz of the cicadas and the Washington warmth, and started back down the path.

Beijing, China

It is past midnight, early Tuesday morning, and the man with the tie tucked into his shirt leans back. He drains the lukewarm remains of his fifth cup of tea and sighs.

He knows what he should do. He should send copies of this document to multiple offices for further analysis and after-action study. He should forward the name of this infernal boy to the border authorities, to make sure he stays on the watch list for entry into the country. He should set in motion the process to determine whether any of his subordinates, in Washington or Hong Kong or Hanoi, should be reprimanded or demoted.

But he does not want to do any of those things. What he wants is for the mess to go away. Oh, the original operation—the luring of the traitor back into custody—that went smoothly. But the botched operation with the daughter from the United States, and all the publicity afterward: a nightmare.

He barks to his young assistant, who is sitting outside his office wondering if she will go home at all tonight. He orders another cup of tea. It won’t do his career any good to call more attention to this episode. And, really, is further analysis necessary? Everyone knows what went wrong. It is clear from the boy’s rambling, overheated account that he is nothing but an amateur who stumbled into something he didn’t understand. They won’t be trying anything again soon, that much is clear. His document says so. And the girl will know better than to risk making things worse for her father.

At least the boy’s leg is broken. There’s some satisfaction in that.

His assistant brings tea on a small round tray, bows almost imperceptibly and retreats. When she has closed the door, he clips together the two printouts (English and Chinese), pulls open his bottom file cabinet drawer and drops the documents at the back. He blows on the tea, sips, leans back and pushes the drawer closed with his foot.

Rockville, Maryland

In her small windowless office, the juvenile court judge leans back in her chair, a half smile on her face. It’s almost time for court, and the pile of orders and pleadings she had intended to plow through remains untouched on her desk. She doesn’t mind.

The boy has taken her assignment seriously, and his personal account is a change of pace from her normal fare of child abuse, drugs and petty crime. She is pleased when she doesn’t feel bound to inflict punishment. He did things he shouldn’t have, no question, and she can’t just let those slide. He made his parents frantic. He used their money. He forged their signatures.

He also saved those poor girls from a terrible life—more than she accomplishes, most days. He stood by a friend.

The judge thinks she can devise a community service plan that everyone will be happy with. Maybe he can teach kendo to some of my real troublemakers, she thinks. Once he gets out of his cast.

She leans forward and scrolls back to the final page, with Ethan’s description of turning down a second lunch. Speaking in code indeed. She smiles, closes the attachment and tosses her empty coffee cup into the wastebasket. She steels herself for an afternoon in court.

Just outside Washington, D.C
.

Seven miles to the south, the girl with the long black hair, striking eyebrows and sharp cheekbones leans back, smiling.

“What are you still doing on that computer, Ti-Anna?” her mother calls from the kitchen in Chinese. “Don’t you want lunch?”

“One minute,” she calls back.

Ti-Anna closes her eyes. The knocking of her air conditioner could almost be the waves slapping into the hull of the Hong Kong ferry. Seagulls drift along beside them, a rainbow dances through a spray of seawater. Ethan’s arm is lightly around her shoulder. When the ferry docks, they will go through the gate, not over it.

“Ti-Anna!” her mother calls, more sharply.

She clicks the document closed.

“I’m coming,” she answers.

Ethan’s cast won’t come off for a few more weeks, but soon enough he’ll be riding his bike. They’ll meet up when he gets off work, maybe. He’ll wheel his bike as he walks her home.

She wonders what it will take to persuade her mother to let her spend time with an American boy. She’s not sure. But she knows she will be working on it.

I was thirteen years old and living in Montreal when my father went missing. My name is Ti-Anna. The story you just read is a work of fiction, but many of the details and situations are based on truth. I will tell you the history this novel is based upon.

My father’s name is Wang Bingzhang. He was a medical doctor from China who came to North America for graduate study in 1978. He was in awe of the civil liberties and democracy he found here. They were unknown in his homeland and were so inspiring that he gave up his career in medical research to found the overseas Chinese democracy movement. For twenty years, he worked unrelentingly to promote political change in China, until the struggle that had consumed his life cost him his freedom, too.

In 2002, my father went to northern Vietnam to meet with Chinese labor activists. When he left he told my mother and me that he would call us. Weeks passed and we didn’t hear from him. I was not brave enough to go looking for him, but I remember my family’s desperate attempts to get information on his whereabouts. We knew that he was considered an enemy of his own country
because he was fighting for freedom. Six months passed before we finally learned that he had been kidnapped in Vietnam. He’d been forced into China and charged with planning to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok and spying for Taiwan. A trial was held in secret and he was sentenced to life in prison. When my mother told me what had happened, I was sure there had been a terrible mistake—that such injustice could not exist, and that if it did, it would not touch the sheltered life of a teenager like me living in North America.

My family pleaded with the governments of Canada, the United States and elsewhere to call for my father’s release. In 2008, I put my education on hold for a year to advocate in Washington, D.C., for the government to help get my father’s freedom.

Despite the international support we’ve been able to mobilize, my father continues to languish in prison. For ten years now, he has been in a tiny cell in Southern China. He is allowed one thirty-minute visit each month. My family takes turns making the journey from Vancouver, Montreal, New York City or Los Angeles, only to see him through layers of Plexiglas and prison bars. The mood is so heartbreaking, even the prison guards monitoring our visits have conveyed to us their sympathy.

It is true that I have traveled to meet questionable people in questionable places in the hope that I could understand my father’s journey and ultimately win his freedom. Sometimes, my adventures have been rewarding, like the time my brother and I went looking for the Royal Thai Police colonel who investigated my father’s supposed crimes. We traveled to Thailand with nothing but the colonel’s name on a faded piece of paper. Luck led us to this man on the outskirts of Bangkok. When we met over tea and jackfruit, he exonerated my father of any wrongdoing. Over the years, I’ve also met many people, who, like some characters in this book, took a stand to help others. I know that like Sydney’s, their heroic efforts
to help complete strangers for the sake of a belief in humanity have changed lives for the better.

But the decade of my father’s imprisonment has been marked largely by a sense of defeat and the helplessness one feels when confronting an adversary as formidable as the Chinese government. I don’t have my father’s idealism, eloquence or brazen ability to defy the Chinese communist regime. But I have always felt that if I cannot secure his release, at least I must ensure that his sacrifice is not in vain.

Often the challenges are overwhelming and my efforts seem meaningless, but I’ve come to realize that you can never know what may come from taking action—and you can be sure that nothing will come from sitting idle. Not everyone can be an effective public speaker or writer, but we all can make a difference in our own way. Ethan’s eagerness to help is as important as Sydney’s dedication.

However naive it may seem to believe that one individual can make a difference, the point is that we should not allow ourselves to be mere victims of adversity. With our rights come responsibilities to use whatever strengths we have and stand on the right side of history.

I think if my father knew that in exchange for his freedom, he had planted a seed for change in China, it would be a trade he would be willing to make many times over.

—Ti-Anna Wang

This story is fiction, but it’s inspired by the type of stories I usually write—true ones.

I’ve spent most of my life working for a newspaper, the
Washington Post
, which has given me a chance to meet people like Sydney, Horace, Ti-Anna’s father—and even a real Ti-Anna.

My first reporting from Asia didn’t go well. I landed in Seoul, Korea, in 1987, just as thousands of university students were staging demonstrations against that country’s military dictatorship.

Their story had a happy ending: Eventually, they were joined by thousands of other protesters, including many of their parents. The government agreed to hold free elections. South Korea evolved into what it is today: a prosperous, peaceful democracy.

But when I got there, things were confusing, and a little scary. Students with bandanas tied around their foreheads were heaving flaming Molotov cocktails into formations of riot police. Policemen, sweating inside padded green jackets and helmets, were firing tear gas back at the students.

On my first day, I made a true rookie mistake: I let myself get
walloped in the leg by a tear-gas canister. I was lucky. If it had hit me in the chest or head, I would have really been in trouble. As it was, I got away with a welt, a lot of chemical-induced tears and a couple of useful lessons.

One was: Don’t get stuck in no-man’s-land between students throwing Molotov cocktails and riot police firing tear gas. You can write as good a newspaper article from behind one line or the other.

The other, which I learned slowly over the next weeks and months and years, was more important: people all over the world, in every country and every culture, want to live in freedom, and many of them will take amazing risks to get there. I saw evidence of that again in 1991, when the
Post
sent me and my wife (also a reporter) to Moscow to cover what turned out to be the collapse of the Soviet Union. I saw it in Indonesia in 1998, when ordinary people forced the dictator Suharto from power.

And in this century, while I’ve been running the
Post
’s editorial and opinion section in Washington, I’ve seen it in the eyes of brave people from all over the world: Egypt and Burma, Belarus and Zimbabwe, Cuba, Bahrain and, yes, China.

We call these people dissidents, or freedom fighters, or activists. They think of themselves as ordinary people who are tired of being pushed around—who want the same thing Thomas Jefferson wanted, which is to say, their “inalienable rights” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Some of these freedom fighters come to the United States because they’ve been kicked out of their own countries. Some visit and then go back, even though they know they may be put in jail when they do.

Sometimes they come to Washington because they’re hoping to convince Congress to appropriate money for their cause. Often they just want moral support. They want us to know that they’re out there, fighting. They want us to appreciate our own freedom. And
some come to the
Washington Post
, hoping we might write about their struggles.