Fate or State: The Double Life of a Composite Chinese Spy in A Map of Betrayal

Cheung, King-Kok

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_4

King-Kok Cheung²

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1 Citations

Abstract

In A Map of Betrayal Ha Jin interweaves his personal experience with his historical and political concerns to create a novel based loosely on the case of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a PRC spy who for 30 years infiltrated the CIA. The protagonist, Gary Shang, is a composite of Chin and Jin. In mapping Gary’s geographical, psychological, and linguistic odysseys, the author infuses the work with his sensibility as an accidental immigrant caught between worlds. The trope of doubling runs through the text, underscoring the themes of duplicity and self-division and creating a contrapuntal score. Thematically, the novel interrogates the relationship between the state and the individual by weighing dual national allegiances against personal loyalties and by exploring reciprocal betrayal, bilingualism, and repressed historical trauma. Structurally, it alternates between a third-person account focalized through Gary and his daughter’s first-person account, covering two historical periods, representing different generations, and orchestrating multiple national(ist) perspectives. This chapter brings out the four-way correspondences between the author Jin, the historical Chin, and the fictional Gary and his grandson Ben to show the author’s abiding concerns about the infringement of individual lives by the polity and about the psychological turmoil wrought by the vicissitudes of (im)migration.

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Notes

1.
I. C. Smith , Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI (New York: Nelson Current, 2004), 29.
2.
Todd Hoffman, The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China’s Penetration of the CIA (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2008).
3.
Michael Wutz , “The Individual versus the State: A Conversation with Ha Jin,” Weber: The Contemporary West 31.2 (2015), 14–15.
4.
Ha Jin , A Map of Betrayal (New York: Pantheon, 2014), 213, 270.
5.
King-Kok Cheung, “The Chinese American Writer as Migrant: Ha Jin’s Restive Manifesto,” Amerasia 38.2 (2017): 2–12; Shan, Te-hsing 单德兴. 2014. “背叛与被叛:《背叛指南》之指南 [Betraying and Being Betrayed: Map of ‘A Map of Betrayal].” In 《背叛指南》[A Map of Betrayal], translated by汤秋妍Qiuyan Tang, 319–27. Taipei: 时报文化.
6.
Smith , Inside, 45, 30, 33, 33.
7.
Jin, A Map, 8.
8.
Hoffman , The Spy, 184.
9.
Gaylord Shaw , CIA Aide Called a “Living Lie” for 30 Years. November 28, 1985, accessed July 1, 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-11-28/news/mn-8993_1_fbi-agent.
10.
Hoffman , The Spy, 265.
11.
Chou , Cathy 周瑾予. 1998. 《我的丈夫张无怠之死》[My Husband Larry Wu-tai Chin’s Death. ] Accessed December 30, 2014, https://www.bannedbook.org/forum2/topic1259.html, 341–2; my English translation.
12.
Jin, A Map, 262.
13.
Ibid., 263.
14.
Ibid., 273–4.
15.
Ibid., 219.
16.
Ibid., 19–20.
17.
Ibid., 242.
18.
Ibid., 270.
19.
Ibid., 270.
20.
Sarah Fay, 2009, “Ha Jin , The Art of Fiction No. 202,” accessed Feb 25, 2017, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5991/the-art-of-fiction-no-202-ha-jin.
21.
Ha Jin , The Writer as Migrant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31–2.
22.
Ha Jin , “Exiled to English,” New York Times, May 31, 2009: WK9.
23.
Shan Te-hsing 单德兴. 2009. “辞海中的好兵: 哈金访谈录 [The Good Soldier in Cihai: An Interview with Ha Jin.],” in In the Company of the Wise: Conversations with Asian American Writers and Critics, 20. Taipei: 允晨文化 [Yunchen Wenhua]; my English translation.
24.
NPR Staff, 2014, “An Ambivalent Double Agent, Torn between Two Countries,” ed. Arun Rath, November 1, 2014, accessed Feb 25, 2017 (hereafter cited as NPR Staff 2014).
25.
Jin, A Map, 62.
26.
NPR Staff.
27.
Kevin Nance, “ Ha Jin on ‘A Map of Betrayal,’” November 13, 2014, accessed Feb 25, 2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-map-of-betrayal-ha-jin-20141113-story.html.
28.
Jin, A Map, 260.
29.
NPR Staff.
30.
Hoffman , The Spy, 249.
31.
Ibid., 256.
32.
Smith , Inside, 46.
33.
Hoffman , The Spy, 184.
34.
Jin, A Map, 40.
35.
Ibid., 135.
36.
Ibid., 219.
37.
Ibid., 220.
38.
Smith , Inside, 46.
39.
Jin, A Map, 58, 62.
40.
Ibid., 126.
41.
Ibid., 221.
42.
Ibid., 221.
43.
Ibid., 222.
44.
Ibid., 223.
45.
Ibid., 223. Chin was also presented with a Career Intelligence Medal at the CIA headquarters in 1981, before his retirement. The recommendation, signed by the director of FBIS, describes Chin’s service as “marked by the highest degree of professionalism and dedication.” Chin is lauded for his “dependability and personal integrity” (Hoffman 2008, 50). These words are echoed by Thomas in the novel.
46.
Ibid., 172.
47.
Ibid., 212.
48.
Ibid., 242.
49.
Ibid., 19.
50.
Ibid., 19.
51.
NPR Staff.
52.
Wutz , “The Individual,” 14.
53.
Jin, A Map, 103.
54.
Hoffman , The Spy, 50–1.
55.
Jin, A Map, 24.
56.
Ibid., 237.
57.
Ibid., 29.
58.
Wutz , “The Individual,” 15.
59.
Ibid., 15.
60.
Milan Kundera, Ignorance (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 178–9.
61.
Jin, The Writer, 74.
62.
Jin, A Map, 140.
63.
Ibid., 139.
64.
Ibid., 140.
65.
Ibid., 141.
66.
Ibid., 274.
67.
Wendy Law-Yone , interview by Nancy Yoo and Tamara Ho, in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed. King Kok Cheung (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 302.
68.
Jin, The Writer, 33.
69.
Ibid., 29.
70.
Hoffman , The Spy, 159.
71.
Frank Dikötter , Mao’s Great Famine: The Story of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), viiii.
72.
Yang Jisheng, Tombstone : The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, eds. Edward Friedman, Jian Guo and Staci Mosher. Translated by Staci Mosher and Jian Guo (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 3.
73.
Dikötter , Mao’s, 333, x.
74.
Anne Applebaum , The Dissident Within: What a Book about China’s Great Famine Says about the Country’s Transformation, August 11, 2008, accessed June 21, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2008/08/the_dissident_within.html.
75.
Jin, A Map, 137.
76.
Ibid., 138.
77.
Ibid., 138. What happened to Suzie’s family was rather typical at the time. According to Dikötter : “Livestock declined precipitously, not only because animals were slaughtered for the export market but also because they succumbed en masse to disease and hunger—despite extravagant schemes for giant piggeries that would bring meat to every table … Up to 40 per cent of all housing was turned into rubble, as homes were pulled down to create fertilizer, to build canteens, to relocate villagers, to straighten roads, to make room for a better future or simply to punish their occupants” (xi, xii).
78.
Evan Osnos, Q. & A.: Frank Dikötter on Famine and Mao, December 15, 2010, accessed June 21, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/q-a-frank-diktter-on-famine-and-mao.
79.
Jin, A Map, 142.
80.
Ibid., 142.
81.
Ibid., 85.
82.
Ibid., 240.
83.
Ibid., 48.
84.
Ibid., 240.
85.
See also Dikötter, Mao’s, 245–65.
86.
Jin, A Map, 28.
87.
Ibid., 151.
88.
Ibid., 151.
89.
Ibid., 201.
90.
Nance, “Ha Jin ,” 2014.
91.
Hoffman , The Spy, 56–65.
92.
Jin, A Map, 160.
93.
Hoffman , The Spy, 57.
94.
Jin 2014a, 258.
95.
Ibid., 275.
96.
Ibid., 275.
97.
Ibid., 248.
98.
Ibid., 276.
99.
Ibid., 276.
100.
Ibid., 250.
101.
Ibid., 276.
102.
Ibid., 169.
103.
Ibid., 169.
104.
Ibid., 170.
105.
Ibid., 169.
106.
Hoffman , The Spy, 1.

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University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
King-Kok Cheung

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Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Jane Yeang Chui Wong

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Cheung, KK. (2018). Fate or State: The Double Life of a Composite Chinese Spy in A Map of Betrayal. In: Wong, J. (eds) Asia and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_4
Published: 22 March 2018
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