The next morning, I used my apartment complex’s gym. The basic training Agent Lim and Agent Reddy provided made me realize how obvious it was that I was being watched. The staff in the apartment—and there were so many—would openly write down my comings and goings in a notebook.
At half past noon, my doorbell rang. A girl with short hair waited in my hallway, attractive but not intimidatingly so. As promised, about my age.
“Hi, Michael,” she said. “I’m Fanfan, but you can call me Christine. Bo sent me here to give you this and take you out to lunch.”
She handed me an envelope. “Thanks,” I said. It was a platinum Amex with a sheet of paper instructing me to use the card for any of my expenses while traveling abroad. “You don’t have to take me out for lunch though. You can just tell Bo we had lunch.”
“No, Bo always knows when I’m lying. Plus, I feel bad for you. Look how nice it is outside, basically everyone is out and about right now. Just you all alone here.”
I blinked, having not expected this level of directness. “Okay,” I said finally, and we set off. Fanfan asked me if I ate spicy foods. I nodded. She brought me to a dry hot pot restaurant on the sixth floor of a large shopping center where all of the menus were tablets. I let her order everything, contributing absolutely nothing to the selection of our meal except a Diet Coke for myself.
“Are you trying to lose weight?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. Since I saw my extended family so rarely, I had forgotten how blunt the Chinese were about weight. “I just don’t really believe in drinking calories.”
Christine seemed to not know what to say to that and looked at me as if I had said something incredibly lame. She asked me a few softball questions about my life back in the United States, which I answered with varying degrees of vagueness. Then the food came, which to my irritation was too spicy for me to eat.
“So, how long have you been Bo’s assistant?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
Unfortunately, this question did not land. “I’m not Bo’s assistant, I’m his chief of staff,” she said. “I hate it when he calls me that. He was the one who promoted me! In so many ways, Chinese society is still so backwards and misogynistic. I am sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen in America, does it?”
I wasn’t sure how to convey to Christine that I was in no way equipped to answer her question. My own thoughts on the issue were so biased as to be worthless. Most of the smart women I’d been acquainted with at Princeton (like Jessica) became investment bankers or consultants, which at the time I took to mean I’d end up working at least one or two levels below them in five years. Those who expressed any interest in software engineering were funneled into diversity hiring programs at Facebook, Google, etc. I first noticed this during my freshman year, when Jessica (whom I had always considered to have sprung from the same sexless mold as myself in Bergen County) somehow came out ahead of me in every supposedly gender-blind selection process on campus. Somehow, in college and in life more broadly, (Asian x female) seemed to unlock a hidden fast track while (Asian x male) redirected you to the spam box. It was like some twisted karmic retribution in the West of the One Child Policy in China, which had created such a strong preference for boys that the gender ratio had been irreversibly skewed in macabre ways I won’t get into.
Christine didn’t seem to notice that I hadn’t answered her question. “If you’re a pretty girl in China, you can get whatever you want. But you’re constantly dealing with perverts,” she said.
I thought about Gary, who was certainly some type of pervert. Or the anonymous men on SamarChat whose obsessive commentary struck me as at least pervert-adjacent, but that wasn’t quite it either, since those internet men in general seemed impotent and unable to dispense whatever it was that the pretty girls wanted. They were not the power perverts.
We finished our lunch and Christine insisted on taking me on a walk around the neighborhood. She helpfully pointed out the local grocery store, café, gym. Again, she lobbed lightly probing questions at me and I fed her bullshit, more or less. That she was obviously a spy did not diminish the impression of her sincerity. When she asked me what I was doing later in the evening, I told her I was meeting my Chinese teacher for drinks and had to go get ready. She let me go, but not before putting her number into my phone by using it to call her own.