Over the next few weeks, I worked hard to find an inroad with Bo. To my disappointment, this involved a lot of waiting, and it became clear I wasn’t the only source competing for Bo’s attention. I lobbied Ferris to get the FBI to send me more leads, but he kept reminding me of the perils of moving too quickly. This left me with nothing to do but wait for the correspondences ghostwritten on my behalf to appear in my inbox.
Two successful transfers I had facilitated (one in lithium-ion batteries, the other in LIDAR) had been enough to secure me a standing thirty-minute weekly meeting with Bo at his office in Guomao, where he plied his craft of impersonating a venture capitalist. By the second or third meeting it became clear that Bo had a keen interest in semiconductor manufacturing, a field that had nothing to do with the technical challenges at Naveon (indeed, the general topic of Naveon seemed to disappear from our discussions entirely). Bo often encouraged me to visit the States to meet my prospects who had semiconductor-related knowledge in person, but gave no indication of being willing to leave the country himself.
During these meetings, I worked hard to understand Bo on a fundamental level. On the morality and values front, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that Bo was a “true believer.” Consistent with his elite upbringing, he didn’t seem primarily motivated by the pursuit of money or status in the way Chinese civil servants stereotypically are. Rather, with his vast knowledge of Chinese history, Bo struck me as a highly intellectual person, someone who might have even plausibly been a professor in another life. He spoke convincingly of the moral case for economic espionage, which for him was an activity as natural and necessary as war. As far back as the eighteenth century, he told me, Jesuit priests were sent to China from Europe to steal porcelain techniques. During the Industrial Revolution, Alexander Hamilton openly paid bounties to anyone who could deliver British manufacturing secrets to the United States. China’s technological progress had been stunted by the domination of Western powers during the nineteenth century, and now it was justified to use any means necessary to catch up. When we discussed these subjects at length in his office, I often felt an uncomfortable consonance between his ideas and views I’d mulled over in San Francisco long before I met him.
Meanwhile, I continued to meet with Ferris in secret once a week. The geographic coordinates of our meetings were encoded in the assigned page numbers on my syllabus. I opened each of these meetings with an update on the week’s progress—which profiles seemed to spark Bo’s interest, what I had learned about him as a person. Ferris would interrupt with questions and give me feedback and coaching. We’d play back interactions beat by beat and he’d tell me—the next time Bo presses you on X, respond with Y. Fairly soon we settled into a comfortable mentor-mentee dynamic; I found myself eager to show progress and get his approval, perhaps because he was the only one who could see the work I was doing.
One of the great and terrible things about my relationship with Ferris was that it was explicitly one-directional. I could confide in him about the anxiety and loneliness I experienced during the mission, but the professional boundaries of our relationship meant he’d never share anything back; he was almost like a shrink in that way. Over the next few weeks, I opened up about the chronic insecurities and disappointments that have plagued me over the years as well as the regrettable decisions that landed me in the present situation. He listened to me in the way I always imagined a true friend would, patiently and without judgment; I often found myself thinking I was lucky, in spite of everything else, to have met someone like this. When I finally told him about Vivian, he said he felt so sorry for me he had to buy me a drink immediately. He took me to a bar in Dongjiaomin Hutong that was loosely pirate-themed and smelled like fried anchovies.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, my friend, the way you described her I would have fallen for her too,” he said. “Try to see the humor in it. Plus, you have to realize there are a lot of clever women like this in China. That’s why you have to be careful.”
We had talked through the Vivian saga for the duration of two beers now, and it might have been the end of the conversation. I figured with everything now out in the open I may as well ask Ferris what was really on my mind. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you think Vivian is working for Bo?”
Ferris crossed his elbows on the bar and furrowed his brow for some time, appearing to give the question careful consideration, though I got an odd sense he’d seen it coming. “It’s too hard to say without a careful review of the facts. There are many possibilities, and I don’t want to speculate. But from what you’ve told me, circumstantially it seems like her working for Bo is a plausible explanation.”
“Is there any way we can find out for sure? Maybe we can trace the encrypted number she used to call me? I just want to know, so that I can have closure.”
“That’s a dangerous path to go down, Michael. To look for people who don’t want to be found. My advice is, the best thing you can do is forget about her.”
I showed my assent with a sustained slug of beer. As I neared the bottom of my glass, I tried imagining a world in which Vivian had never entered my life, and found myself craving a cigarette. “By the way, Ferris, I never told the FBI agents anything about Vivian. Because I thought she might be in danger. They think I’m just working for Bo to make money. Can we keep this just between us?”
“Of course, Michael. You have my word.”
So now we had a secret.
During one of our talks Ferris mentioned that he hadn’t been back to America for eleven years, and he didn’t know when, if ever, he would be cleared to return. He spoke tenderly of the country that he missed, an America stuck in the year 2007. He reminded me of one of those men who worked on freezing oil rigs in the middle of the ocean to support a family at home that he never got to see.
At the same time, it was obvious that Ferris relished his life in Beijing. He had a rotating social group of former students, expats who’d stuck around the city, who were always begging him to join their outings. There was Hans, a German who worked in the Beijing office of BMW; Lisa, an Australian who owned her own yoga studio; and Christian, a Dane who worked as a promoter for electronic music festivals. Ferris had a way with people, a special ability to make them feel important and seen. Whenever we went to a bar or restaurant, people would pause their conversations to come up and greet him. I found this fascinating because I always considered that level of respect and popularity to be the exclusive privilege of the extremely wealthy or good-looking, and in the latter departments I felt Ferris and I were starting from the same modest building blocks. I took copious amounts of mental notes. I noticed that the more I observed Ferris succeeding in these environments, the more I tended to view myself as fundamentally similar to him. Ferris’s charm extended to the realm of women as well, and inevitably over the course of a night out one or two women would try to pin down his attention and get him to take her out, but he always politely let them down easy. I always thought this was strange and asked him once why he was so disinterested; was it because he already had a girlfriend, or maybe someone at home? But he always just said he didn’t want more complications in his life and left it at that.
One Saturday, Ferris and I went for a nightcap of cumin lamb skewers at a dive bar in Nanluoguxiang at the end of a long night. I asked him how he ended up getting recruited by the CIA.
“Why do you ask? Are you thinking about joining us full-time?”
“Probably not with how this internship has been going so far. But I’ve been curious to hear the story for a while.”
Ferris did a quick scan around the bar, which was basically empty except for a few drunken college kids.
“I was recruited out of college, actually. I still have no idea how they found me. I was just standing in front of the student lounge vending machine one day when a man wearing a suit approached me and said, ‘You’re Ferris Guo; do you mind if I speak to you?’ followed by, ‘Have you considered a career in the CIA?’
“At first I thought he was a scammer. Of course I hadn’t considered a career in the CIA. I was actually set to move back to Ann Arbor after graduation to teach public school. So when he invited me to interview, I said yes mostly out of curiosity.
“The interview took place in a hotel conference room a few miles away from campus. The first thing the interviewer wanted to understand was family background, which I assumed he already knew everything about. I told him that my father had been a pro-democracy activist in China who’d fled the country before I was born. Back home, he’d been somewhat well-known for running an underground political magazine that published the country’s leading pro-democracy thinkers, an activity that made it unsafe for him to continue living in China. He thought of his forced migration as a sort of pilgrimage. He figured since no one hated Communists more than the Americans, he was certain to find his people here.
“My father had the misfortune of arriving in America in 1972 during the week of the historic and highly televised Nixon visit to Beijing. Millions of Americans watched their president shake hands with Mao Zedong and eat Peking duck on television. Suddenly, sentiment toward the threatening Communist power was never warmer. My father the journalist failed to connect with his audience, but he never gave up the fight. I distinctly remember when I was seven years old, he started a fund to support radical democracy activists in Hong Kong and tried to collect donations at our local church after Sunday service. When that didn’t work, he printed out pamphlets about the human rights abuses of the Communist Party and made me stand on the street corner with him handing them out. Imagine that! We became social outcasts. At school, other kids would bully me and say my dad was a spy for China.
“I think some part of him missed the standing and notoriety he enjoyed back home. Here he was a nobody, he’d had a whole string of jobs he was no good at: office manager, insurance salesman, assistant to a veterinarian. At the dinner table he’d brag about correspondences he had with famous Chinese dissidents that also lived in the States, but none of them ever showed their faces. He saw the jobs he had as somehow beneath him, taking away from his true purpose of changing the course of history in a country I’d never even seen. But what about his responsibility to our family? Since he was so delinquent, my mother had to be the breadwinner. She’d been someone in China as well, a doctor, but gave it up without hesitation and got a job at a laundromat. The stability she created restored some sense of normalcy to my childhood. At first we were ostracized for my father’s strange political activities, then when that was forgotten we became invisible, just another struggling immigrant family whose names no one bothered to remember. At first I used to resent this. But seeing my father struggle made me fearful of grandiose dreams at a young age. I came to think of myself as someone who would be grounded and realistic about what the future could hold.”
While Ferris spoke, I was thinking of my own father and the meek, self-effacing way he’d carried out his family duties every day for ten years, until the day he suddenly stopped. We’d spent the summer of his disappearance elbows pressed together in the garage working on a remote-controlled battery-powered car for the county science fair. We didn’t use a kit—designed the whole thing from scratch and shipped the component parts from China. It was a complex, six-week build engineered by my father, who even hung a Gantt chart on an easel pad to track our progress. When we started falling behind schedule, the daily time commitment and intensity increased; toward the end, at my father’s insistence, we worked for eight hours a day, not even taking a break for lunch, which my mother would bring into the garage for us. We finished on a glorious August afternoon and took the car, which we called the Tenafly Swift, for its maiden voyage in Roosevelt Common, where we set up an obstacle course to test the car’s maneuverability. My dad handed me the remote control and watched with pride as Tenafly Swift completed a perfect loop. Then we went for a celebratory father-son dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant on Sunset Lane and stayed until close. He disappeared the next day.
“I figured I’d write off the first interview as free therapy, but to my surprise I got a call to come in for an all-day aptitude test, which consisted of eight hours of logic and verbal questions. Apparently I passed that too. Then they flew me to Langley, where I met with another man who would only tell me his first name. I ended up working for him for eight years. I was struck by how little they tried to sell the job during the interview process. The pay was low. No flashy perks. I might get to travel the world, or I might not. I’d have to tell all my friends I was working at the State Department with an unimpressive low-level job title.
“It was a grueling interview process that dragged on for six months. The whole time, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t take the job, but something kept pushing me to the next step. When the offer finally came from the Clandestine Service, the division of the CIA that runs undercover missions to recruit foreign agents, I thought there had been a mistake. ‘No mistake,’ they said, and on top of that, they told me I was likely to get deployed in China. Pretty ironic, considering I’d been avoiding the country my entire life. I was ready to just laugh it off when my father finally passed away three weeks before graduation. Before that, we’d been in a fight about my plan to go back to Ann Arbor and teach public school. I was his only son, he wanted me to go to law school and become someone ‘significant.’ My father spent his entire life in America sitting on the sidelines and clamoring for attention, and in the end, only five people came to his funeral. He never could accept what fate had in store for him. But I could; I could transcend the alienation and invisibility I felt for my entire life by devoting myself to serving a country that had never embraced me. I could give my life away knowing no one outside of the Agency would ever know my name, and prove to myself I didn’t need the recognition my father chased for so much of his life.”
As Ferris wrapped up his story, I reflected on the remarkable similarities between our lives. Like me, he’d also grown up as an only child, an outsider raised by a father who’d never found his footing in America, whose life had changed by getting recruited out of the blue by a mysterious agent. Unlike me, however, Ferris had answered a calling, not a phishing message. Ferris measured his life by the extent to which he lived in accordance with his values, while all I ever craved was the feeling of being seen. Ferris didn’t feel tortured by his invisibility; he wielded it. It struck me that at the end of it all, this must be the irreducible difference between us. It was what made him the perfect spy, and myself someone who could be easily manipulated, never sure of himself and always captive to the judgments of others.
Was there a possibility I could learn to be more like him? We were, after all, of the same mold.
“Something changed in me when my father left too,” I said. I figured no context was necessary since everything I would’ve told him was surely in my file already. “He didn’t leave a note, so I spent much of middle school trying to piece together why he left. At first I blamed my mother. She never understood what he was going through, and he could never understand how she was somehow able to never look back. As I got older, I started to think more about the struggle and humiliation he’d suffered outside of the home—the stuff I never saw directly. Similar to yours, my father never found what he was looking for in America, always had this defeated look in his eyes. I pitied him. But over time, that pity turned into resentment. I decided I wouldn’t end up like him; in fact, I’d forget about him. That’s why I made sure I was always the best at school, tennis, got into Princeton. But in a strange way, ever since I turned eighteen and started living by myself, I’ve felt myself inexplicably following in his footsteps. Even my being here today; it feels like his disappearance is still overshadowing my life, as if in all this time all I’ve done is look for him.”
It suddenly occurred to me that I was speaking with one of the only people in the world with the power to find my dad. Now something unspeakable and heavy seemed to shift beneath the surface of our conversation.
“The worst part is, for all the time he was in my life, he was a good dad,” I said. “That made it hurt even more when he left, because it felt like he was robbing me of all the good memories he’d given me.”
“I’m sorry, Michael. It’s never fair to those who are left behind.”
“What about your mom? Were you able to explain everything to her at least?” I asked. Now it was just the two of us left in the bar. The staff had started mopping and I wondered if we were going to miss the last train back.
“I called her a week before graduation to tell her that instead of coming back home to Ann Arbor, I would go become an English teacher in China, the one place she could never hope to visit me. That’s what she believes to this day. She is still alone in Michigan, with no family to lean on, spending every holiday alone. I know she wonders why I never visit. To be honest, given how singularly she devoted herself to making America a home for me, I wonder if my decision made her feel like her life was spent in vain. Over the years I’ve searched deep within myself for a justification that could put my guilt to rest, but nothing makes it go away. I’ve come to accept that in life, and especially in this line of work, a certain degree of betrayal is unavoidable.”
A fleeting darkness eclipsed his face that was so surprising, for a moment he became unrecognizable. The terrible notion that “a certain degree of betrayal is unavoidable” struck me as alarmingly incompatible with the idealistic Ferris I had come to know, though perhaps what was really idealistic was the heroic image I’d formed of him, am forming in your mind even now, because the notion of a perfectly good spy was a paradox. A certain degree of betrayal, I’ve learned as well, was inevitable—and looking back, I wonder if I had listened to him closely enough in that moment.