Authors: Fred Hiatt
Nine Days (20 page)
That’s how I met the real Ti-Anna, whose name is Ti-Anna Wang. When she came to Washington in 2008, she was older than the Ti-Anna in my story, but not by much. She had just graduated from high school.
Before starting college, she had decided to spend a year in Washington to bring attention to the case of her father, Wang Bingzhang, a founder of the overseas democracy movement who was by then in prison in China. We met for coffee in a hotel lobby across from the
Post
newsroom on 15th Street NW.
I was struck by her quiet determination, and asked her to write an article for the
Post
. Here’s a snippet of what she wrote, in which she recounted what had happened to her father:
In June 2002, my father traveled to Vietnam to meet with two fellow labor activists. They were conferring over lunch in a restaurant near the China-Vietnam border when several men speaking Chinese ordered them into a car. Beaten, blindfolded and gagged, my father and his two colleagues were abducted into China by boat. They were left in a Buddhist temple in Guangxi Province for the Chinese authorities.
My father was held incommunicado for six months, in contravention of China’s own Criminal Procedural Law, after which he was charged with “offenses of espionage” and the “conduct of terrorism.” His “trial” lasted one day and was held behind closed doors. During the proceedings, my father was not allowed to speak, nor was any evidence presented or witnesses called. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The identities of his abductors have never been discovered.
Ti-Anna succeeded in raising the profile of her father’s case. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to persuade China’s government to let him go, even though his health has been declining in prison.
With her mother and her brother, Times Wang, she’s still trying. Hopefully his release will come soon.
I didn’t realize how much her story had stuck with me until I started writing this book the next summer. I thought it was going to be about a boy named Ethan, but before the second chapter had ended, a girl named Ti-Anna had made a quiet entrance. It turned into a book about both of them—and, though they never make it into mainland China, about China, too.
Like Ethan, I’ve been fascinated by China for a long time, though I’ve never lived there and I don’t speak Chinese. I first visited China in 1977, when the country was just beginning to recover from the Cultural Revolution.
I remember the Beijing of 1977 as a poor, freezing city, wreathed in smoke and soot from coal fires. Everyone wore padded blue or gray jackets and walked or rode bicycles; only a few Party functionaries got to ride in cars.
For a visitor, it was magical, otherworldly, almost silent but for the bicycle bells. For residents, to an extent I couldn’t appreciate at the time, it was a place of privation and fear. People dared not talk about how much they had suffered under the rule of Chairman Mao Zedong, who had died the year before.
By 2000, when I returned to interview President Jiang Zemin and see “the new China,” Beijing was transformed. The city was still choking, but this time on automobile exhaust. There were gleaming new buildings. The Party was still in control, but it didn’t try to run people’s personal lives. People felt freer to talk—within limits.
As Ethan and the fictional Ti-Anna and their angry classmates in world history class could tell you, it’s a complex story, and there’s no single right way to view it. But what Ethan and Ti-Anna experience is certainly part of the story of modern China. According to Amnesty International, half a million people in China are in punitive detention, though they’ve never been charged with a crime
or had a trial. The number of prisoners of conscience, like Wang Bingzhang, has been going up.
Modern-day slavery is not a product of my imagination either. Thousands of girls are tricked or taken from their homes and sold into prostitution, like the ones Ethan and Ti-Anna rescued from the truck. It happens everywhere, including in America, but it happens a lot more often in poor countries like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The good news is how many people, here in the United States and in those countries, are working to make things better. For readers who want to get involved, there’s no need to head to faraway countries without telling your parents. There’s a lot you can do.
There is an organization called International Justice Mission, which works with local police to promote the rule of law and help keep girls from being exploited. There are other groups that fight trafficking as well, including Free the Slaves, an organization dedicated to ending slavery worldwide, and Catholic Relief Services, the official humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. There is also MTV Exit, a campaign about freedom—our rights as human beings to choose where we live, where we work, who our friends are and who we love.
And there are organizations trying to promote, in a peaceful way, freedom and civil liberties in China, Vietnam and elsewhere: Human Rights Watch, China Human Rights Defenders, Human Rights in China and Amnesty International.
Thanks are owed to my discerning early readers, Pooh Shapiro and Joe Hiatt; my always supportive agent, Rafe Sagalyn; my wise and talented editor, Beverly Horowitz; and above all my loving and encouraging family: Pooh, Joe, Alex Hiatt and Nate Hiatt. I also am grateful to Ti-Anna Wang for what she taught me, and to the many dissidents and freedom fighters around the world who have been willing to share their stories.
Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor and a columnist for the
Washington Post
, where he began working in 1981. He and his wife served as co–bureau chiefs of the
Post
’s Northeast Asia Bureau in Tokyo, reporting on Korea and Japan. They then served as correspondents and co–bureau chiefs in Moscow. Before joining the
Post
’s foreign staff, Hiatt covered U.S. military and national security affairs. He also worked as a reporter for the
Atlanta Journal
and the
Washington Star
in Washington, D.C., and wrote for the
Harvard Crimson
. He is the author of two books for young readers,
If I Were Queen of the World
and
Baby Talk
, and the adult novel
The Secret Sun
. Fred Hiatt and his wife have three children and live in Maryland.