Weirdly enough, the only one who wanted to help me after everything was Christine. We spoke on the phone two days after Bo’s arrest made the news.
According to Christine, while Bo and his son awaited trial in the United States, Bo’s wife was under house arrest in Beijing. Rumor had it that Bo’s capture was tantamount to exile, since the investigation was sure to uncover evidence that would implicate him in corruption back home. All of his assets had been frozen. And that’s when she told me about the apartment.
Like many Chinese elites, Bo had been stockpiling property all over the world for several years as a way of transferring wealth out of the country. Opera Residences in Sydney’s Bennelong Point was a new development that had just been completed in March, and Christine had furnished it herself. Christine said cautiously that if I wanted, it was possible for her to give me remote access to the unit through the property manager’s iPhone app. Within twelve hours, I was on a one-way flight to Sydney. As I puzzled over why she was helping me, I felt a pang of regret: not once, I realized, had I taken the time to think about what Christine wanted.
Over time, I found a few ways to make the place my own. For example, I installed an identical unit of the La Marzocco GS3 espresso machine I’d had in San Francisco. I missed the high-pressure showers from my old apartment in Beijing, so I had Bo’s taken out and replaced with a replica. One afternoon, at an antiques market in Surry Hills, I came across a scholar’s rock that reminded me of the one in Bo’s backyard in Beijing, so I bought it and had it put up on a mantel in the living room.
At first it felt weird to watch the news about Bo’s trial from the air-conditioned comfort of his own living room, but very quickly I found a sense of satisfaction in it. I never missed a broadcast. It was Richard Scully versus the attorney Bo had hired, a guy who looked like a senior version of Lawrence, while Bo sat stone-faced and mute at the front. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, but even so managed to bear his lot with a shred of dignity, which is more than I could say for myself. Bo was very telegenic and there was something about his demeanor that commanded respect; it was clear this wasn’t the first purge he’d been through (though probably his last). Every now and then, my presence would indirectly insert itself into the trial, when Scully presented evidence collected by “anonymous government witness.” During these moments I’d feel a sharp and sudden moment of pride, always hoping the camera would pan to Bo so I could register his reaction to learning the role I’d played in his downfall. Was it insane to think a small part of him would even be proud of me?
Ferris was right—one of the best things about Chinese people is that they always want the best for the next generation. Ultimately it was this insight that provided the key to my “freedom.” At first it felt sick to use his parental instincts against him, but then I wondered if he’d gotten my dad on a similar strategy. My dad was a man who’d always seen science as a gift to the world and not something to be jealously guarded by nations. Something for the next generation. Something to help me.
Why then had I accepted Christine’s offer to live at Bo’s apartment in the first place? At first I couldn’t tell if I was getting revenge or punishing myself. In the end, I figured it just felt fitting. I started to consider the possibility that maybe the state of betrayal was something that suited me.
I monitored my dad’s release date on the state of California’s public incarceration records. To my surprise, it was coming up in three months; he’d be free just a few days after my twenty-seventh birthday. I wondered what he’d do when he got out. Unfortunately, there was no government bailout deal with fake references waiting for him. But he was the sort of man who could make peace with his circumstances and wouldn’t think twice about moving into a motel and finding a job at a Chinese restaurant.
I wondered if he would try and find me. At first I tried writing him a long letter explaining everything that happened, not just in the past few months but in the years that had gone by since he disappeared, but this felt too self-indulgent or confessional, and in the end I decided the picture I’d created of myself was too embarrassing to show him. I realized at some point that all I wanted was to somehow convince him that I turned out this way of my own accord, that he wasn’t at fault for the person I became, and that on some level perhaps things were always fated to turn out this way for me—but then I realized there wouldn’t be a need to explain any of this if he never found out about what happened in the first place. So I stopped writing the letter. It struck me that the irony of all this was that when my father “disappeared” all those years ago, he probably performed a similar calculus.
I’d made enough money in China to live comfortably for a few years, but partially out of necessity and partially out of boredom I started freelancing again on Samarkand. Boredom maybe wasn’t the right word. I had no visitors and no activities; this state of idleness worked my anxious imagination to a fever pitch. What Scully had said about Vivian and Ferris’s decade-long partnership often woke me up in the middle of the night. It took me a while to place the feeling, but then I realized it was how I felt when Vivian had told me the story about Vincent, the painter from Beijing whose romance she’d kept from her watchful father. The first time I heard that story, I worried about how I could possibly take the place of someone like that in her heart—now I’m struck by how naïve I was to believe it all in the first place. I pictured Vivian and Ferris celebrating their respective promotions together at some secret resort in Switzerland, toasting with champagne glasses. Would they mention my name? My face burned when I thought about Ferris and the loyalty and warmth I’d once felt for someone I thought of as a brother.
It was a couple months before I started to attempt to create a life for myself in Sydney. I knew that getting a job was key, would serve the purpose of putting me in real-life situations with real-life human beings. What I ended up doing was getting a job as an instructor at a coding boot camp in Gore Hill. I had one section that was for high school–aged kids and another that was for adult “career switchers.” My students in the latter section came from all over the world and had ended up here because of some sort of large-scale career or life frustration. One woman had been a diplomat in the State Department but became disillusioned with the lack of control and moral ambivalence of her work. Another was a retired Finnish football player who’d gotten injured in the last season and lost his ability to play. Some people were sketchier and clearly running from something. This crossroads was almost like a hostel environment of sorts. Because I couldn’t say anything about my past life, I learned how to become a really good listener, and to my surprise, people opened up. As one of the “fixtures” of this space, over time I started to see the first green shoots of a real life: one with other people and a concept of a future. Compared to other futures I had imagined previously, this one was more limited in scale. I didn’t have dreams of greatness anymore; in fact, I didn’t want to attract any more attention than necessary and took solace in my invisibility. I started to spend less and less time on Samarkand, at least the social forum part of it, though I still took jobs from the marketplace. If things continued in this way, I figured, at some point (presumably) I would meet a woman, maybe even start a family several years down the line. And for my children, this way of existing in Sydney wouldn’t be some weird purgatory, it would just be normal life. After about six months of this I came to the conclusion that I was, in fact, an immigrant, just like my mother and father before me.
It didn’t take long for me to convince myself that the life I had in Sydney was a completely new one, that the memories from San Francisco were from a past life. This was easy because the social connections tracing me back to America were so few. I’d let down and shut out so many people over the years that pretty soon the outreach stopped entirely. Even Jessica had given up on me. I guess at a certain point, you do lose people forever.
The one exception was an unexpected email from Daniel, my friend from Club Mandarin. He was writing from his new laptop to tell me that the barbecue shop was finally a success. They couldn’t agree what to call the place between the three of them, so they’d named it Mike’s BBQ. In fact, he’d gone through the trouble of getting my email from Madame Suyi to figure out how he could transfer me $3,241—my share of the shop’s profits from the first year. When I read the email, I wept for the first time in months.
I continued to monitor the state of Bo’s trials in the American news. Since it had now been a year, coverage was slowing down, but I had Google news alerts set up to update me on new developments. There was never anything exciting. But every time I started to feel too comfortable in my new life, the old fears would come creeping back. Maybe Bo would reemerge or one of his lieutenants would show up to avenge him. What would I do then? Pick a new country and start over? I never could stop looking over my shoulder.
A full year after I moved to Sydney, I felt settled enough in my own life that I decided to shut down my Samarkand account for good and move all my funds off the platform. So one Friday evening, after going out for dinner with my new friends, I logged into the platform for the last time. That’s when I noticed that the status sticker next to viv798 had turned green again—active as of two days ago. Something told me she’d know where to find me.