Nine Days (2 page)

I didn’t even notice her at first. I was staring at my desk, letting the blood drain from my face. She must have been standing there for a couple of minutes before I looked up.

To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I’d known Ti-Anna since sixth grade, and of course I knew some basic facts about her, like you do if you’ve been in classes with someone. That her parents came from China, but that she didn’t hang out much with the other Chinese students. That she was smart but quiet, and hardly ever talked in class. And, yes, that she was, as they used to say in the old detective novels, easy on the eyes.

But if she had said a dozen words to me in the five years we’d been classmates, I couldn’t remember more than eleven of them.

So I was surprised to see her there, and even more surprised when she said, in her quiet voice, “Thank you, Ethan.”

“For what?”

“For being brave enough to say those things about Mao. Some Chinese people think that to be patriotic they can’t be honest about their country. I think the opposite. And every single thing you said was one hundred percent true.”

Then she tucked her hair behind her ear, smiled a dazzling smile and added, “Even if I might not have phrased them in exactly the same way.” And walked out of the classroom.

I spent the rest of the day, and a good part of the night, thinking about her.

At my school you can leave at lunchtime, and most kids do. They go in groups and gaggles to fast-food places or to the deli on the corner. I usually bring a peanut butter sandwich and find a quiet spot to read. Ti-Anna usually brings lunch too, because her family doesn’t have much money, though of course I didn’t know that at first. Sometimes she sat in the cafeteria with her friends, but I had noticed that sometimes she ate by herself, in the same general area as me—out on the bleachers overlooking the track.

So the day after she talked to me in class, I waited until I thought she might be out there, and then I walked out and acted surprised to see her. I sat on the bench just above hers, and we started to talk. The next day we went out at about the same time and sat on the same bench, and we did that pretty much every day until finals, except when it rained.

After a few days, I started finding her when school ended, and I’d walk my bike alongside her while she walked home, a mile or so from school. We’d talk outside her apartment building. She never
asked me in, and I never asked to go in. I got to know the bench in front of her building pretty well.

When I think back to our talks, of course the one I remember best is the day she told me her father had disappeared. But by then, we’d done a lot of talking—about her father, yes, because she was really proud of him, but about a lot of other things too. Ti-Anna didn’t like to talk about herself, but it turned out we had a lot in common, even though we were really different. Or we were really different in similar ways.

For example: my parents believe that if you are born intelligent, the only reasonable course of action is to become a scientist. They wouldn’t admit that, certainly not to me, but there it is.

And that’s a problem, because my big brother is a physics whiz, like they are, and my sister is probably going to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry by the time she’s thirty.

Whereas I’ve never once had a lab come out the way the teacher said it should. What I love is to read history, biographies, human rights reports. My parents pretend to think that’s fine too, when they notice. But they don’t really get it.

Ti-Anna was always two steps ahead of the lab teacher’s directions, but her parents didn’t really approve of her love of science. They’re both from China. Ti-Anna was born there too, but her family came to America when she was four, so she sounds totally American. Her father, as she explained to me one lunchtime while we watched the cheerleading team practice, was a big deal in the Chinese democracy movement.

“Wait—Chen Jie-min—that’s your father?” I asked.

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Of course!” I said. “Wow. I had no idea.”

She looked pleased and a little surprised. But if you know anything about China today, you’ve heard of Ti-Anna’s father.

“But a man like him—I mean—I wouldn’t think he’d have anything against girls becoming scientists.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Ti-Anna said. “It’s more—it’s hard to explain.” She took a bite of her apple. “Ever since we came to America, he thinks about nothing except going back and helping China become a democracy. That’s his whole life, and it’s my mother’s life—typing his articles and letters, helping answer his mail, whatever needs doing. They think it should be my life too.”

She stopped, and I thought that was the end of it. The cheerleaders had collapsed in a laughing heap, and Ti-Anna seemed to be studying them as they untangled themselves.

But she continued. “Being good at science, and getting into a good college, and becoming a biochemist in the United States—for him, that would be a waste, something that a million other kids could do, that a million other Chinese immigrant kids
will
do. For them, there’s nothing wrong with it. For me, it would be abandoning the cause he’s given his life to,” she said. “And that I should be giving my life to also. Just look at my name.”

“What about your name?” I asked. A little unusual, maybe, but I said I was sure there were American biochemists with odder ones.

“The ‘Ti’ in Ti-Anna?” she answered. “In Chinese, it’s the same character as in ‘Tiananmen.’ ”

She knew that I’d recognize that word. Tiananmen is the giant square in the heart of Beijing where thousands of young Chinese gathered the last time there was open protest in China—way back in 1989—demanding more freedom. They put up a big replica of the Statue of Liberty, but in the end Chinese soldiers broke up the demonstration by killing a lot of protesters and putting a lot more of them in jail.

Including Ti-Anna’s father.

“So I’m named for a movement, and for the martyrs to freedom, and for my dad’s cause.” She sighed. “How could I grow up to be a postdoc in a lab at the University of Maryland?”

One afternoon as we rounded the corner to her apartment building, Ti-Anna shuddered as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. She whispered for me to look at a blue Taurus parked across from her front entrance.

“It’s
them
,” she said. “From the embassy.”

“What for?”

“Who knows?” she said. “Sometimes they sit there for hours. Keeping track of who my father meets with, maybe. Or trying to intimidate him.” She studied the car with disgust. “Good luck with that.”

She said good-bye and went inside; I eventually realized that she never lingered when the Taurus was there.

On afternoons when it wasn’t there, though, she’d happily talk until close to suppertime, though it was hot, and not the most comfortable place. A lot of the time, we talked about China. She’d never been back, and her memories were fragmentary but vivid, she told me.

She could close her eyes and feel the padding as she clutched
her mother’s jacket, her mother bicycling through a freezing Beijing morning with Ti-Anna perched behind. She could remember the cracks in the beige paint on the wall beside her bed, in the room she’d shared with her grandmother. She thought she could still hear police hammering on the apartment door when they took her father away one night, though her mother insisted she’d been fast asleep and couldn’t possibly remember.

Sometimes, she said, a smell from a diesel truck, or a restaurant exhaust fan, or something she couldn’t even trace, would carry her back with dizzying force.

“Though I know it’s changed completely since my parents left,” she said. “It was crazy in the old days, like you were saying about Mao. But it’s not like that now.”

Her parents sometimes talked about what it was like when they were her age, and you couldn’t do anything without Communist Party permission. The Party decided whom you could marry, where you could live, whether you’d go to college or spend your life growing rice. You could wear any color you wanted, as long as it was drab gray or faded blue.

Now the government pretty much left people alone. They could marry, get rich, stay poor, buy or sell their apartments, dress as they pleased.

The one thing they couldn’t do—and here’s where her father came in—was say anything bad about the Party, or suggest that maybe other people should have a chance at running the country.

“The Communists are stubborn, but my dad is as stubborn as they are,” Ti-Anna said. “He spent four years in prison for believing in democracy. Came out, wrote another letter for democracy, and went right back in. They only let him out again after he promised to leave the country. For my sake, and my mother’s, he promised, but he hated to do it. He’s sure he’ll go back one day.”

“And what do you think?”

Ti-Anna didn’t answer right away.

“I think he’s the bravest man you could imagine, and I think everything he says about what China needs is right,” she said finally. “But I’m not sure so many people in China are interested in hearing about it right now, since in so many ways their lives have improved.”

Just then a small, gray-haired woman got off the bus that stopped by the apartment building. Ti-Anna bolted off the bench. “Pretend you don’t know me,” she said.

At first I thought I must have heard wrong. But she strode away, toward her mother—because of course that’s who it was—and I bent down, pretending to fix my gears.

As they passed, I heard them talking in Chinese. I looked up in time to see Ti-Anna open the door for her mother, who was about a foot shorter than Ti-Anna and was carrying a cloth shopping bag. Then they were gone, and it was suddenly very quiet on the sidewalk.

I waited by my bike for—well, for a long time. I was sure Ti-Anna would come out and apologize, or at least explain what was so repugnant about me that she had to pretend I was a stranger. But she didn’t come out, and she didn’t come out, and eventually I got nervous that some other tenant would wonder why this curly-haired kid was loitering outside the apartment building.

So I shouldered my backpack and wheeled away.

That was a Friday, so I had the whole weekend to stew. At lunchtime on Monday I chose a bench down toward the practice football field, away from where we usually sat. After about ten minutes, I heard someone behind me.

“Sorry,” she said as she sat down next to me. She looked at me as though she meant it, and just like that I wasn’t mad anymore. I shrugged, as if to say, no big deal.

“Your mom doesn’t approve of boys?” I asked.

“American boys,” she said. “Or American girls, for that matter. Like I told you, being in America is just a temporary and unfortunate condition, as far as my parents are concerned. Anything that might distract us—anything that might get us more connected to life here—is a bad thing.”

“But you have friends,” I said. “You’re always hanging out with Janice Twersky, right?”

“Janice has been my best friend since forever,” Ti-Anna agreed. “My parents like her and her family, and on one level they understand that every child has to have friends.

“But—well, pretty much the only people they talk to are other exiles in the democracy movement. Or people who pretend to be in the movement and are probably spies for the government. And so on another level, they don’t see why I should be any different.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“Well …” She paused again, as if studying something on the field, except this time there were no cheerleaders—just one skinny ninth grader running laps in shorts that were too short. “I agree that what my father is trying to do is more important than anything in my life could be. But still …”

She looked at me, as if wanting me to finish the sentence for her. I nodded, hoping she would understand that I got what she meant.

“Trade you for half your sandwich,” she offered, handing me the container of rice with cold vegetables she brought every day.

“Really?”

I love every kind of Asian food, as I had told her. She said she would take bread over rice anytime.

“So what got you interested in China?” she asked after we had swapped lunches. “I mean, I know you take great satisfaction in knowing more than Mr. Stoltz does, but there has to be more to it than that.”

Besides, that’s a pretty low bar, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

“Well, that
is
good motivation,” I said. “But—” I paused, and then thought, What the heck. What’s the worst that can happen?

So I took a deep breath, screwed up my courage—feel free to add any cliché that comes to mind—and said, “It’s kind of a long story. Maybe we could do something Saturday? Go to the Freer or something?”

I went back to my rice as if it were no big deal whether she said yes or no, and thought, Did you really just ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen? How about she turns you down? Or laughs?
Or even worse, politely blows you off in a way you know is designed not to hurt your feelings?

“The Freer?” Ti-Anna repeated.

“The gallery?” I said. “On the Mall?”

I started chattering nervously. “There’s an exhibit of ancient jades and bronzes that’s supposed to be pretty cool. Late Shang dynasty, early Western Zhou …”

“Okay, now you’re just showing off,” Ti-Anna said. “
Nobody’s
heard of the Shang dynasty. I’m not even sure there
was
a Shang dynasty.”

Around 1600 B.C.E. to 1060 B.C.E., if you want to know. Not as important as the Qing or Ming dynasties, it’s true, but it had its moments.

But I let that pass.

“It sounds fun,” Ti-Anna said as though she meant it. “Let’s see how much homework we end up with, and if it’s not too bad I’ll ask my mother.”

Knowing how seriously Ti-Anna took her homework, and having seen how eager her mother was for Ti-Anna to know me, I wasn’t encouraged.

But I also didn’t think Ti-Anna was the kind to say things just to be polite.

Sure enough, late Friday afternoon she called and asked what time we should meet. We agreed on noon at the Bethesda Metro station.