MCLC: Map of Betrayal review

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Map of Betrayal review
Source: NYT (11/7/14)
‘A Map of Betrayal,’ by Ha Jin
By BEN MACINTYRE
Many years ago, the F.B.I. coined an acronym, MICE, to describe the motivations of the spy. This stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. All spies, it is argued, are drawn into espionage by some combination of these factors.
Gary Shang, a long-term Chinese Communist mole within the C.I.A. and the protagonist of Ha Jin’s latest novel, fits uneasily into this template: Greed, it seems, plays only a minor part in his motivation, though it is money that eventually leads to his exposure; his adherence to his native country’s ideology is habitual more than passionate; he is pressured to continue spying by a veiled threat to his family in China, but he is never openly coerced; his ego is tempered by self-doubt.
Gary’s nebulous motivations make him more believable than most fictional spies. He simply drifts into the espionage world and gets stuck there. For long periods, nothing much happens to him. In this, Gary’s story is close to that of many real spies: Moles tend to burrow inside the system and then lie dormant, often for years. Gary Shang is unobtrusive, unremarkable and rather dull — important attributes in a genuine spy, but less than gripping in a fictional one.
We meet Weimin Shang in Shanghai in 1949 as a young, newly married Communist, a graduate of Tsinghua University recruited to infiltrate the spy networks of the retreating Chinese Nationalists. He isn’t very skilled at spycraft. He can’t shoot straight or dismantle a bomb, but he speaks good English, and thus is detailed to infiltrate an American cultural agency, a covert C.I.A. offshoot. He changes his name to Gary, “which sounded savvy and fashionable for a young Chinese man.” “Why are you interested in this kind of work, Mr. Shang?” one of his superiors asks. “I need to eat and have to take whatever is available,” he replies tamely. James Bond, he isn’t.
When the “cultural agency” moves out of Shanghai to Okinawa, Shang follows Beijing’s orders and goes along, despite the dawning awareness that he is now an exile from the Chinese wife he barely knows and the children he will never see. From there, he moves on to suburban Virginia, as a trusted translator for the C.I.A. Ultimately he becomes a naturalized United States citizen, an agency stalwart, with access to some of the crown jewels of American intelligence.
In chapters alternating with Gary’s chronological story, Ha Jin follows the journey of Gary’s half-American daughter, Lilian, as she searches for the truth about her father by reading his diaries and by traveling to modern-day China. We see America through the eyes of a Chinese émigré, torn between an old loyalty and growing affection for the adopted land he is betraying. Simultaneously, we see China through the eyes of his daughter, discovering whatever she can about the family her father left behind.
There are strong autobiographical echoes here. Ha Jin (the pen name of Xuefei Jin) was born in 1956 to parents who were both military doctors. He volunteered for the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 14 and served for five years before being admitted to Heilongjiang University, in Harbin, to study English, the language in which he has now written seven novels. In 1985, he came to Brandeis University to do graduate work, and stayed in the United States.
Ha Jin’s 1999 novel “Waiting” received the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, an astonishing achievement for a writer who, like Conrad and Nabokov, adopted a written language from an entirely different linguistic and literary tradition. If this occasionally reveals itself in somewhat clunky language — “Eyes glazed in pain and smitten with regret. . . . He swallowed, wheezing and pushing down a wad of misery in his windpipe” — it also adds an authentic awkwardness, a voice at once outside and inside the culture.
Gary bigamously marries an American waitress called Nellie, but secretly pines for his Chinese family. He finds solace in the country-music bromides of Hank Williams and inspiration in Nietzsche. “He began to believe in the superman, though he never succeeded in mastering his own life or outgrowing the herd ­values ingrained in him long ago.” With his C.I.A. salary (and the far smaller stipend deposited in a Hong Kong bank by his Chinese bosses), he buys a suburban home and begins to fall for America, but only provisionally: “He loved some aspects of American life — the orderliness, the plentitude, the privacy, the continuity of daily life, the freedom of travel.”
And he spies, not dramatically but efficiently, to the point where Mao himself declares that Shang’s work is equivalent in value to four armored divisions. Every few years, Gary meets his spymaster in Hong Kong and is told that he must not come back yet, that his family is being looked after, that he is rising through the ranks and deeply valued. He is homesick, but not so much that he insists on being brought back; he is settled in America, but not so rooted as to switch his loyalty. He prefers his Chinese mistress to his American wife, but won’t rock the boat by fully loving either.
Gary Shang’s politics seem childlike, unchanging because they’re unexplored and unchallenged. The sight of an official British car in Hong Kong “reminded him that he’d been engaged in fighting imperialism. China had to drive all the colonial powers off its soil, and he’d better stop indulging in self-pity and fretting about his personal gain and loss.”
When the end comes, Gary is hung out to dry by Beijing. A cynical spymaster tells Gary’s daughter that her father was never going to escape once he had deeply penetrated the C.I.A.’s bureaucracy and earned America’s confidence. “A nail must remain in its position . . . and rot with the wood it’s stuck in, so a spy of the nail type is more or less a goner. . . . It’s in the nature of our profession.”
“A Map of Betrayal” is an uneven novel. Lillian’s discovery that her Chinese nephew, Gary’s grandson, is also a minor spy offers too simple a parallel. Some of the characters veer close to stereotypes: the grumpy American wife, the manipulative spymaster, the rebellious niece in the Chinese pop band. But in Gary himself, Ha Jin has captured the painful, often humdrum essence of the hidden agent, living a double life but only half a life, like those Soviet spies bedded down in the West and enjoying the gifts of democracy while working to wreck them, or the latest crop of “sleepers” uncovered in the United States, serving Russian intelligence while tending their suburban gardens.
At the start of the novel, Gary is announced as “the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America.” Yet, like most real spies, his motivations are small: a little money, a brushing of patriotism, a hint of coercion, a whiff of egotism.
Kim Philby, the notorious British spy who hid in plain sight as a K.G.B. agent for more than 30 years, once explained: “To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged.” Gary’s tragedy is that of most moles. He never belongs: not to America or China; not to his wives, mistress or children; not to the Chinese intelligence service or the C.I.A.; and not, in the end, to himself.
A MAP OF BETRAYAL
By Ha Jin
280 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 10, 2014
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