A Map of Betrayal Read Free

of silly mistakes. Feeling embarrassed, he avoided mentioning the test in front of his comrades.
    But the following week a notice came in the mail summoning Gary Shang for an interview. Did this mean he had passed the test? “You must have done pretty well,” said Bingwen Chu, a round-faced, hawk-eyed man, who was just one year older than Gary but was his immediate leader. Bingwen was a more experienced agent, sent over directly from Yan’an, the Communists’ base in the north. Gary figured that the foreign employer probably wanted to interview him because there hadn’t been many applicants—clearly the Americans would flee China soon, and few Chinese were willing to get too involved with them.
    Winter in Shanghai was damp and gloomy. Gary had been miserable,always chilled to the bone, because most houses had no heat and it was hard to find a place where he could get warm even for a moment. At night he and his seven comrades would share beds in a single room, sleeping head to foot. And worse still, people in the city were apprehensive as the civil war was raging. The Communist field armies were advancing from the north steadily and poised to cross the Yangtze to capture Nanjing, China’s capital then. Every day dozens of ships left Shanghai for Taiwan, transporting art treasures, college students, officials’ families, industrial and military equipment. Unlike Gary, his comrades all enjoyed the cosmopolitan life, especially the cafés, the nightclubs, the cinemas. Some of them even secretly frequented gambling houses. Gary liked movies too, but preferred tea to coffee, which he drank with three spoons of sugar for every cup. When the other men talked about Shanghai women and girls, most of whom looked down on provincials like them, he’d shake his head and say, “They put on too much makeup.” He missed Yufeng and every night thought of her for a while before going to sleep.
    A junior American official, George Thomas, interviewed Gary at the American cultural agency. The man, in his late twenties, was wide-framed and had a head of woolly auburn hair. He gesticulated with his large hands as he spoke. He asked the applicant which English books he had read. Gary gave a few titles: The Good Earth, Sister Carrie, Main Street, The Scarlet Letter , and Gone with the Wind . He was a breath away from mentioning Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China , a book that he’d enjoyed reading and that had inspired tens of thousands of young people to join the Communists, embracing the revolution as the only way to save the country, but just in time he thought to bring up Ibsen’s A Doll House instead, though he’d seen it only onstage, not on the page. Except for Pearl Buck’s novel, he had read all the others in translation. Thomas appeared pleased with his answer and said, “You speak English better than you can write. This is unusual among Chinese.”
    “I went to an American missionary school.”
    “What denomination was it?”
    “The Episcopal Church. They were from North Carolina.”
    “Well, Mr. Shang, there’re some errors in your translation, but you did better than the other applicants. We believe that your written English will improve quickly once you start working for us.”
    “You mean you want to hire me?”
    “At the moment I can’t promise anything because we’ll have to run a background check.”
    “I understand.”
    “You’ll hear from us soon.”
    The interview went so smoothly that Gary felt he was just a step from a job offer. That evening he briefed Bingwen on his progress, and Bingwen said he was going to report to their higher-ups immediately to get further instructions. He was pretty sure that the Party would have Gary take the job and stay with the Americans for some time. This opportunity looked like a windfall, though neither of them could surmise what it might entail.
    Meanwhile, Gary was getting nervous, knowing the Americans were preparing to pull out of Shanghai. He wouldn’t mind