NOV. 7, 2014
Credit Asaf Hanuka
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.
