God's Double Agent (14 page)

When I stepped into the house, I felt a strange combination of pure hatred and complete excitement. I’d been cooped up with my special agent, some pencils, and a stack of never-ending paper for so long. Now that I had decided to die, I finally felt alive. I placed my foot on the slate tiles of the hallway. My shoe made a sound, and I paused.

Was I right about the home being empty? I took another step and paused to listen. Nothing. I took another step. Then another. And so I made my way through the hallway toward the kitchen, one step at a time. If the president was home, he definitely could’ve heard me—either my shoes clicking on the tile or my heart thudding in my chest. But I couldn’t control either of those things. I’d started realizing just how few things were in my control.

The hallway led to the kitchen, which was open and clean except for some tomatoes sitting on a butcher’s table in the middle of the room. One was cut with a knife, which was lying beside the food and a dirty plate.

My feet were suddenly glued to the floor and I strained to hear sounds indicating another person’s presence. Was President Ming’s wife there, nibbling on food instead of preparing dinner because her husband was working late? I scanned the rest of the kitchen. An empty wine glass sat beside a copper vase holding chrysanthemums that should’ve been thrown away a week ago. A few dead petals had fallen from the flowers and piled beneath it.

I was somehow both completely numb and exceedingly invigorated as I left the kitchen—and heard a loud crash. I froze again. My first inclination was to assume I’d unintentionally hit something, knocking it to the floor. However, the sound had come from the living room, which was about ten feet from where I stood as still as a statue. Had the agents followed me here? Were they setting up a trap in the other room?

After the crash I heard a gasp, and then laughter. It was a man, definitely President Ming. Though he was generally a serious and sober man, we had shared many good times in his office. I would’ve recognized his throaty laugh anywhere.

Instead of feeling fear or trepidation, I felt relieved. It was like I’d walked into his house and heard the sound from times past, when things were less serious. When I had more life in front of me than behind me. Instead of running away, out the door and back to my security agent, I put my hand on the living room doorway and peered around it.

There, sitting in a chair, was President Ming. His eyes were partially closed, his head tossed back in a complete belly laugh. A bottle of wine was between his legs, and a glass was on the floor, completely shattered. All of the rage that had built up in my heart against the man was temporarily halted. It’s hard to hate a man who’s giggling.

“Xiqiu,” he slurred. If he was surprised at all that I was in his house, I couldn’t tell. When he said my name, it reminded me of the first time he called to me on campus. Inexplicably,
even in those weird circumstances, I felt honor that the president of the university knew my name. “What are you doing here?”

I walked into the room but stayed near the doorway.

“Wait,” he said, holding up a finger. “Let me guess. You’ve come here to . . . protest something.” He absolutely cackled at this, and I noticed an empty wine bottle on the floor next to the broken glass. My anger rose again.

“You’re mocking me?” I said. “You used to be on my side!”

“Well, your side is now the losing side,” he said, leaning over and picking up shards of glass. For the past few months, I had hung my hopes on the asinine idea that this man would be my advocate?

He got up out of his chair and headed toward me. I thought of the knife on the butcher block in the kitchen, but didn’t move from my spot. When he got to me, he stuck his finger in my face, just an inch from my nose.

“You are such a troublemaker,” he said, little drops of spittle hitting my face. “The Communist Party has nurtured you for years. Why do you go and do these offensive things to the nation that’s given you so much?”

“You betrayed me,” I yelled. “I was loyal to you, and you turned on me!”

“What do you know of loyalty?” he barked, his jovial mood completely gone. Beads of perspiration had formed above his eyebrows. “China has taken care of you like a son, and all you’ve done is try to destroy her. You are an enemy, an agitator, and you will pay for your treachery.”

I was livid, but I suddenly wanted nothing more than to get out of there. “No, you will pay!” I yelled. I turned away from him and ran through the house. By the time I reached the back door, all I heard was chortling from the living room.

“I will pay?” He laughed. “I will pay?”

As I scurried back to campus, I didn’t feel humiliated or even fooled. I felt betrayed by a person I had believed to be a
true friend and ally. He mocked me because he knew I’d always wanted to right all the wrongs in the culture. Of course, I couldn’t do that with my life.

But in my death, I was satisfied to be able to right just one wrong.

9

In the pre-internet age, English literature majors were at a serious disadvantage when it came to figuring out how to build bombs. Had I paid more attention in high school chemistry class, perhaps, I could’ve known the basic science, how to mix this chemical with that to make the perfect, deadly mix. However, my academic specialty provided precious few clues on how to get the job done. Shakespeare killed his characters in rather gruesome ways—smothering, stabbing, beheading, hanging, plague. Too messy. I needed something faster that could take both President Ming and me out at once.

I began to dream about death and murder all the time. During the day, I looked out for the agents, dutifully sat in my isolated room, wrote my so-called confession, and dreamed about revenge. Sometimes an hour would pass, and I’d look down at my paper and find it blank. Instead of scurrying to fill the page, I’d simply start again. I no longer cared enough to give the impression of effort. Without college and post-graduate options, I no longer had any incentive to please my deputy. In fact, I no longer tried to impress anyone. In the evenings, as I sat in the back of the class while my papers were graded, I laid my head on the desk and cried.

One day, as I sat in the back of the classroom, something
unexpected happened. The guy who sat in front of me, who’d drawn the English name “Jack,” finally turned around and spoke.

“Here,” he whispered. “This might help you.” He laid a booklet on my desk. It was a biography of a Chinese intellectual.

I looked at the cover, and then flipped it over. “Why would
this
help?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, a little exasperated. “Lao Wu gave it to me.”

“Thank you,” I said, touched by his compassion, even though I didn’t see the use of it.

“Maybe it will help you stop being so . . . weepy.”

Reluctantly, I flipped through the pages of the booklet, which was the story of a Confucian scholar from the Western Zhang village near Linfen, Shanxi Province. He was known far and wide for his wisdom, but when he was alone, he was sad and very depressed.

I can identify with that
, I thought as I turned the page. Though I wasn’t really in the mood to read a new book, I didn’t have anything to do as I sat there in silence waiting for my papers to be graded. Plus, I found it interesting that Jack would think this might be a solution for me. I readjusted myself in my chair and began reading about this tortured scholar.

His name was Xi Zizhi, and Confucianism and the Chinese classics couldn’t calm his troubled soul. When he was thirty, the sorrow took its toll and his health deteriorated. At one point, his wife and friends dressed him in his finest clothes, laid him on his bed, and waited for him to die. He didn’t, much to his own chagrin. One day, his friends suggested opium might brighten his mood. The drug provided an immediate—yet short-lived—relief. The temporary thrill was replaced by a deep depression, even worse than he’d had before.

“This is a terribly sad story,” I said, hitting Jack in the back with the pamphlet. “Why would you give me this? Do you want to make me cry even more?”

“Lao Wu said it was inspirational.” Jack shrugged.

I reopened the book and started reading again. By the time Xi realized opium wasn’t going to solve his problems, he was already addicted. His health began to deteriorate at an even faster rate. In 1877, when his province was hit by a famine, two British missionaries from Hudson Taylor’s group went to a nearby city to offer assistance. Thousands died from starvation, suicide, and disease, so the two missionaries brought food, money, and a new religion. When the famine finally ended, the missionaries used a very clever way to get the community thinking about this new faith. They conducted an essay contest in their newspaper, asking people to answer the question, “What’s the most effective way to get rid of an addiction to opium?” This got Xi’s attention. He knew a thing or two about opium, and he desperately needed money to buy more of it. He decided to enter the contest four times, under four different names. He won three out of the four prizes.

Reluctantly, he and his brother-in-law went to one of the missionary’s houses in Pingyang to collect his money from a Mr. Hill. He’d heard all sorts of rumors about the missionaries and their new religion.

“As daylight banished darkness, so did Mr. Hill’s presence dissipate all the idle rumors I had heard,” he said. “All sense of fear was gone; my mind was at rest. I beheld his kindly eye and remembered the words of Mencius: ‘If a man’s heart is not right, his eye will certainly bespeak it.’ That face told me I was in the presence of a true, good man.”

I stopped reading for a moment, and rubbed my hands over my face. When I was a child, I’d heard of people my father described as being of the “Jesus religion.” In fact, there was an old, abandoned church where they’d met in a nearby village about two miles from my home. I remember walking by it for the first time and saying, “Oh, what is this?”

Though it was beautiful, it was deserted and one of the walls
had fallen in. My friends made fun of it, but I never went in. It seemed dangerous and very mysterious.

“Some foreigners used to be there,” they told me. Of course, anything related to foreigners was infinitely fascinating. As the Chinese term for foreigners,
yang guizi
, literally means “foreign devil,” the first Christian church I ever saw was automatically related to devils because it was related to Americans. We went near it and looked at it with as much curiosity as if it had been a spacecraft from another planet.

I smiled as I thought of that old building, perhaps the only smile I hadn’t faked in months. I put the book down and stretched as I looked at the backs of my classmates. They were working diligently while I was reading about an opium addict.
This is how far I’ve fallen
, I thought.

Nevertheless, I turned the page and kept reading. Xi took his prize money, and even began working for the missionaries, translating the New Testament into Chinese to use as religious tracts. When he got to the story of the crucifixion, he fell on his knees and wept. He felt he’d finally found the answer he’d been searching for his entire life. It wasn’t found in Confucianism or the Chinese classics. Mysteriously, it was found in the story of a man named Jesus, who had been punished and killed by the government for something he didn’t do.

A chill came over me and I looked up from the book. I felt like it was written specifically for me, like it was whispering deep truths to me with each new page. There were so many beautiful sentences in it, phrases I’d never heard used together, and ideas I’d never contemplated.

I reached down into my backpack and grabbed a notebook I used to use for my English studies. I opened it, drew a dark line after my old English notes, and wrote, “Notes from the Xi Zizhi Book.” Then I began to copy some of the beautiful sentences I’d been reading.

I copied a couple of pages of the quotes and then went back
to the book. I was eager to discover what would happen to Xi after he converted to Christianity. After all, he was a drug addict. Would Christianity be enough to help him finally escape both his sadness and his addiction?

“
I tried to break it off by means of native medicine, but could not; by use of foreign medicine, but failed,” I read. “At last I saw, in reading the New Testament, that there was a Holy Spirit who could help men. I prayed to God to give me His Holy Spirit. He did what man and medicine could not do; He enabled me to break off opium smoking.”

A tear trickled down my cheek, and a student sitting a few rows in front of me turned around at the sound of me sniffling. When she saw me, she rolled her eyes and turned back around quickly. My crying in the back of the classroom was no longer interesting. This time, however, I was not crying from the desperation that had become my constant companion. Instead, I cried in relief. There was hope. His name was Jesus? The Holy Spirit? How did they relate to the “Heavenly Grandpa” I’d prayed to in my youth? I jotted down some notes, wiping the tears from my eyes so they wouldn’t land on my notebook. I was so overcome with emotion and confusion, I couldn’t write quickly enough to get back to the story.

After Xi believed, he was so much of a changed man that he changed his name to
Shengmo
, which meant “conqueror of demons.” He stopped using drugs, he set up gospel drug prevention centers, and he helped rescue hundreds of thousands of people.

I was in awe. This man had created real, lasting change—not just for himself but for others. That’s all I had ever wanted to do. When I was a poor elementary school kid being ridiculed, I wanted equality and respect, and I figured the only way to effect change was to become wealthy. When I was in high school, I wanted fairness and equal opportunity for all people, so I figured the only way to pull that off was to become prime minister. When I made it to college, I wanted democracy and
freedom. By this time, I figured the force of my own ambition and personality would be enough to transform my community into a better place.

But none of my grand plans worked. In fact, the people I had supposedly changed had betrayed me! That was the real reason I felt so desperate. That was the real reason I’d been scheming on the best way to kill President Ming and then myself. Nothing changed. It
never
changed. My life, my nation, and my community were going to be the same forever. And it didn’t matter how much I tried or how much inequality, unfairness, or injustice existed in this world. I’d never see anything actually change.