gets a shot at them, you guys, trust me: I am
“So the reason you gave him for going ahead with us, it’s actually true?” I asked. “Not the synergy of shared effort? The serendipitous sparks when bits of data collide? You’re just keeping an eye on us?”
“Damn correct. Also, Athos here still owes me a martini.”
7
We headed north where Bill, to no one’s surprise, knew a quiet bar.
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Jack. “After the Tiananmen story I’m inclined to think Dr. Yang’s motives are legit. But I’m hung up on his reaction when Anna asked what you were doing. If he’s being noble, why doesn’t he want her knowing about it?”
“I’m not sure. But things between them aren’t the greatest right now and she has her own problems.”
“That’s what it sounded like. Can you tell?”
“It’s not a secret. She went to Beijing last year to study. Dr. Yang was against it but she can be bullheaded when it comes to her work. There were old-school masters she wanted to get to before they’re gone.”
“Given his experience, I’m not surprised he felt that way. But things have changed over there.”
“Maybe not so much. She met a poet. Liu Mai-ke. Part of a loose network of activist artists. He—”
“Wait.” I stopped walking. “That’s the Mike? Mike Liu?”
“You know about him?”
“Who’s Chinese and doesn’t?”
“I’m not Chinese,” Bill said. “Fill me in.”
“A dissident,” I said. “He wrote an open letter to the government about artists’ rights. Last fall. They closed down his Web site, but too late, and the letter went viral. Mike Liu Mai-ke. But he’s in prison.”
Jack said, “And it’s sort of her fault.”
“Hers?” I began to see why Anna might have her own problems. “I thought it was the letter. Wasn’t that what the trial was about?”
“The letter went up a few weeks before he met Anna. They shut down his Web site, followed him, tapped his phone, things like that, but they didn’t arrest him until after they were married.”
“
“They realized their mistake and now they keep it quiet.”
“What mistake?”
We stepped apart for a pair of hand-holding students. “They were married at a wild wedding banquet in a hip cafe in Beijing,” Jack told us. “
“He’s a friend of theirs?” The needle on my Anna Yang respect-o-meter, which had jumped, started to slip.
“Haig? Somebody’s friend? He goes to China four or five times a year just to scoop up the hot new artists. He was in Beijing then, and it would’ve been mass career suicide for every artist there if he wasn’t invited. The whole thing was less marriage ceremony than art world happening anyway. Everyone drinking, shouting slogans, singing revolutionary songs. Belting out ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Chinese. Tweets flying, photos on Facebook, MySpace, mad blogging.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Probably was. After the wedding Anna and Mike planned to ship out here to meet the in-laws.”
“The Yangs? They weren’t there?”
Bill said, “I bet they couldn’t get visas. That whole crowd that left after Tiananmen, China doesn’t want them back.”
“Right,” said Jack.
“Even for their daughter’s wedding?” I said. “Hey, you guys, don’t look at me like that. It’s sad.”
“Gets worse,” Jack said. “One reason Anna and Mike got married, besides true love, is they figured marrying a foreigner was the only way a troublemaker like Mike could get a passport. Big mistake.”
“He couldn’t?”
“Not only couldn’t he, when he applied he got arrested. It dawned on them too late that the marrying-a- foreigner thing, the public-wedding-banquet thing, the who’s-who of the dissident world all-together-now on YouTube, that was the problem.”
“Oh. That’s what you meant, realized their mistake?”
Jack nodded. “Mike had been small potatoes. Now suddenly his political writing, his poems, the open letter, they were high-profile. The PRC couldn’t let him travel and they couldn’t ignore him. They decided to deal with him publicly, as a warning. He was convicted of subversion of the state. He got seven years, and Anna got kicked out of the country.”
I looked around at the students strolling under the early spring trees. “Poor Anna. And poor Mike. And why do I get the feeling there was a lot of I-told-you-so when she got back?”
“Great heaping piles of it. Dr. Yang had been against the whole thing from the start. Not that he knew Mike from Adam, or cared. It was the idea of Anna involved with a dissident, on the other side of the world, where he couldn’t protect her—I’m just sayin’, that was no semester to defend your thesis.”
“What about Anna’s mother?” Bill asked. “Did she object, too?”
