The next morning, Xiaowen picked me up at seven o’clock, and I met Ferris for lunch one more time to go over the plan for Princeton Reunions. There wasn’t much to discuss since all the meetings would be fabricated anyway; we just had to chat through the plan for presenting the assets to Bo.
“One more thing, Michael,” he said. “Agent Lim is actually going to be coming on the trip with you.”
“Are you serious? Why?”
“He just said he wanted to meet. During the weekend, he’ll be posing as your driver.”
Fucking great.
I landed at JFK at around five o’clock in the afternoon. Stepping out of the gate in Terminal B, I wasn’t surprised to see Agent Lim waiting for me.
“Fancy seeing you here,” I said.
He put both his hands up. “Relax! Not here to handcuff you this time. Just giving you a ride.”
Lim waved me past the immigration and customs lines and made a show of examining me from head to toe.
“You look good, Michael. New clothes?”
“A few.”
“So they’ve been treating you nice, huh?”
I just barely stopped myself from rolling my eyes. We headed to the garage and got into Agent Lim’s black Chevy Suburban.
“Where to, boss?” he said, dialing up the GPS.
“Nassau Inn in Princeton.”
Agent Lim let out a low whistle. “Prime location—must be expensive this weekend! We’ve got a high roller. Let me know if the people you work for have an opening sometime.”
“Look, now that we’re in private, you can just go ahead and ankle bracelet me,” I said.
“Michael, Michael. No need to be so uptight. Honestly, I’m here to protect you. You’re a valuable government asset, remember? And, according to our files, not the strongest drinker; we can’t afford any slipups with this crowd. Most importantly, we don’t know who the Chinese may or may not have sent to tail you on this trip. That is, to verify you’re representing your activities here accurately to Beijing.”
That shut me up. Instinctively I glanced at the rearview mirror to see if anyone suspicious was tailing us on the highway. It was too dark to make out the faces in the cars behind us.
“Do you think that scenario is likely?”
“It’s certainly not unlikely. Have you given them any reason to suspect you?”
I instantly regretted asking about Vivian a few nights ago. There were a few other moments, I thought, when Bo could have suspected me. Or when Michelle had casually inquired about my Chinese lessons.
“I’m not sure. Nothing comes to mind, but I know these guys are trained and I’m not.”
“Sounds about right. How is our man on the ground, Ferris?”
“Holding up well. I’ve quite enjoyed working with him.”
Lim nodded. “Well, he speaks highly of you. I’m not sure why. Candidly, I’ve been making the pitch to recall you for several months now. Don’t get me wrong, if somehow you do deliver Bo, that outcome would more than justify your exoneration on acceptable standards of affirmative cooperation. I just don’t think it’s responsible for the bureau to put an untrained civilian in enemy territory like that. Particularly when said civilian has such obvious psychological complexes that could compromise the success of the mission—not to mention our overall strategic position in China, where we’ve been burned before.”
I prickled at “obvious psychological complexes” but didn’t want to press the point. The rest of the ride passed in silence. An hour later, we crossed the Washington Road Bridge and entered Princeton proper, the primordial soup of my neuroses. Past the bridge, the traffic on Washington Road was start and stop as both lanes were flooded with the cars of returning alumni. No one really needed a car to get around for the weekend, but people drove them in anyway, and those with convertibles pulled the tops down and waved presidentially as they cruised toward campus. On both sides, the uncannily pristine colonial and Georgian facades of downtown Princeton vaunted themselves from memory. We passed the winged glass silhouette of the Lewis Science Library, where I spent the greater part of my solitude; just about five hundred feet down the street, the Frist Campus Center, where I usually went for greasy fried food after a late night of studying. Frist was the town square where all walks of Princeton society collided at the end of the evening for chicken tenders and curly fries. I tried to avoid the 1:30–2:00 A.M. window there because that was usually when the eating club festivities ended and the formal-wear-clad Nicks of the world poured in reeking of alcohol to bask in deep-fried social glory while continuing their conversations from the previous party. Whenever this happened I immediately felt like an intruder, my evident nonparticipation in their debauchery a conspicuous sign of unintended social disproof. Talk about obvious psychological complexes. I turned to the left and saw Agent Lim’s observant gaze boring into my temple. I endured this slow-time tour of my undergraduate experience for fifteen agonizing minutes before we finally reached the Nassau Inn. Lim made a point of telling me he would be staying at the Holiday Inn in neighboring Trenton. He had my itinerary, so I should expect to see a lot of him this weekend.
I tried to get through check-in as quickly as possible in order to minimize the chance of unexpectedly running into someone from college when I hadn’t had the time to mentally prepare myself.
“Welcome back, Mr. Wang,” the receptionist said. “We have you in a King Suite on the third floor. Your bags will up shortly, and we hope you enjoy your stay.”
When I got to the room, I found a black and orange windbreaker neatly spread out on the bed with a card on top of it.
Michael,
Welcome back, Mr. VIP! I figured you didn’t bring your class of 2013 beer jacket to China but I managed to dig up a spare for you—hopefully it still fits! See you at the P-rade.
Jessica
It did not fit, but I was touched nonetheless. I had no idea how Jessica found out where I was staying—did she call every hotel in Princeton? Talk about making an effort. I thought about texting her but told myself I’d just thank her in person.
The next morning, I had a simple breakfast at the Nassau Inn, put on the suit Christine picked for me to wear during the panel, and headed toward campus. Princeton was blindingly sunny and humid this time of year. First I stopped by the check-in booths near the athletic fields to collect my class bracelet and the brochure for the weekend. I found the blurb for “Princeton in Asia” panel on page 2, alongside other events such as “Living and Working in Literary Fiction” and “Frontiers of Biotechnology.” I found my own name printed under the “Princeton in Asia” header: Michael Wang,’13. I realized that I had missed the cheap thrill of seeing my own name in print.
By the time I got to Jones Hall, where the panel was being held, my shirt was already damp under the dark charcoal suit. I wiped the sweat from my brow and walked into the lecture hall. I’d arrived five minutes early, but only eight or nine seats in the hall were filled. Lawrence had set up a rather elaborate breakfast spread by the entrance, which made the room feel even emptier. The three other panelists and Lawrence were huddled together in a corner of the room catching up over coffee and orange juice; the other three were all white guys at least three inches taller than Lawrence, and for once Lawrence appeared less than calm and collected, as if embarrassed by the turnout for his event. I approached the group and recognized James Stacy, chair of the East Asian Studies Department. When I was a freshman I took his Business in China class, where he regularly invited CEOs of major Chinese corporations to guest lecture. I was awed by Professor Stacy’s stature and visited his office more than a handful of times (though I ended up with a B+ in the class). Over the years, I began to form a deeper understanding of his career trajectory and the influence he’d had on the department and the university as a whole. As a scholar, he was nothing special—Lawrence was actually the one who told me that. What accounted for Stacy’s meteoric rise at Princeton was raw ambition and political cunning. He’d started as an obscure professor of ancient Chinese history and made an unprecedented mid-career pivot to the field of modern China studies, a subject with a much more engaged audience. He then used his credibility as a China scholar to convince the university leadership that for Princeton to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, it had to establish a meaningful position in China; at the same time, he stoked fear by reporting on the expansionary moves rival universities such as Yale, Duke, and NYU were making in the region. The crux was that Stacy positioned himself as the only man who could guide the university out of the impending crisis. Like the Chinese elites that he studied, Stacy was supremely effective in cultivating powerful contacts that impressed the administration and, more importantly, generated healthy donor inflows. Rumor had it he’d even brokered the admission of a few Communist Party princelings, which brought in tens of millions of dollars to the department. His naked careerism sometimes attracted the scorn of more traditional colleagues—weren’t intellectuals supposed to speak truth to power?—but in the end fear and the expansionist instinct won out. Over the course of five years, Stacy ascended from niche untenured historian to one of the most powerful figures at Princeton. Lawrence said the president of Princeton even allowed him to charter his own private jets—only for the purpose of entertaining the most important donors, of course.
“Hey, Professor Stacy!” I said.
He smiled and extended a hand. “Good morning, young man! I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Actually, I was in your Business in China class the fall of 2009,” I said.
He glanced at my name tag. “Ah, right. Michael Wang, of course! It’s so good to see you again. Seems like you’ve been making some waves in China. I’m glad that my class had such an influence on you.”
I just stifled a laugh. The extent of this man’s self-centeredness was impossible to overstate. The way he had so transparently read my name off my name tag—I couldn’t believe he was so well-received in China. Obviously I wouldn’t tell him that the following year I became disillusioned with the Woodrow Wilson School, switched to computer science, and resigned any ambition of being part of the world stage. And yet in spite of all that—or perhaps because of it—I had indeed ended up “making some waves” in China, or getting sucked into a whirlpool to be more accurate. When the irony of this occurred to me, I nearly laughed inadvertently in Professor Stacy’s face.
Lawrence chimed in with a forced chuckle. “Hey, Michael! So grateful that you’re doing this. Meet Tom Allen and Matt Dolan.”
Tom and Matt were each about forty-eight years old and 6'3". They’d been roommates at Princeton, both East Asian Studies and Chinese double majors, now neighbors in Hong Kong. Tom was a senior partner at McKinsey and Matt a managing director at a large American investment bank.
“Neither of us were star students at Princeton, to say the least,” Tom explained. “The recruiting standards in Hong Kong at the time were much, much lower. Demand was so high McKinsey was taking any Ivy League Chinese speaker with a pulse. Totally different story now, obviously, Tsinghua and Beijing Universities are our biggest feeders now, the locals have reclaimed their territory. But man, the first decade out there was a hell of a time. It was like the Wild West. I could tell you some stories.”
It didn’t occur to me until Lawrence asked us to take our seats on the panel that no one had asked me anything about my background.
Lawrence was seated at the end of the table with a microphone and a deck of notecards. He asked each of the panelists to introduce themselves, then invited James Stacy to provide some opening remarks on the state of governance and business in China. Stacy spoke off the cuff for about twenty minutes and it became very clear why he was so well-received by the Chinese elite. His narrative of the past twenty years of Chinese history had the veneer of academic nuance, but at its core could only be described as a celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s track record and an affirmation of its right to govern.
“Okay, now I’d like to turn it over to some of our panelists who have been living and working in the region for the last two and a half decades. Any general observations you’d like to share with this group? Maybe let’s start with you, Tom.”
“Thanks, Lawrence. As a firm, McKinsey has been active in China since 1994, just four years after the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened. Our business in China has grown twenty to thirty percent since inception and now it’s one of our most important markets. The opportunity for Princeton-trained talent has mostly been around professionalizing business practices. There was and still is a huge amount of inefficiency in their system that’s inherited from centuries of graft and backwardness. I certainly don’t expect that opportunity to go away.”
“Thank you, Tom, very insightful. Matt, would you like to give some thoughts?”
“Yeah, of course. Look, as a firm we’ve really reaped the rewards of investing heavily and early in China. We saw the vision early—you know, great civilization, billions of people, tons of talent that needed to be unleashed. In the early days we were basically teaching these folks how to do double-entry bookkeeping, and not commit fraud. Obviously, now many of their businesses have taken off spectacularly, especially the tech companies. It’s been a lucrative strategy for many of their savviest people, over the past several decades, to basically just copy American internet companies and roll it out to their huge population—shielded, of course, by the government’s protectionist trade policies. But if you think that means the party’s over, you’re wrong. For entrepreneurs in China, there’s still nothing that can replicate the cachet of an initial public offering led by a major US bank on the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Wonderful, thank you, Matt. Michael, any thoughts for us?”
“Err, yes, happy to give some of my own thoughts,” I said, backing away slightly from the mic because my voice came across louder than expected. I hadn’t actually prepared any remarks. “So, I think everyone is here because we all know there is a lot of opportunity in China. We can take that point for granted. If I were sitting in your own shoes, I’d be wondering most about what working there is like and what makes someone in China successful. My main observation is that things move really quickly over there, and a lot—actually, even everything—can change overnight. So if you want to succeed, you need to be the sort of person who can adapt really quickly and deal with uncertainty.”
“Good. Any questions?”
A slight brown man sitting near the middle of the room, probably a junior or senior, raised his hand. There was a ten-second delay as Lawrence climbed up the stairs to give him the microphone.
“Yes. This question is for Tom Allen. Tom, can you explain why McKinsey’s Greater China office held an Arabian Nights–themed desert office retreat in Kashgar, four miles from a Uyghur internment camp? By serving the Chinese Communist Party as a client, isn’t McKinsey complicit in the party’s atrocities against Uyghurs?”
Lawrence instantly turned pale. Tom gave Lawrence an annoyed look, as if they’d had an arrangement beforehand that that specific question was not to come up. The student looked defiantly at Tom as Tom accepted the microphone from Lawrence.
“Thanks for the question. I believe you forgot to tell us your name?”
“My name is Hamza,” the student said, but his voice sounded small and hollow without the microphone.
“Alright, Hamza. Thank you again for the question. First of all, I’d caution against the casual usage of words such as internment camp and atrocities. In my experience, defamatory language of that kind not only fails to describe the reality, which is always nuanced, but also deepens polarization on both sides of any issue. Which is not to say that we don’t take the moral responsibility that comes with leadership in our industry seriously. As a firm we always evaluate the impact of our engagements on a case-by-case basis, and especially on aggregate, we are proud of the positive impact that our practice has had in the Greater China region, which has a population of over 1.4 billion people.”
With that Tom passed the microphone back to Lawrence, who asked for the next question before Hamza had an opportunity to respond. For a moment it seemed like Hamza was going to rise from his seat, but a few seconds later the microphone was already on the way to the next audience member, a white guy in business casual attire who asked whether it was better for early career professionals to start in the US or Asia office of an international firm. This seemed to put Lawrence at ease. He fielded two or three more of these questions before announcing that the time for the session was up. Cue scattered applause.
After the end of the session, a couple of audience members hung around to mingle with the panelists. Most of them were huddled around Tom and Matt, while Lawrence and James Stacy held some sort of private sidebar. Unsure of where to put myself, I stood in the general vicinity of Tom and Matt’s sycophantic orbit, watching as the students hurled canned questions about opportunities at their respective firms, hoping their names would stick. I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I was much closer in age to the students than to them. Ten minutes later, Tom and Matt announced they had to leave, abruptly ending the gathering; there was a general exchanging of business cards, then everyone filed out of the room. On the way out, Matt made a joke about Tom putting Hamza on the firm’s “no fly” list.
Lawrence had insisted on debriefing the panel afterwards, so we walked together to Stephanie’s, an American restaurant on Nassau Street, and ordered some brunch plates.
“So, how do you think that went?” Lawrence asked. “By the way, is that… your driver?”
He was looking through the window at Agent Lim’s car waiting conspicuously across the street. Lim was just sitting there in his sunglasses staring straight ahead.
“Ah, yes,” I said casually. “That’s my driver Xiaowen. They sent him here from Beijing to accompany me. Don’t mind him, please.” Lawrence seemed impressed.
“Anyway,” I continued. “I thought it went pretty well… maybe not as well attended as we would’ve liked.”
Lawrence laughed. “Actually, the turnout today was better than I’d expected. The university likes to organize these events to give the whole thing a sheen of respectability, but the alumni are always too hungover to attend. Especially since they’re so damn early in the morning. Tom and I were joking earlier that we’d be shocked if we got more than five people in the room. What I meant was, how do you think the panelists got along with each other?”
“Pretty good, I guess. Was a bit annoyed though not surprised that James Stacy didn’t remember me—I went to his office hours at least six or seven times. Tom and Matt seemed nice enough.”
Lawrence nodded. “James has a tendency to do that, yes. He was actually my senior thesis advisor; his name opens many doors in China. Though so far for me, sadly not quite enough. Anyway, my friend. You disappeared from San Francisco rather suddenly. What’s the story? Give me the inside scoop.”
I sighed. “Where to even begin? You remember the thing that happened at work the last time I saw you?”
“Yes. You made a breakthrough in self-driving car software and your boss snubbed you for a promotion.”
I raised an eyebrow; Lawrence’s memory never ceased to impress.
“Right. Well, after validating that what I’d invented was actually novel, I did some research and discovered that there were several promising self-driving car companies operating in China. I read some of their white papers and came to the conclusion that the Chinese companies were getting more traction than the American companies. So when a recruiter from Naveon reached out to me, I was well-prepared to seize that opportunity.”
“Fortune favors the prepared mind, as Pasteur said. Out of curiosity, which headhunting firm represents Naveon? And how do you think they found you? For such an important role, it must have been a very wide search.”
“Hmm. To be honest, I don’t remember the name of the headhunting firm. It may even have been an independent headhunter. As for how they found me, they said they knew me from my portfolio of work on Samarkand.”
“The coding freelancing platform?” Lawrence asked skeptically. I was surprised he was even aware of it.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Not just the work I did for clients on Samarkand, though. I posted a lot of white papers on multinodal aggregation as well that generated a lot of discussion in the industry.”
“Ah, so like a peer review of sorts. Interesting. And how’s working there been so far? Seems like you’ve been promoted extremely quickly. I mean, a VP at the age of twenty-six. How many people are you managing now?”
“About forty or fifty engineers,” I lied. “And the team is growing really quickly, so I feel like I’m learning a lot. Though now that the team is so big, I spend all of my time managing and I miss engineering.”
“You and me both, old friend. It seems we are both hitting inflection points in our careers. For myself, the managing partner has sent me to Hong Kong to establish our Asia presence. So the nature of my work has changed as well. I’m not so much a lawyer these days as a salesman and a project manager. They’ve made it very clear I’ll either build a successful Hong Kong practice or lose my chance of making partner.”
“Sounds pretty stressful. But I’m sure your family can help you with introductions in China.”
“Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. My family is well-connected within Hong Kong, but it’s obvious now that all the real action is in the mainland. And in that world, I’m an outsider. A generation or two ago, it used to be easy for Westerners to break into the inner circle, but now that opportunity has passed. That’s why I needed to make a good impression with Tom and Matt today. They established themselves in China about a decade before anyone there realized they didn’t need foreigners’ help. I’m hoping they might be able to introduce me to some of their advisory clients who need legal representation.”
Lawrence took several large bites of his steak frites in rapid succession and washed it down with a swig of mimosa. I noticed his way of eating was a little more hurried and less elegant than I remembered. His face was a bit rounder as well.
“By the way, Michael, there might be a good opportunity for us to work together too and create a win-win situation,” he continued. “Out of curiosity, I was looking through Naveon’s patent filings. Some strange patterns emerge when looking at the picture as a whole. No surprise that your R&D team churns out dozens of patents each year, but in tech companies, patents are usually progressive and it’s possible to trace a clear development path across multiple research initiatives. This isn’t the case with Naveon’s IP portfolio—discoveries seem to pop out of nowhere. As you know, tensions between the US and China, especially on the topic of IP, are at an all-time high. This could put Naveon at risk of DOJ investigation or worse. I’d suggest putting some defensive measures in place. If you’d like to introduce me to the CEO, I’d be happy to discuss how we can help with an overall IP strategy to protect Naveon in the long-term.”
I looked over at Lim, who was still staring straight ahead. “Ah, I see. That is very troubling indeed. Let me speak to Peng and see if I can get him on a call with us. In the meantime, I’d appreciate your discretion on this matter.”
“Of course,” Lawrence said. “You have my absolute discretion! By the way, Michael, if I might say so, looking back now, I wish I had been a little more like you. You always had the courage to stand apart from the crowd. My whole life I cared about nothing more than what other people thought of me. And that attitude led me to law school, where now I do paperwork for entrepreneurs like you. It’s all just proximity to power, at the end of the day, all this meaningless chasing after prestige and credentials. By the way, did you get an invite to Jeff Bezos’s barbecue tomorrow? Apparently invitations went out last night. Arche told me it starts at 10:00 A.M., but that seems way too early, right?”
I responded with a sort of knowing smile that I hoped implied I was in the know about Bezos’s barbecue. Now we were wrapping up our brunch and the waiter came to clear the table.
“So, Michael, are you going to the P-rade later?”
“I think so. Starts at two o’clock, right? What are you doing for the next hour and a half?”
“Pre-drinks at Ivy, of course. What about yourself?”
I deflected the question, though not without giving him the opportunity to invite me to Ivy, which he didn’t. Ivy was Lawrence’s eating club—the most exclusive and historic at Princeton. Good luck securing legal business from my fictional start-up, I thought bitterly. When the check came, I insisted on paying, and was surprised he didn’t fight me for the bill. Then Lawrence said he would catch me later this weekend and we parted ways.
I started walking in the direction of the quad like I had somewhere to be, attempting to appear to not notice the incredibly loud EDM music blasting from the walled courtyards of the eating clubs on Prospect Street. They wanted you to hear the party without being able to see it. Everywhere I looked, groups of attractive young alumni were spilling out of grand entryways and loudly deliberating on where they should “roll” next. So far, no one had spotted me. After about ten minutes of this I was feeling almost embarrassed enough to just wait things out at Nassau Inn.
“MICHAEL!”
I turned and saw Jessica on the other side of the street waving at me. She ran over and gave me a hug.
“Hmm, you look nicer than usual. Didn’t wear the class jacket I ran around to find for you, though, of course. Where are you headed right now?”
“I’m pretty jet-lagged from the flight here. Was going to head back to the inn and take a nap.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re here for like twenty-four hours, there’s no time for a nap. Okay, you’re coming with me to TI. We can grab a few drinks there before the P-rade!”
TI, short for Tiger Inn, was Jessica’s eating club at Princeton—the demographic there was primarily wrestlers and extremely extroverted Asian girls. Jessica was now leading the way and I had to pick up the pace a bit.
On the way over, she shot me a pouty look. “I’m still mad at you for ghosting me in San Francisco, by the way. But we’ll talk about it later!”
Five minutes later I was waiting awkwardly outside the entrance of TI’s massive Tudor mansion while Jessica had a word with the doorman. The house music from the courtyard was too loud for me to hear what she was saying. She kept gesturing back to me, then finally the doorman nodded and Jessica ushered me inside. We squeezed past a hallway of sweaty partiers to get to the courtyard, where they’d set up six tables of beer pong. Everyone seemed incredibly inebriated and once again the music was too loud to hear anyone talk. We found two Solo cups and filled them with beer from the keg. Jessica, perhaps sensing how uncomfortable I was, asked if I wanted a shot. I nodded and we went upstairs to a quieter floor of the club. Jessica took a bottle of tequila from the cupboard and we took one shot each. Feeling loose and pleasantly warm from the shot, we headed back to the courtyard and started to mingle. Everyone was already quite drunk and extremely friendly. I recognized a handful of distant acquaintances from college and managed to say hello. After about an hour or so the courtyard started emptying out, which meant it was time for us to go to the P-rade. Jessica motioned for me to come join her group and introduced me as her friend from back home. I met four of her friends and we forgot each other’s names instantly, but no one seemed to mind. We did one more round of shots and headed out onto the street.
By the time we arrived at the P-rade, the spectacle was already well under way. Vintage cars modded out in black and orange rolled down University Street, flanked by euphorically inebriated alumni of all class years. My ears rang with marching band music and loud cheering. Was this what they meant by school spirit? The whole thing was over about an hour after we got there, at which point everyone started clumping together to try and discreetly organize after-party plans. Since I had nothing to contribute to the conversation, during this part I just stayed within Jessica’s general orbit and tried to maintain a facial expression of self-reliant nonchalance, which I hoped signaled that while I was happy to go to an after-party, I couldn’t care less about whether or not I was included. There was some discussion, some open-market bartering on the question of passes and how many passes each person had for groups of varying hypothetical sizes. Finally, after five minutes of excruciating social limbo, Jessica tugged on my sleeve and said that a bunch of us were going to head to Tower, which was where the debate/theater crowd “partied.” She didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about this plan, which instantly made me think that she’d lost some social currency by being attached to me in the pass-trading game just now. Our group walked to the austere brick clubhouse of Tower. It was definitely a more diverse group in there, and I got the vibe that everybody was applying to or headed to law school in the fall. They were serving nicer drinks, but everyone seemed to be having less fun than in Jessica’s club. I noticed myself feeling more comfortable and confident in this definitively less attractive group of people than at the previous venue. Pretty soon I was three or four drinks in and had joined a group of recent grads that were having a spirited debate about the quality of living in San Francisco. I had just started delivering my take on the San Francisco homelessness issue when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was Hamza, the guy who asked the question about Uyghurs during the Princeton in Asia panel.
“Oh, hey man, what’s up!” I said. “I’m Michael.” I went in for the dab but he just stood there with his arms crossed.
“I know who you are,” he said. “Are you a member here?”
“Well, no. I came here with my friend Jessica,” I said, gesturing to Jessica, who was in a more fun bubble of the party.
“Don’t know who Jessica is either. Anyway, I’m the President of Tower Club,” he said. Then he turned to the group. “And you are a right-wing genocide apologist for the Chinese Communist Party.”
There were a few scattered gasps from those standing within earshot.
“Hey man, I think you’re confused. The guy you asked that question to isn’t here. I was just on the panel. I wasn’t even invited until the last second, actually.”
Hamza sneered. “I’m going to stop you right there. If you don’t think you had an obligation to speak up for marginalized communities while you had the platform to do so, then you’re absolutely guilty by association. Silence is violence!” This drew nods of approval as well as some finger-snapping. I looked around nervously and saw that the commotion had attracted a small group of onlookers.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said firmly.
“Um, okay,” I said. Then I turned to the group. “Just to clear things up, I’m not a genocide apologist. This is a misunderstanding. But I’ll leave.”
“What the fuck is going on here?” Jessica had just showed up and was slurring her words.
“Hi. I’m Hamza, president of Tower Club. Your friend here is a genocide apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, which is currently mass murdering millions of Uyghurs. So I’m sorry, he has to leave.”
“I’m sorry, but do you know what the fuck you’re talking about?” Jessica said. “This is my friend Michael, who is literally a software engineer. He has zero interest in mass murdering Uyghurs.”
Now the people in the crowd looked very confused. Hamza uncrossed then recrossed his arms. “Well, maybe you should have seen him at this Princeton in China panel cozying up to CCP insiders. As club president, it’s my responsibility to make sure Tower is an inclusive safe space for everyone. And your friend’s presence is making it unsafe, so I’m going to have to ask him to leave.”
“FINE!” Jessica said. “God, you guys are literally such pussies…” She gave Hamza the middle finger then took my hand and stormed out of the building with me.
“Thanks for that back there,” I said, as soon as we were out of earshot.
“Well, I didn’t help very much, did I? Whatever, it’s fine. That party was so lame anyway.”
“You looked like you were having fun.”
“That’s part of my thing, Michael, you know it is.”
“Fair. Want to head back to Tiger Inn?”
“No, I don’t think we can do that,” said Jessica, without explaining why. “Whatever. Should we just go to Terrace? I think it’s late enough.”
I was surprised she suggested Terrace. Terrace was probably the closest thing Princeton had to an “alternative” (druggy, vegan, nonheteronormative) scene, once described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “breathlessly freakish.” It was also a “sign in” club, which meant anyone could join; there was no selective bidding process. And for that reason, I felt at the time there was no point in joining, which could only be read as an admission of defeat.
Jessica and I walked right into Terrace without being stopped by a bouncer. Everywhere we went we were surrounded by guys wearing leather pants and girls with purple hair and nose rings. There were also copious amounts of crushed-up drugs in plastic baggies strewn about in the open. Some of the baggies weren’t sealed all the way shut and were spilling powder onto various surfaces. Frankly, Jessica looked more uncomfortable than I was.
Jessica said she thought there was live music in the backyard, so we went outside to check it out. Compared to the chaos indoors, the scene outside was almost idyllic. The music was just one undergrad playing indie folk originals without a microphone. We found a spot on the lawn not far from the house and sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
“By the way, where’s Nick?” I asked, surprised I hadn’t noticed his absence until just now.
“Not in the picture anymore.”
“Whoa. You gonna tell me why?”
Jessica gave me an angry look.
“You remember my mom, right?”
Of course I remembered Jessica’s mom. She was this tall, imposing woman from Beijing who spoke in staccato sentences and was always alone at school events because her husband was away pursuing business ventures in China. According to Jessica, her mom always blamed her for being the reason she was stuck at home instead of making a name for herself like her college classmates from China. She channeled all of this frustration into making Jessica a star and saw Jessica’s accomplishments as her own, which was a constant source of resentment for Jessica. To be honest, Jessica’s mom could often be a pretty unpleasant woman. I got the sense that she saw me as kind of a loser and a distraction for her daughter. But as soon as we got into Princeton, she completely flipped the script. Suddenly I was always welcome to hang out at her house, even alone with Jessica in her room.
During Jessica’s sophomore year of high school, it came out that her dad had finally made it big in China—but he’d also started a second family there. To my amazement, her mother basically shrugged it all off and got a job at a small accounting firm the next month to support Jessica on her own, and eventually pay her way through college.
Jessica took a deep breath. “Right—of course you remember her. Anyway, ever since I moved away from home, I’ve been calling her once a week. You know, just to check in, since now I was so far away and she didn’t really have anyone else. Around the beginning of this year, I noticed she was acting unusually forgetful. It was small stuff at first, like not being able to remember the names of my friends from high school. Then she started to forget things I just told her the week before. But one day when she called me in a panic because she’d gotten lost on her way back home from the grocery store, I knew I had to fly home to see her.
“The doctor told us it was early-onset Alzheimer’s, but he couldn’t predict how quickly her condition would deteriorate. What we knew for sure was that at some point, probably in the next year, she’d need to either have a full-time caretaker or move into a memory care facility.
“Of course, Nick was the first person I’d told. By this point we’d been dating for two years. My mom loved Nick, or at least the idea of him, and her face lit up every time I brought him home from Princeton to visit on the weekends. I assumed the feeling was mutual. At first we decided to hire a part-time helper for her to smooth things over while we monitored her condition. Then the late-night calls started, and it was like all of a sudden she was letting out all the anger she’d bottled up since my dad left, or maybe since I was born. She’d scream into the phone that the helper was stealing from her and that I was leaving her to die. She’d say I was just like my father, who could only think of himself, and that she’d always known the day would come when she’d regret moving to this country and starting this family. Sometimes she called three, four times a night, with no recollection of the previous conversation. Of course, Nick heard everything. Afterwards it was: ‘Are you just going to let her speak to you like that? She’s abusive, Jessica. Toxic. You need to establish boundaries. You don’t owe her anything; you need to put her in a facility where she can get the specialist treatment she needs.’ I told him I couldn’t just put my mother in a home; even if they could give her the best treatment, there was no way to do it without making her feel abandoned. Then he said: ‘When are you going to start making your own choices instead of just doing whatever your family expects from you?’ That was it for me. I broke up with him, quit my job, and moved back to Tenafly.”
I suddenly realized why she was telling me this now. I was there for her when her dad abandoned them in high school, and this exact scenario was something we’d talked through many times in the past: as the only children of single parents, what would happen if one of our parents got sick? The only answer, of course, was the promise that we’d be there for each other if and when it happened—no matter what happened between us. It was one of the last things Jessica said to me when she broke up with me freshman year: I think of you as someone who’s always going to be in my life. Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that promise. Now I could clearly see the pain on her face and felt ashamed.
“I’m so sorry, Jessica. I had no idea any of this was going on. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
“Maybe it’s selfish of me to be telling you this,” she continued, “but the whole time this was happening, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I just knew you’d understand exactly what I was going through, and make me feel okay no matter what I decided to do. It feels strange being back in Tenafly without you. That’s why I tried so hard to get you to come back for Reunions. But when I looked you up, I saw that you left the country for good without even saying goodbye. You know, right before you left, I actually saw you once. You were walking around Pac Heights with this really pretty girl. She was so stylish too, looked like she was from somewhere really chic like London or Singapore. I figured that’s what you always wanted. You left SF with her, right? If so, then I understand.”
When I looked at her again, I recognized the same sincere, vulnerable girl I’d met in high school. Maybe she had been the same person this entire time. I couldn’t remember how we had grown apart in the first place. It felt odd to be having this conversation with her at Princeton, only sixty miles and seven years from where we grew up together. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to open up and tell her truth (or something close to it) about everything that had happened since I left San Francisco. But another part of me couldn’t bring myself to shatter the new impression she had of me as someone who had gone on to greater things. At around two o’clock in the morning, I walked her back to the dorm where she was staying and we lingered at the door for a moment.
“Can I get something off my chest?” she said. I waited for her to continue. “It was my idea to invite you to the China panel. I asked Lawrence if there was any extra space, and luckily he said he had a cancellation. I knew you wouldn’t have come all this way otherwise. That’s how much I wanted to see you.”
“I see,” I said, but now there was a hollowness in my voice. Something in the space between us had shifted. I suddenly felt embarrassed of the expensive suit I was wearing, of my performative nonchalance leading up to the trip; it was the feeling of nakedness from being seen by someone who really knew you. “I think I should go. It was good to see you.”
“Goodbye, Michael,” she said, smiling and sniffling. “I’m glad you came.”
Back in my hotel room, I was just about to turn the TV on when I heard a loud knocking at the door.
“Come on, let’s go for a ride,” said Agent Lim.
I followed him out to the parking lot and got into his Suburban. Lim deftly navigated us out of Princeton Township and soon we were on I-95 headed toward Manhattan. We coasted on the freeway for twenty miles, then took a right on exit 99 and stopped in front of a late-night Chinese buffet called Jade Empress right before the New Jersey state line. The place was decked out in many of the greatest hits of the genre: wall-mounted scrolls, plastic waterfalls, redwood panels, and beckoning cat figurine. The only other customers were four lonely old white guys sipping bottomless cups of coffee with hard eyes staring straight ahead waiting for morning. At the center of the dining room was the buffet trough, each chafing dish about one quarter to one third full. My mouth watered instinctively at the potent corn syrup and soy sauce scent of the spread, which lit up the nostalgic pathways of my brain.
Lim loaded his plate with a heap of orange chicken, egg fried rice, beef and broccoli, lo mein, and crab rangoon. I just got a cup of black coffee. We took seats across from each other in a corner booth with hard overhead lighting. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning and Lim still had his tie on. He rolled up his sleeves and started eating voraciously, creating an almost passive-aggressive silence for several minutes that told me he hadn’t had time to eat all day because he’d been busy tailing me.
“So tell me,” he said finally, “where do things stand with Bo?”
“We’re getting close. He trusts me, I think. Or at the very least, he sees me as a competent, reliable aid. I did a good job for him in San Francisco a few weeks ago and he’s really interested in what Yang has to offer.”
Lim stopped eating and put his elbows on the table, appearing unimpressed with what I had to report. “That’s all great, Michael. But unfortunately, we’re out of time. That’s what I came to tell you tonight. It’s got to be now or never. Before your flight is supposed to leave tomorrow, you need to call Bo and see if he’ll fly out to meet Yang.”
“No, no,” I said, trying my hardest not to sound frantic. “We really can’t do that. Please, listen to me just this once. You don’t understand how close we are now—I even had dinner with his family last week! We just need to wait a little longer for the right moment. Bo’s said again and again that it’s too dangerous for him to leave the country right now.”
“And he’s right. That’s consistent with our best intel from Hong Kong. But like I said, we’re out of time. That’s coming from the US attorney. If you don’t think you can deliver Bo, then I would suggest you surrender yourself to me.”
He picked his fork back up and continued to eat leisurely. It was the middle of the night, and we were in no rush.
“What happened to the original plan?” I said. “Ferris said we’d still have another week after Reunions to make it work.”
“Unfortunately for you, Michael, Ferris has gone dark. We no longer have anyone in the country to handle comms with you, and if you got caught, there’d be nothing we could do. The government doesn’t want another Otto Warmbier situation. And I don’t want to watch your tear-streaked face on CNN pleading for mercy from a Chinese prison. How humiliating. Think about what that would do to the image of Chinese Americans here, Michael. It wouldn’t be fair to those of us who never strayed.”
I focused on steadying my breathing and marinated in Lim’s disdain. If he wanted to kick me while I was down, then so be it. “Ferris has been caught?”
“We don’t know that. It’s definitely possible. The alternative possibility is he’s lying low because Beijing is on high alert. The last time he went dark, it was when we lost ten of our agents to a mole at the CIA. He made it through that alive, so I hope he can get through this one too. But here’s what I know for sure—having you running around Beijing leaving breadcrumbs everywhere is not going to increase his odds of survival.”
Lim was right: if I got caught, I took Ferris down with me. On a server somewhere in Beijing was dozens of hours of CCTV footage of Ferris and me walking together. If I ended up in custody, Chinese authorities would be on their way to Ferris in a matter of minutes. The inverse, I thought, was likely true as well: if Ferris had indeed been caught, my cover would’ve been blown as well.
Lim threw a twenty on the table and rose from the booth. “So, that’s it, then. Get some sleep tonight and figure out what you’re going to say to Bo tomorrow. I’ll pick you up for the airport around noon.”
After Agent Lim dropped me off at the Nassau Inn, I pulled out my phone and checked Ferris’s status on WeChat. The account for the Haigui Language Education Center had been deactivated two days ago, and the business hours said “permanently closed”—so I really was on my own.
I drew the blinds and paced my suite for two, then three hours, desperately trying to come up with a solution. Of course, none presented itself—how could it have? I hadn’t conceived of a single original intervention this entire time; all I’d done was passively execute my handlers’ instructions and telephone the information they’d fed me. Now the line was being cut on one side. I felt crushed by the obvious immovability of the situation. In a few hours, I’d be a prisoner, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. Because of Chinese tariffs on American corn, the impending failure of the DOJ’s China Initiative, and a “century of humiliation” that started 150 years before I was born. And also because of my own deep-seated flaws of character and judgment. I laughed uncontrollably when I thought about how trivial my problems at General Motors and dating life were merely a few months ago—and yet how grotesquely connected they were to this game of nations that had somehow found me at its center. Of course it had been me. I climbed out onto the fire escape and started smoking my last pack of FPMO cigarettes.
I didn’t see Agent Lim’s car in the parking lot. Maybe he was watching the front door from the inn’s surveillance feed and didn’t know about the fire escape. I could climb down to the parking lot and run out to Witherspoon Street. It was only a ninety-minute cab ride to the Chinese consulate in New York City. I could call Bo on the way and see if he’d make arrangements for me. I’d have to give him Ferris, of course—but he’d said it himself, didn’t he? A certain degree of betrayal is unavoidable.
No—I wouldn’t disappear into the night again. Not when there was so little left to lose. I climbed back inside my room and buried my head into the pillow. I hated this feeling of being cornered by Agent Lim. I hated the disdainful way that he looked at me, the way he casually alluded to my “obvious psychological complexes,” as if he could read every shameful thought in my head. The only thing worse than feeling invisible, I thought, was being see-through. Not that he’d been alone in this. Vivian and Bo as well—hadn’t they always known exactly what to say to me? To get me to betray my country, leave my life? How easy and cheap my eager cooperation must have appeared to them. The only difference was that they didn’t tout their mastery over me in the open, which was somehow even more humiliating.
As I lay there convulsing in spite, a terrible thought came to me. Even while they slid me across their board with impunity, I hadn’t been the passive piece they thought I was. I’d seen, as well. I registered quite a bit more than any of them realized.