Nine Days (7 page)

Ti-Anna nibbled, Horace popped an occasional morsel, his chopsticks like extensions of his long fingers. I … well, I may have eaten more than my share. I already had spent enough time with Ti-Anna
to know I’d better take advantage, because who knew when my next meal might be. Besides, I thought, it was only polite, as a guest, to show enthusiasm.

Finally, when every kind of cart had been wheeled past us, Horace leaned toward us and, in as quiet a voice as could be heard, asked Ti-Anna to retell her story, from the beginning.

She described her father’s decision to go to Hong Kong, and how he had just disappeared after the second phone call, and how we had decided to follow. She ended with the broken hair and our plan to break free of the listeners.

Horace nodded gravely. “It is worrisome,” he said. “I was certainly surprised to see you and your friend.”

As far as I was concerned, that didn’t advance things much. Ti-Anna nodded and waited.

“As you know, your father always believed that the key to bringing democracy to China would be uniting intellectuals like himself with workers from the factories,” he said. “Many people argued against him. The workers are too busy making money and worrying about feeding their relatives back in the village, they would say. But he would say, no, the workers also want to be free, it is just a question of overcoming their fear.”

I was sure none of this was new to Ti-Anna. But she listened without impatience. I tried to follow her example.

“When he came to see me, he was very excited, because he said he had a chance to meet with leaders of an underground workers’ movement,” Horace went on. “He seemed to think this could be the beginning of something big.”

“Meet where?” Ti-Anna asked. “Inside China?”

Horace shook his head. “He didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask,” he said. “But he told me the contact had come through a man who—well, do you know this name?” He slid an expensive-looking pen from his breast pocket and, rather than saying the name aloud,
wrote three Chinese characters on a paper napkin, which he then swiveled so Ti-Anna could read it. She shook her head.

“He moved from the mainland to Hong Kong about fifteen years ago, I believe,” Horace said, “probably barely in time to avoid arrest.”

He crumpled the napkin into a ball and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

“He started a radio program that attracted a huge audience inside China. Every illegal strike, every workers’ protest—somehow he would find out about it, and report on it, and people all through China would listen. Of course, no Chinese newspapers would write about such things.”

He sipped his tea.

“A few years ago, his radio station said they would not carry his program anymore,” Horace continued. “A business decision, they said—no advertisers. I’m sure there was pressure from Beijing.” He spat that out with disgust.

“He kept his program going on the Internet. He still seems to hear more about what’s happening inside China than anyone else, I don’t know how. And somehow he earns enough of a living to keep going. I’m not sure how he manages that, either.”

“So my father was going to meet him?”

Horace nodded. “If anyone knows where your father was headed, it would be he. Your father told me they were getting together the day after he saw me.”

Whatever food remained on the table was looking a bit gelatinous. Horace signaled for a waitress, who came over and counted our plates to figure out how much we owed. He pulled some bills from his pocket. I offered to help pay, but he waved me off.

As the waitress walked away, Ti-Anna said, “Do you know how we can find this man?”

“He lives on Lamma—you know the island?”

Ti-Anna shook her head, but I said yes. I hadn’t read and reread the guidebook for nothing. Lamma was just south of Hong Kong Island, and in a way its opposite—only a few thousand residents, in a few fishing villages. People from the city took the ferry there to go to the beach or eat seafood at restaurants on the bay.

“Do you know his number?” I asked.

“He has no phone, as far as I know,” he said. “But I can give you an email address.”

Ti-Anna shook her head. “Can you give us any more information? We need to pay him a visit.”

“You and your friend are not exempt from dangers,” Horace replied. “You cannot just roam about.”

When Ti-Anna did not answer, he began drawing on another napkin.

“He lives on the most isolated part of the island—down here,” he said as he sketched what looked like a long, narrow piece of a jigsaw puzzle. “The opposite end from where the ferry drops you.”

This time I took the napkin, folded it and stuck it in my little pack.

“There are no cars on the island, as you know,” he said to me. “If you don’t have a boat, you have to walk. But once you get to his little bay, there’s no missing the house and its bright red roof.”

We headed for the elevator. He and Ti-Anna resumed talking in Chinese, this time very earnestly. As we rode down, I saw tears in her eyes. But by the time he shook our hands outside the restaurant and we again thanked him and said good-bye, she seemed calm.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“I asked if he would contact my mother,” Ti-Anna said. “She will feel more reassured hearing from him.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said we would be better off not pursuing this on our own, but that he would not try to stop us, since we had come so far and were
so determined. He said my father would be proud of us. And he said he would tell my mother that I am fine, since it is true so far.”

“Wow,” I said. “ ‘So far.’ What does he think could happen?”

Ti-Anna shrugged. “He didn’t strike me as full of optimism,” she said. “But at least he didn’t try to stop us.”

At first, things went according to Ti-Anna’s plan, and I started to shake the ominous feeling Horace had left me with. Maybe I’d just eaten too many dumplings, I told myself.

We found our way back to the ferry docks. To be honest, I found our way; Ti-Anna’s sense of direction was on a par with her appreciation for food.

We scoped out the piers, trying not to telegraph our interest in one over another. Ferries for Lamma seemed to depart every thirty minutes, from Pier 4.

At a kiosk, we bought a map of the island. Ti-Anna didn’t want to leave such a clue, even with a harried clerk inside a kiosk, but I didn’t think Horace’s napkin would be enough to get us to Radio Man’s house before dark. As a compromise we bought maps of a few other islands too.

I also insisted on buying some protein bars and Snickers, and a couple of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bars—they still seemed to like their British sweets in Hong Kong.

“How can you even think about food after all that dim sum?” Ti-Anna said.

“You’ll thank me later,” I replied, thinking of it more as a suggestion than a prediction.

Joining the crowds in front of the main Star Ferry dock, we found places on a bench, sipping boxes of cold tea with our faces turned to the sun. The day was warming, though a cool breeze was blowing in from the bay. We could have been a couple of young tourists getting a lazy start on our sightseeing.

Sixty seconds before our ferry was supposed to leave, we tossed our tea boxes into the trash and moved fast, while trying to look like we weren’t moving fast, toward the Lamma pier.

We stepped aboard just before one crewman shut the gate, while another tossed the lines from the giant knobs along the deck. We were the last ones on. If anyone wanted to follow us to Lamma, they’d have to take the next boat.

We made our way to the upper deck, found seats together on a bench, tucked our little packs between our feet and let our heart rates return to normal as the downtown receded and water sounds filled in where city sounds had been.

Oil tankers and cargo ships with giant containers stacked on their decks steamed smoothly past us, while fragile little fishing boats bounced in their wake. The warship I had noticed turned out to be from New Zealand. As we rounded the corner at the top of the island, the buildings gave way to woods, and the chop of the harbor gave way to bigger waves.

It was too windy to unfold the map, so we invented stories for the other passengers on the ferry. Those two boys with bicycles? Training for the Tour de France, but their parents didn’t approve of them doing anything but studying, so they had to sneak over to Lamma to ride.

That plump young lady? Her pet turtle, which she loved more
than anything in the world, had died, and she was hoping to find a replacement in the wilds of Lamma, which was famous for its turtles.

As the island came into view, and the blur of green resolved into scrubby vines and banana trees, Ti-Anna grew serious again.

“He said one other thing to me on our way out of the restaurant,” she said.

“Horace?”

She nodded. “On the way out, he said, ‘Be careful about this man.’ ”

“Meaning Radio Man.”

She nodded.

“What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter. Because if we don’t get something from him, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

So there was no Plan B? For a second, that made me mad. What if Kwan had been away when we got here? I had thought Ti-Anna knew a lot more than she was turning out to know.

Then I thought, if she’s been fooling anyone, it’s herself, not me. She wanted to think she had more to go on than she did, because she was that desperate.

And I thought, well, of course she’s desperate. You would be too. Just because she always seems cool and controlled doesn’t mean she has all the answers.

“Then we’ll have to make sure we do get something from him,” I said.

We picked up our backpacks and prepared to disembark. In an announcer’s voice, I said, “Now approaching the strange and exotic island of Lamma. Please enjoy your stay, and do not cuddle the turtles.”

Ti-Anna laughed, or tried to. We let the boys with bikes wheel off ahead of us, and then we jumped ashore.

We set off immediately in the wrong direction. If anyone was going to report on our movements later, better that they see us leave the village the wrong way.

And it was a village—a few blocks, really, a street that curved along a not-too-appealing beach, lined with not-too-appealing restaurants. I supposed it would be festive at night, with terraces full of merrymakers and red lanterns bobbing in the breeze. But now, nearly deserted, with the sun spotlighting the mold-streaked walls and tin roofs, it all looked surprisingly old—as if it hadn’t changed in fifty years. It was hard to believe we were only a few miles from the technoglass wonders of Hong Kong.

We headed north, away from the restaurants. For a while it seemed very tame, with every tree numbered, and a couple of golf cart–like things parked off to the side. The path was smoothly paved. We might have been in a theme park that had been abandoned a few years before. We even saw a turtle sunning on a rock right off the path—as if the Hong Kong Tourist Board had put it there for us.

But as we rounded the corner and left the village behind, the
path started to get wilder. In half a mile or so, I saw what I’d been looking for: a dirt trail that doubled back behind the village, off the beaten track and toward the center of the island.

We started climbing. When we were well out of view of anyone on the paved path, I opened our map. The route looked like a straight shot—well, a winding shot, but only three miles or so to the other end of the island—and I thought we should be able to make it before nightfall, no sweat.

Ti-Anna waited patiently while I turned the map this way and that. She seemed to assume that if we started walking we would automatically end up at the right house, and map-reading was another one of my odd habits, like reading biographies of famous people. But she was willing to put up with it in a good-natured way.

The path was steeper and rougher than I had expected. The air was cooler than in the city, but I worked up a sweat as we climbed. The woods on either side of the path weren’t high, but they were dense, with thick vines winding around each other and sometimes across the path. Atop one hill we came across a small Buddhist temple, red columns holding up a green-tiled, ski-jump roof, but it was untended, its paint peeling in the sea air.

We saw no one, though a couple of times I thought I heard someone, and we’d stop and hold still. Every now and then we’d break through to a view of a curving bay or beach way below us, on one side of the narrow island or the other. We saw no sunbathers. I supposed on a weekend there would be hordes.

At one point we stumbled on an abandoned house so decrepit that it could have been an ancient ruin, but for a rusty fan dangling from the ceiling and a lidless rice cooker forgotten in a corner. We sat on the cool cement floor for a few minutes and shared a protein bar.

“I think we’re almost there,” I said.

Ti-Anna didn’t reply. I guessed she was deciding what she would say to Radio Man.

We were actually closer than I realized, and the house—as Horace had predicted—was impossible to miss. We braked and slid our way down a steep path and around one more switchback to the most beautiful cove yet—though one with nothing but rocks, no beach. On the far spit of land stood a tidy yellow house—two rooms, by the looks of it—with a bright red roof and a sliding glass door facing the water.

We picked our way from rock to rock around the little bay and then followed a sandy path to the door. Most visitors must come by boat, I thought. If he has visitors.

Ti-Anna took a deep breath, tucked her hair behind her ear and knocked on the sliding door.

Nothing happened. She knocked again. Nothing. Knock. Nothing. Knock.

Eventually, a curtain slid back a few inches, and a face appeared, atop a muscular body in a T-shirt, sweatpants and bare feet. The man stared down for what seemed like a long time. Then he unlocked the door and slid it open a few inches.

Ti-Anna bowed slightly and began talking in Chinese. The man listened. She talked some more. He didn’t say anything. She talked some more. Finally, he answered. And closed the door. Locked it. Yanked the curtain shut.