Nine Days (6 page)

I counted out the bills. It about cleaned me out of Hong Kong money, but Ti-Anna had said,
Pay in advance: we want them to be sure we’re staying put
. So I did.

We packed our knapsacks wordlessly, like we’d agreed the night before. Toothbrush, air mattress, a change of clothes, Hong Kong map. Passports, of course. When Ti-Anna wasn’t looking, I slipped in my book, a biography of General MacArthur. The bags still
looked small—as if we were heading out with guidebooks and cameras for a day of sightseeing.

We left everything else in the room, Ti-Anna’s duffel neatly repacked, my stuff spilling onto the bed—a lived-in look, I thought.

As we headed back down the Corridor of Doom and into the coffin elevator, I hoped we would make it back at least once. I hated to think what my brother would say if I came home without his backpack. But I knew it might be a while. I can’t say that I worried about missing the Rising Phoenix. I didn’t think our clerk would miss us.

We walked down Nathan Road with throngs of commuters, all talking into their Bluetooths. At the first ATM, I decided we’d better find out if we could get money. I didn’t like transmitting our location so soon, but it was that or go hungry. Going hungry is never a good option.

The screen was in Chinese, so I gave Ti-Anna the card and told her my password. We withdrew five hundred Hong Kong dollars and hoped we wouldn’t set off alarms.

As we ferried across the harbor, the sun sparkled off the waves. Dozens of junks, patrol boats, barges and ferries crisscrossed before us and behind us. Off to the right you could see a navy destroyer, though I couldn’t make out its flag.

We watched the ferrymen tie us to the dock and then stepped onto Hong Kong island. We were in Central, the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district, at the height of rush hour, and people in dark suits were rushing all around us, toting briefcases and looking anxious. For a minute we stood close to each other, overwhelmed.

“Let’s sit,” Ti-Anna said.

We found a bench near someone selling boxes of juice and soy milk and cut-up pieces of pineapple from a cart. The pineapple looked juicy and sweet, but Ti-Anna, of course, didn’t feel like eating.

“I know it’s crazy, but I keep looking at faces,” she said. “As
if, if we sit here long enough, maybe he’ll just appear out of the crowd.”

“And spoil our fun?”

Ti-Anna smiled politely. We breathed in ocean smells and city fumes, listened to flags snapping and buses grinding their gears. People streamed past as if they all had someplace they had to be five minutes ago.

Our first stop, Ti-Anna had said the night before, would be Horace Kwan, one of her father’s oldest friends. I’d heard of him. For years he had been a leader of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp. While Hong Kong was a British colony, until 1996, he’d agitated for more self-rule. After Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, he’d kept on agitating for self-rule, only now his target was Beijing, not London.

“If my father was in Hong Kong, I’m sure he would have seen Horace,” Ti-Anna had said.

If? I’d thought. I’d never heard her doubt that her dad at least had started here.

Horace Kwan didn’t know we were coming, and we didn’t know if he’d even be in his office. He’d been on the legislative council—like Hong Kong’s Congress—but now he was semiretired from politics. He was still a lawyer, though, Ti-Anna had said, and a successful one. I figured the earlier we got there, the better the chance we’d find him before he went to court or somewhere else.

I took out the map once more, though I’d pored over it after dinner and was pretty sure which way to head. Ti-Anna quit examining the men passing before us. We walked past a couple of cool old buildings from colonial days and some great-looking palm trees—which I had never seen in real life—but mostly there were skyscrapers, each one sleeker and taller than the next.

Kwan’s was one of the sleekest, all intimidating marble and glass. In the lobby two young women in powder-blue suits with
powder-blue caps sat behind a desk, but they didn’t seem to be blocking anyone from the bank of elevators. Trying to look like we knew what we were doing, we found Horace Kwan on the directory on the wall—floor 33—and joined the flow of people riding up.

Double glass doors led to a thickly carpeted anteroom, where another young lady sat primly behind a wooden desk. It was weirdly quiet.

Ti-Anna found her voice first.

“We’d like to see Mr. Kwan, please,” she said in English. I realized I had yet to hear her speak Chinese since we’d landed.

“Do you have an appointment?” the lady said.

She didn’t exactly sneer, but she looked like she would have sneered if she hadn’t been trained not to. Obviously, she knew the answer to her question.

Ti-Anna shook her head.

“Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here? We don’t mind waiting.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Kwan doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” she said.

“I understand,” Ti-Anna said.

“Would you like to make an appointment?” the woman asked icily. “Though Mr. Kwan is quite booked for the next several months.”

You had to know Ti-Anna to tell when she was angry. I could sense that she wasn’t going to be inviting this woman to lunch any time soon.

“Would you please tell him that Ti-Anna Chen is here?” Ti-Anna repeated in a pleasant voice. “I think he might like to know.”

The woman sighed, started to speak, glared at Ti-Anna and apparently decided that we weren’t going anywhere. Shaking her head, she disappeared through a door in the wood-paneled wall behind her desk.

The door reopened almost instantly for a tall, distinguished man in a suit, with horn-rimmed glasses and a shock of black hair falling over his forehead.

“Ti-Anna?” he said. “Is it really you?”

She nodded. “And this is my friend Ethan.”

“Horace Kwan,” he said. He gravely shook my hand, then put a hand on Ti-Anna’s shoulder without speaking.

Finally, he gestured toward the door.

“Please come in,” he said.

Take that, I wanted to tell Miss Snooty, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Stepping into Horace Kwan’s office, you felt you might fall right into the harbor. The wall facing us was glass. You could see the Kowloon ferry dock we’d left from an hour before, and if you squinted and shielded your eyes from the sun bouncing off the waves you could even make out the railing where we’d met Wei and Mai.

“Please,” Horace Kwan said again. “Do take a seat.”

He pointed us toward a couch facing the glass and sat in an armchair to the side. His desk was at the other end of the room, dark wood with graceful curving legs.

Nobody spoke.

Well, I’m certainly not going first, I thought. But neither of them seemed uncomfortable. Horace Kwan was studying Ti-Anna as though if he looked hard enough he could read what was on her mind—but in a nice enough way, and she waited patiently.

Finally, he broke the silence.

“I’ve heard so much about you, for so long, Ti-Anna,” he said. “This is a great pleasure.” You could tell he meant it.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Kwan,” she said.

There was another pause, and then he asked, “What brings you to Hong Kong? Are you meeting your father?”

“Well,” Ti-Anna said. “We hope so. But that is why we came to see you. We don’t know where he is.”

I was studying his face, but I didn’t see any change of expression—maybe a tensing, a slight leaning forward in his chair.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Please explain.”

You could imagine his using the same calm tone for someone who came in and announced, “I just beheaded my husband,” or something along those lines.

So Ti-Anna explained—how her dad had gotten a message that excited him, how he’d left for Hong Kong, how he’d hardly been in touch since—and how unusual that all was.

“I am certain that if he came to Hong Kong he would want to see you,” she concluded. “So I thought you might be able to help us.”

It was her turn to sound calm, but I knew she wasn’t feeling calm. If Horace Kwan couldn’t help, I wasn’t sure where we’d go next.

He put his long fingers together in a steeple, searched Ti-Anna’s face again and then glanced over at me.

Following his gaze, Ti-Anna said, “I have no closer friend than Ethan.”

I blushed, and thought I’d tuck that away to replay later. I realized—I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before—that if not for me they would have been speaking in Chinese.

“Well, then Ethan is my friend also,” Horace said. “I’m sure you know”—he was looking at me now—“that Ti-Anna’s father is one of our bravest and most important patriots.”

Now it was Ti-Anna’s turn to blush.

“Though you would not know it from Chinese newspapers today, I’m sure he will go down as such in our history books. If,” he added drily, “Chinese students are ever permitted to study their true history.”

He turned to Ti-Anna. “You know, this may surprise you, but I’ve always thought the bravest thing your father did was to leave the country,” he said.

“To leave? Why was that brave?”

“He could have endured whatever they dished out in prison. But he knew how hard it is in China to be the family of a patriot—of a dissident, as they are called. I think he worried how much more your mother could stand, with him in jail and plainclothes police camped on the landing outside your apartment door, listening in on every phone call, following her on every trip to the market.”

Ti-Anna perched on the edge of the sofa, facing Horace, totally still. I didn’t know if she had any memory of those police guards. Somehow I was sure that she had never heard her parents talk about any of this.

“So,” Horace said, “he left. Very difficult for him. He knew few would understand the different kind of courage required. He worried especially about the opinion of those who mattered most to him—especially his daughter.”

I thought I might get teary, so I could only imagine how Ti-Anna must be feeling.

“He knew the normal fate of the exile—forgotten, overlooked, belittled. Somehow, if our suffering diminishes, then supposedly so does our moral authority. It is a strange calculus.” He gazed out at his stunning view.

“In any case,” he resumed. “Your father was determined to fight against this fate. Not for the sake of his ego, you understand, but for China. Even from America, he never stopped fighting for democracy in our homeland. And so, yes, I did see him here, quite recently, on his latest mission in that quest.

“He stopped in the day he arrived,” Horace said. “Like you, he did not feel it necessary to make an appointment.”

He smiled, and as he walked to his desk said, “You all must assume
my business is doing very poorly, since you are sure you can drop in and find me available.” He leafed back a page on his desk calendar. “The fourth, it was.”

“And?” Ti-Anna said, her voice quavering slightly for the first time. “Did he tell you why he was here?”

Horace hesitated. “You must be hungry,” he said. “Why don’t we continue our conversation over dim sum?”

Before Ti-Anna could politely lie to him that we had already eaten, I interjected, “Yes!” It came out as a bit of a squawk. I realized, embarrassed, that it was the first word I had spoken.

But Ti-Anna didn’t overrule me, and I realized, even more embarrassed, that his wanting to go out had nothing to do with food. He wanted to talk where he knew
they
would not be listening.

As he held the office door for us, he and Ti-Anna started conversing in Chinese. The young woman at the front desk gave me the evil eye as we walked out. I smiled back. We rode the elevator down in silence.

I tried to memorize our route as Horace led, so that we could find our way back without him, but I soon gave up. He took us along skywalks and up and down escalators; only once did we come down to a road and have to wait at a traffic light.

He loped easily on his long legs, his shock of black hair bouncing lightly over his forehead. Ti-Anna walked beside him, chatting quietly.

Every once in a while I glanced over my shoulder, but if someone was following us, I didn’t have a chance in a million of spotting him. I had thought New York City was crowded, but it couldn’t match Hong Kong.

There was no hiding the Taurus parked across from Ti-Anna’s apartment in Bethesda, and that was how they wanted it—to be visible, to be intimidating. The man on the Metro—if he was one of them—stood out from the crowd enough to be noticeable. But here, everyone was Chinese. Almost everyone was in suits. Not a few had military-style haircuts. There was just no way to know.

But if they cared enough to break into our hotel room, I had to assume they might care enough to keep an eye on us now.

Horace must have had the same idea, judging by how he behaved at the restaurant.

Inside the front door a half-dozen employees, each wearing headsets, manned a desk as people jostled to get their names on a list for tables. When the boss saw Horace, she made room through the crowd, led us to a bank of elevators—it seemed to be a four-story restaurant, crazy as that sounds—and escorted us to the third floor.

A wave of noise, a cheerful, hungry roar, nearly knocked us over as the elevator door opened on a huge room full of round tables. Before us a thousand people, or so it sounded, were eating and waving chopsticks and talking and arguing and drinking tea, while young women in uniforms pushed carts through the din, unloading little dishes at one table, then weaving on to the next and unloading some more.

The manager led us to a corner that I guessed was Horace’s regular spot. But Horace whispered into her ear, and she led us right back into the middle of everything and plopped us at a table there.

“This way you can enjoy the true Hong Kong experience,” Horace said to me with a polite smile. Yes, I thought, and this way no microphone could possibly pick up our conversation.

It wasn’t easy to talk above the roar, anyhow, and for a while we concentrated on the food, or at least I did. Horace poured tea into our little round cups, and he said yes to almost every server who pushed a cart past us, until our table was covered with dishes of shrimp dumplings and pork wrapped in tofu skin and other things I didn’t recognize and couldn’t possibly name, even after tasting them.