Nine Days (3 page)

“By the way, Janice wants to come too,” she said. “Is that okay?”

What could I say?

We had to wait for a train, like you do sometimes on weekends, so we stood around making awkward chitchat on the platform.

When we finally boarded, the car was mostly empty. The girls sat on a two-person bench, and I sat across the aisle. They gossiped. I pretended to use my phone. (I don’t get service on the Metro.) The expedition was beginning to feel like a big mistake.

But as the train slowed into Dupont Circle, they both stood up. Janice gave Ti-Anna a quick hug, shot me a breezy “Bye, Ethan” and jumped off. Ti-Anna nudged my shoulder. “Slide over,” she said.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, it has nothing to do with you,” Ti-Anna answered. “Janice wouldn’t be caught dead in a museum.”

“So why did she come?”

“Well, my mother suggested I ask her,” Ti-Anna said. “So I did. She’ll take the bus over to Georgetown and meet some other friends and have a fine afternoon shopping.”

I guess I looked surprised. Ti-Anna looked at me and then looked away.

“I’m usually totally honest with my mother,” she said. “But I thought, how ridiculous is it to worry about my going to the Freer Gallery with someone as, well, wholesome as Ethan Wynkoop?”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. She laughed. At least she hadn’t said “harmless.” Or “dorky.”

We rode the rest of the way in what I thought was a comfortable silence. And when we got to the Freer, we did amble through the exhibit. We did both notice a figurine of a small toad that looked a lot like Mr. Stoltz.

But I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more about the ancient jades and bronzes of the Shang dynasty, or the Western Zhou, for that matter. We were so focused on our conversation that we (or at least I) didn’t notice much else.

At one point I asked about her friendship with Janice. “You seem so, well—”

“Different from each other?”

I nodded.

“I think that’s one reason we’ve always gotten along so well,” Ti-Anna said. “She’s not dumb, but she likes having fun. Music, clothes, the usual. She jokes that all she wants to know about China is how to pick out a pattern when she gets married. If you knew my parents, you’d get why that’s appealing.”

“They never do anything fun?”

“Not often.”

On hot summer Sundays, she said, her father loved to rent a rowboat at Seneca State Park and take the family out on the lake.

“He goes in his long pants and black shoes, and spreads a handkerchief over his bald spot, and looks totally ridiculous, but he doesn’t care,” she said. “He’s very proud of his skill as a rower.”

Once, she said, a thick black snake wriggled under their boat, and Ti-Anna’s mother was so startled she flung her straw hat into the water. Her father started to laugh, and when neither Ti-Anna
nor her mother dared put her hand in to retrieve the hat, he laughed harder, and pretty soon they all had tears rolling down their cheeks. Ti-Anna laughed just thinking about it.

“But there aren’t too many times like that,” I suggested.

She shook her head.

“What about you?” she asked. “You promised to explain how you got interested in all this.” By now we were sitting on a bench in the Freer’s shady courtyard.

I told her how when I was a kid I’d gotten interested in hieroglyphics and the methods archaeologists had used to puzzle out their meaning. Which had led me to Chinese characters, so different from our puny twenty-six letters. Which led, somehow, to Asian martial arts.

“But of course I couldn’t go to the karate place in Bethesda like everyone else,” I said. “Somehow I fixed on a kendo studio across the county.”

“Kendo?”

“Japanese swordsmanship,” I said. “I still train there a couple of times a week.”

I tried to explain why I liked it so much—the predictability, the ritual, how bit by bit and with a lot of hard work you can feel yourself getting quicker and more balanced, but how when you reach a higher level you always discover something you didn’t know or couldn’t do.

The master at the studio had taken me and my friend James under his wing, taught us to use chopsticks at the Korean restaurant down the block, lent us books on Japan and Korea (where James’s parents came from) and then, when I had devoured those, on China.

“For some reason, I fell in love with China,” I said.

The Great Wall. The Mongol hordes. The court rituals, the sages, the emperors who had hundreds of their concubines buried alive with them when they died—I soaked it all in. China’s civilization
is four thousand years old. Comparing China to America is like putting a hundred-year-old guy next to a kindergartner. The Chinese invented not just gunpowder and rockets and fireworks, which everyone knows about, but earthquake detectors, printing presses, even toilet paper. And their art is amazing.

“Then I started reading about modern China,” I said. I began with Edgar Snow’s book about Mao and the Long March, with its romantic view of the Communists, the hardships they endured before taking power, the poverty of the peasants they wanted to help. Then I started reading memoirs of the Cultural Revolution and realized things were a bit more complicated.

“So who’s James?” Ti-Anna asked after I had finished rattling on. We had left the museum and were walking slowly up Fourteenth Street, toward the White House.

“I met him at kendo, and even though he lived pretty far away we became best friends,” I said. “Our parents got us each an Xbox so we could play together without them having to drive one of us to the other’s house all the time.”

“What happened to him?”

“He moved with his family to New York a couple of years ago,” I said. “I visited him the first summer, but it wasn’t the same.”

I might have explained how empty it felt to visit a best friend who for no good reason wasn’t a best friend anymore. But we had reached the Metro station. And by the time we boarded a train, Ti-Anna seemed to have lost interest, almost as if I’d said something wrong.

I realized soon enough that I’d been right about something distracting her. But it wasn’t anything I’d said.

It was almost two weeks later that she confided in me.

Things had been going well between us. In fact, my main worry was how I’d manage to keep seeing her during the summer.

And then, at lunch, on a Thursday, she sat down and said, “My father is gone.”

Actually, she sat down and didn’t say anything for a long time.

She hadn’t brought lunch. She waved away my sandwich.

I asked what was wrong, and that only made her look more as though she would cry.

Then, finally, she told me.

“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.

I knew her father traveled sometimes—to conferences in Providence, or Vancouver, or Berkeley. He could hardly afford it, but activists in a town would raise enough money to pay his expenses and a bit more, to hear him speak. Sometimes Ti-Anna would go along, helping translate, but often he went on his own. So his being away was nothing unusual.

“He’s disappeared,” Ti-Anna said, almost without expression.
She looked around as if someone might be eavesdropping, but of course there was no one. It was a normal sunny day on the track-and-field bleachers.

I waited for her to explain, and gradually she did, in bits and pieces.

Two weeks earlier, she said, her father had flown, much to her mother’s dismay, to Hong Kong.

This was news to me.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I didn’t tell you. My dad is totally paranoid about the agents keeping tabs on him, and it’s just easier if I can answer honestly when he asks, ‘You haven’t mentioned this to anyone, right?’ And it didn’t seem like such a big deal.”

I nodded. I believed it wasn’t that she didn’t trust me.

“So what was he doing? I thought he wasn’t allowed to go back to China?”

“He’s not,” Ti-Anna answered. “But he thought Hong Kong might be different.”

Hong Kong, I knew, is a gray zone, part of China but with its own government and more freedom. It was a British colony for a hundred years, and when Britain gave it back in 1996, China promised not to impose its Communist system. So far they’ve kept the promise.

“Even so, he wasn’t sure if they’d let him in once he landed.”

“So why did he go?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He’s always looking to get in touch with people on the inside. Like I told you, he believes China is just a spark away from a democratic revolution, and nothing will ever stop him from thinking so. He must have gotten some news from someone he trusted that a meeting could be arranged or something like that.”

“Your mother has no clue?”

She shook her head again. “She’s practically catatonic.”

Her dad had called once to report that the immigration people in Hong Kong had let him in. Ti-Anna and her mother didn’t know where he was staying, but he’d bought a SIM card and told them he’d call to let them know he was all right.

He had called once more. And then nothing. Radio silence. Not a word.

“Maybe he’s really busy,” I suggested. “Maybe his phone died and he forgot his charger.”

Ti-Anna gave me one of her little half smiles. “My father doesn’t leave things like that to chance,” she said.

Then she did start to cry, big, almost silent sobs that shook her narrow body. “Something is wrong. Something has happened.”

I wanted to put my arm around her hunched shoulders, but I didn’t. After a minute the sobs stopped. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“We called the Hong Kong trade office here, and they claim not to know anything—said they didn’t even have a record of his landing, which is odd, since we know he landed.”

She’d emailed her father, even though before he left he’d told them not to, and gotten no reply. The people at the embassy despised him, there was no point in calling them, but Ti-Anna had called her father’s friend on the China desk of our State Department. He had made inquiries, and the Chinese claimed to have no information.

“My mother is paralyzed with fear,” she said. “She was furious at me for making any calls. She thinks if we call any friends in Hong Kong we’ll get them in trouble and make things worse for my dad.”

She sighed. “Short of going to Hong Kong, I don’t know what else to do,” she said.

I’d say that was the moment when the trouble started.

I could complain about my dad: how he isn’t around enough, how he drifts off in the middle of a conversation when he’s focused on a physics problem. But really, he is a good father. If I lost him, I would never be the same. Ever. I know that. And to not even be able to say good-bye …

What must she be feeling?

After school the next day I biked to the Barnes & Noble, bought the densest, smallest-type guidebook to Hong Kong I could find and biked home.

I liked to think of myself as someone who cared about people’s rights. I’d stay up reading about a Burmese monk who had walked straight at soldiers with their guns pointed at him, the monk carrying nothing but a begging bowl and his belief in freedom, because—because why? I couldn’t quite fathom it. Because it was the right thing to do.

I’d think, Would I have the guts? Would I ever do
anything
? Or would I just read? And mouth off in history class?

In ninth grade I’d started a human rights club. The idea was to
pick a prisoner of conscience somewhere and start a letter-writing campaign.

Only a few people showed up for the first meeting, and fewer for the next. I never called a third. I blamed the other kids, but it was my fault. I didn’t like clubs. I didn’t want to share my obsessions with people I hardly knew.

Here was a chance to do something.

If I could just get to Hong Kong
, Ti-Anna had said. Well, why not? Wasn’t her father’s cause more important than anything in our piddly tenth-grade lives?

I sat at my desk, my world history textbook propped up in front of me. Our final was in two days. I wasn’t taking in a word.

Ti-Anna had looked so miserable. And so alone. I was the one person she trusted. Would it be so crazy to try to help a friend?

If she were in Hong Kong, Ti-Anna had told me, she could track her father’s movements. People who were afraid to talk over the phone would be more open face to face.

I slammed the textbook shut and went downstairs. My parents weren’t home. At the back of my mom’s closet, behind the shoes, with the other important documents—like her favorite drawings of mine from elementary school—I found my passport.

We’d gone to the post office to apply for it two years earlier, when my parents had announced that we were going to take a family vacation to Mexico. We never take family vacations, and sure enough, at the last minute one of them was nearing some breakthrough and we didn’t go. But the passport had arrived and was valid for another three years.

“Honestly, I don’t think he’s dead,” Ti-Anna had said.

I had winced, but she hadn’t.

“Because if he were, why wouldn’t the Hong Kong police tell us? Even if
they
”—and here she hadn’t meant the Hong Kong
police—“had killed him, they would want to cover up
how
he had died, not
that
he had died.”

I gave up pretending to study, lay down on my bed, read the guidebook from preface to index and then started at the beginning again.

Ti-Anna had tried to persuade her mother that the two of them should fly over, but her mother wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t so much the money, she had told me, though that was scary enough. The real problem was that her mother was used to following instructions. Living in a strange country, she’d never learned much English. She hardly ventured beyond the bus route between their apartment and the grocery store. When there was a problem with a bill, Ti-Anna would handle it.

Ti-Anna’s mother was pulling even further into her shell with her husband having disappeared. She was sure he would call, or so she said, and she didn’t want to be away from the phone even for a second until he did. Ti-Anna was grocery shopping for the two of them.