Two days later I mailed the magazine back to Vice Consul Tao with a letter enclosed. I could not agree with him about serving one’s country unconditionally. “What is a country?” I asked. “For me, it is not a mythical, sacred figure but an apparatus, like a set of machines (each ministry is a machine in this sense). It would be insane to regard the country as a deity and let it rule one’s life. Moreover, I simply cannot trust any country, which might run amok at any time. That’s why E. M. Forster hoped to have the guts to betray his country if he had to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country.”
I continued: “What if your country commits genocide? What if your country has become a fascist state? In such circumstances, a decent citizen should stand up to the government. History has taught us that no country is qualified for the moral high ground. An intellectual’s role is not to serve the state but to keep a close watch on it so that it may not turn abusive, oppressive, and destructive. Therefore, as an intellectual, one must uphold justice, freedom, and equality as universal values. Abstract as those concepts might be, despite their problematic origins and despite the West’s dubious history in measuring up to them, they are still essential in improving our social conditions and making us more human. Furthermore, I must emphasize that no true intellectuals should be in bed with power, letting political shifts determine their ups and downs, nor should they become the hangers-on of some lords. Vice Consul Tao, have you never dreaded the country you have been serving? Has it not destroyed millions of lives? Has it ever hesitated to swallow or squash even those who loved it? You claimed that without a country an individual would be nothing, but how many people have been reduced to nothing by their countries? Patriotism is a pejorative word in my dictionary: it connotes spiritual paucity, intellectual blindness and laziness, and moral cowardice. Isn’t it terrible to let only a country form the underpinning of one’s being? Last but not least, I don’t believe that money is the universal value that you claim it to be—I don’t believe that it can buy every soul and every thing. There are values beyond gold.”
I had to write him to express myself clearly; otherwise he might have assumed I’d agreed with him. After the letter was mailed, I got more agitated. I knew the die was cast, and from now on the Chinese government would view me as an enemy. No matter what, I’d never be a servant of any country, because I believed that the country and the individual were equal.
About a week later Katie heard from Rudolph that the litigation against me was on a contingency basis, which meant that the attorney could get paid only after the case was won or settled. If the defendant had no money, all the effort would be wasted. This news heartened me. I could see that Haili had started the suit mainly to torment and intimidate me. Better yet, the contingency arrangement indicated that Larry was not financially involved. Rudolph told Katie that their attorney might discontinue his service unless the plaintiffs put up a retainer of eight thousand dollars. My gut told me that Haili was unlikely to take such a risk. She was always smart moneywise and wouldn’t open her checkbook that way. On Katie’s advice, I bought a bottle of Russian vodka for Rudolph.
Katie went back to the Chinese consulate to try again for her visa. To her delight, this time they granted it to her. The day after she’d told me the good news, I went to the visa office outside the consulate to try my luck too, hoping that my one-month-old U.S. passport would give me some leverage for a visa, with which I could accompany Katie to Henan province and visit my parents afterward. After standing in line for forty-five minutes, I reached a window in the visa office. The young man behind the glass skimmed the form I had filled out, glanced through my papers, and asked me, “Where’s your Chinese passport?”
“I sent it in for renewal four months ago, but you haven’t returned it to me yet,” I replied. It was the truth. “I’m a U.S. citizen now. Why do you still need my old passport?”
“Because you’re not a native-born American. See here, even your U.S. passport says you were born in China, in Jilin province, but without your original passport you cannot prove that. We have to confirm that you were a Chinese citizen originally.”
“Can you check if my Chinese passport is still at your consulate?”
He punched his keyboard while reading the screen. He closed the small opening on the window and turned to speak to a middle-aged woman. His voice became inaudible. They both looked at the monitor, nodding their heads and commenting on something.
A moment later the young man opened the window and said to me, “We don’t have your passport here.”
“Are you sure? I mailed it to you four months ago. Here’s a photocopy.”
“This cannot prove we received it. We need the original.”
“Damn it, you can’t say I’m responsible for it disappearing!”
“Neither can we be responsible for that.”
My head was reeling with confusion and anger, but I didn’t know how to continue. I could only stare at his lean face.
“Well,” he continued, “I’m not authorized to process your application if your papers are incomplete. Go upstairs, to Window Number Eleven, and see if someone there can help you.”
I went to the second floor and handed in my paperwork to a bespectacled thirtyish woman, who said the same thing: without my former passport I couldn’t possibly get a visa. “According to our rules,” she explained, smiling all the while, “there’s only one way for people in your situation to get a visa.” Her smooth face brought to mind a fine porcelain vase.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We could give you a visitor’s certificate—it can be used only once. Once you are back in China, you must report to the police department of your home province and cancel your Chinese citizenship with them. Then you come back and submit the official proof to us. After that, we will treat you as a regular American citizen and accept your visa application.”
“But the fact that I’ve become a U.S. citizen already means my Chinese citizenship is canceled, because China doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. You can easily verify the cancellation here.”
“Rules are rules, and we have to follow them. You’ll have to check in at the police department back home. They will issue you an exit pass, which you will use to return. Are you willing to do that or not? If you are, fill out this form, write your statement on this page, swearing that you will report to the police, and then give me four copies of your current photo.” She handed me the form and a sheet of paper bearing the heading “My Affidavit.” I was supposed to fill the page with a brief description of my situation and with a statement that I would present myself to the police once I was in China.
Driven by a sudden rush of eagerness to see my parents, I said, “All right, I’ll do what you said and come back shortly.”
She kept smiling. “See you later. You can take your photo downstairs.” By now her moon face was quite friendly, the opposite of the standard officious face.
“Thanks,” I said.
The instant I stepped away from the window, I realized there’d be no way I could turn myself in to the provincial police. Once I was in their clutches, I’d have to own up to my “misdeeds” abroad and might end up signing some agreement, or else they wouldn’t let me return. They could coerce me into cooperation, even into working for them as a semi-agent or an informer. In brief, once I got into their precinct, they could close the gate and torture me at will, and I’d be like the deaf-mute whose protests couldn’t be heard no matter how much pain was inflicted on him. I had a friend who’d once been imprisoned in Gansu province. The police were so brutal that they thrust a baton into his anus while stepping on his legs and forcing him to sing songs and curse himself. He was so traumatized that, even after fleeing China and going into exile in Western Europe, he couldn’t stop talking about the humiliating experience—on the radio, on TV, to anyone who would listen. A little crazed, he would publicly declare that China, as an evil empire, must disintegrate into small countries, as Lao-tzu advocates in the Tao Te Ching.
Clearly, the so-called visitor’s certificate was just a snare for the people on a blacklist. A jolt of fear hit me in the gut—it was so strong that my legs almost gave way. I dumped the forms into a trash can and left the visa office, my mind in a whirl.
Heading back to the subway, I kept saying to myself, “Fuck that! Fuck ruthless China!” Still, I was so saturated with grief that I could hardly breathe and my temples were throbbing. It had been drizzling, the neon lights along the street blurrier than three hours before, and my face was wet with both rainwater and tears, which I didn’t bother to wipe away.
Despite my new misgivings about Kaiming, I told him about my visa problem the next afternoon—he had helped me with such things before, and with Haili’s lawsuit now hanging over my head alone, I figured he owed me a favor. He listened attentively and then said, “In fact, there’s still a way you can get a visa.”
“How?” I asked eagerly.
“Find someone willing to vouch for you—someone who is at least a vice minister. This is a new policy. If you want to get a visa, you must have your name removed from the blacklist first, and nobody but a powerful official can help you with that. Of course, you’ll have to write out a self-criticism to express your deep remorse and promise to toe the line. Keep in mind that they’ll have the right to publish your confessions anytime they like.”
My excitement faded instantly as I realized Kaiming had been talking tongue in cheek. He knew I would never accept those terms. I said, “So I’d have to behave here or I’d compromise my guarantor.”
“Correct.”
I made light of it. “Well, I don’t know any big officials personally,” I said, “so I’ll just have to wait for the day you become a high official and can endorse me.”
“No”—he laughed—“I would never do that for an incorrigible troublemaker like you.”
I went into a deep funk. From now on I had to remain emotionally detached from China while trying my best to manage my pangs of loss and homesickness. As I had brashly advised in an essay: “Banish China from your mind.”
In mid-November, Katie got another piece of good news. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had awarded her a fellowship that would enable her to live and do research in Beijing for six months. I knew she had applied to the academy’s scholar exchange program, but neither of us had expected her to get it, because her kind of research was likely to expose the sordid underbelly of China’s economic reform—the medical system in the countryside had been a shambles in recent years. Then why had Katie received the fellowship?
I wondered if strings had been pulled because of her relationship with me—whether the officials intended to separate her from me to make me more isolated, more vulnerable, and more distant from the mainstream media here. Without an American partner, I could be easier for them to control, and they must have believed that without her involved, the English-language media wouldn’t pay attention to my work. That was merely my guess; I had no way to prove it. Yet I was certain that the consulate had issued her the visa with the intention of taking her away from me. (It’s always more troublesome for the officials to deal with a foreigner, especially a Westerner. In general, they treat a Chinese who has a foreign spouse with some courtesy for the sake of good appearances.) Undoubtedly some officials had been in contact with Jiao Fanping and Gu Bing.
For days I was ill-tempered, full of misgivings about whether I should have engaged the trio to begin with. The anguish gave me bouts of indigestion, acid often shooting up my throat, and I would awake in the early morning hours, unable to go back to sleep. When I spoke to Katie, I couldn’t help but get sarcastic. For a while she was able to ignore my nastiness. Then one evening she couldn’t hold back anymore and snapped at me, “For Christ’s sake, stop dumping on me like that!”
“Who’s dumping who?” I spat back.
“Don’t act like this is a surprise,” she said softly. “I’ve never lied about my feelings. I told you from day one that I might decamp at any time. Besides, we can have a long-distance relationship, don’t you think?”
“Okay, we can try that.”
I wanted to say I needed her more than ever to be here with me, but I thought better of it, knowing there’d be no use. For her, the opportunity was too precious to let go and would eventually ensure the publication of her book, which in turn would help her get tenure. So much of her career hinged on the fieldwork she would do in China. I added, “I wish we’d never met.”
“I’m sorry, Danlin.” She spoke with so much sadness in her voice that I heard sobs behind her words. “If you meet another woman, feel free to be with her. I know I’m not the right one for you, but I’ll remember you fondly.”
I said nothing, afraid of dissolving into tears if I opened my mouth. How could I have become so sentimental? Hadn’t I decided long ago that I wouldn’t marry her? Why couldn’t I just let her go? I realized that my feelings for her had changed considerably in recent months. I reminded myself to appear stolid and never to hold her back.
She had to work on a senior’s thesis, so I turned away to watch the evening news. My eyes were on the TV, but I could hardly register what the anchorwoman was saying. I clicked it off and tried to read This Earth of Mankind, by Pramoedya Toer, a novel Katie had recommended to me. I had just started it and had been enjoying it, but now I couldn’t lose myself in the story. The words crowded together before my eyes and refused to make any sense.
That night when we went to bed, I found myself unable to have sex with Katie. I held her in my arms, a strand of her hair between my lips, but I couldn’t continue—a dull backache seized my body while a gust of grief rolled over my mind, dissolving my concentration. I closed my eyes and bit back my tears.