Measure of Darkness

in government, and these friends are looking for a girl like me, he says. No, not to be a whore, he says, not like that. More in the line of acting, okay? All I have to do, be beautiful and pretend I have no English. The no English part is important, they stress that. Plus, if I do what they want, if I ‘play the game,’ someday I will have a real record producer. Of course I know the dragon head is lying, but what can I do? They fly me to the U.S.A., to Boston, and one of the government people, a woman, she makes sure I’m dressed in traditional clothing, which I have never worn, and sends me to a party on a big boat in Boston Harbor. Lots of people, some of them very rich, but many just young and beautiful. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t exciting. The colonel, she tells me I’m part of something very secret and very important to all Chinese people. And all I have to do is make eyes at this sai yan, this important Western man who will be there. Just look. No talk, no touching, no sex.”

“Joseph Keener?”

“Yes,” she says with a sad nod. “That was the first time I met poor Joe. Right away I knew something was strange about him. Most men-all my life it’s the same-they want to touch me, if only to shake my hand. Not Joe. He’s very shy. Not just shy, but different from other men. He never wanted to be touched, even when later on we had sex. I know that sounds impossible, but believe me, it is not. But that is much later. The first night all I do is look at the man and make my eyes do this.”

Ming-Mei poses with her eyes downcast, and slowly looks up through her thick eyelashes, making eye contact.

Jack sighs and says, “He didn’t stand a chance.”

If Teddy’s jaw drops any farther it will be unhinged. Men.

“The one who hosted the party, this was Jonny Bing?” Naomi asks.

She nods. “He was very nice to me. I went there excited, but afraid, you know? I have never been to the U.S.A., I’m being watched by the triad people and Chinese government spies and I don’t know what they really want. But Jonny told me not to worry, he would do everything, all I had to do was be beautiful and be quiet. Can you do that? he asks, and I say, yes, no problem, I can do that. At the party nothing really happens. I make sure the sai yan sees me, and knows that I see him, and that’s it. That night, after the party, Jonny tells me they will take care of everything.”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” Naomi says. “But who is ‘they’?”

“Jonny and the government woman. I won’t tell you her name-I’m sure it wasn’t her real name in any case. Later I learn she’s a colonel in the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, and a spy, but at the time all I know is dragon head wants me to do what she says. I have no choice. What happens next, they put me in a small apartment in Chinatown and tell me to wait. The PLA colonel stays with me, to make sure I don’t leave Chinatown. Those are the orders. Mostly we sit all day in the apartment and watch American television, which I like very much. It’s almost like me and the spy woman are becoming friends. Two weeks later she has me dress up in traditional clothes and pack up all my things and takes me to the airport. Naturally I assume I’m being returned to Hong Kong. But no, that is not the plan. The PLA colonel says to me, so you want to be a pop star? You want to sing and act like Gillian Chung? Now is your chance. This is your scenario: you have been emailing the sai yan professor for the last two weeks, with the help of a friend who speaks English, and your relationship has progressed. He wants to see you again and has sent you a ticket. You have just arrived in Boston and in five minutes he will come through that door to greet you. Are you ready for the rest of your life? Then she laughs, very cruel. ‘Are you ready for the rest of your life,’ that comes from a game show we’ve been watching together.

“My only real instruction is that I am to speak only a few words of English. I ask her why no English, wouldn’t it be easier for me to talk to the sai yan in his own language? She doesn’t really explain this part to me, but I figure it out after a while. Speaking only Chinese makes me appear more exotic to him, and allows him to make up his own mind about who I am. It relieves him of having to make conversation, which he is very bad at. Also the colonel will be able to control what I say, because she will act as my interpreter-it’s really she who has been emailing him all along, pretending to be me. Or this exotic, traditional version of me.

“It all goes according to the script. Joe arrives at the airport, accompanied by his good friend Jonny Bing. Everybody is very formal. We do a lot of bowing, which I think is very funny but I don’t dare laugh because everyone else is being so serious. We all go to a teahouse in Chinatown and have a traditional tea, and the arrangement is worked out through my ‘interpreter.’ Joe agrees to lease me an apartment-the same place I have been staying all along! — and will pay for a tutor to teach me English-that would be the PLA colonel, of course. Even on that first meeting there is talk of an eventual marriage, but right away the colonel tells him I’m married to a very bad man who has abandoned me, and divorce is difficult. This is something they had already discussed in the emails, and he accepts it. It isn’t until we’re finally back at the apartment that the colonel tells me what she really wants.”

“A baby.”

“Yes,” says Ming-Mei. “I haven’t even kissed this strange man, and already they are talking about when I have the baby.”

“They?”

“She and Jonny. This has been their plan all along. So of course I respond with a temper tantrum. How dare they! I am not a whore paid to have babies! And so on and so forth. They played it like on American TV. Good cop and bad cop. She was the bad cop. Fail to cooperate and I would be sent to a ‘reeducation camp’ in one of the northern provinces. And Jonny would be sweet and understanding and explain that everything would be okay, and that having a baby didn’t mean I couldn’t be a big star like Gillian Chung.”

“So you agreed to the plan.”

“Yes, to my shame, I did.”

“And eventually you got pregnant.”

She nods.

“Did Professor Keener ever discuss his company with you? What he was working on at QuantaGate?”

“No, never.”

“So you don’t know what he was developing.”

She shrugs. “Something to do with computers, that’s all. Please understand, everything changed when I got pregnant. The stupid girl who wants to be like Gillian Chung? She grew up. All she could think about was the baby, the baby. So that’s what we talked about, Joe and me. By then I had ‘learned’ enough English to have a real conversation. In a strange way, I began to like him. I say strange, because he was like no man I had ever met before. I understood that he was a great genius in his work, but at home, in his personal life, he was more like a child. In social matters he was very unsure of himself. He knew he didn’t really understand other people, or how they think, but there was nothing he could do about that.” She pauses, once again with her eyes downcast and her hands folded palm up in her lap. “The thing I am most ashamed of is not seducing poor Joe, because that’s what I did, I seduced him in every way a man can be seduced. No, it was making him think he could trust me, and knowing that when I lied he would believe me. I lied to him about everything. This was shameful. Because even if they didn’t tell me why they wanted me to have Joe’s baby, I understood that it had to do with tricking him, using him.”

“He would be compromised.”

“Yes.”

“Because he would want to protect you and the baby.”

“Yes.”

“And is that what happened?”

“More or less. The strategy was to keep him off balance. While I was pregnant I stayed here in Boston and saw him every few days. He went with me to the birthing center the day Joey was born, although he could not make himself witness the delivery. After a few days he held the baby, briefly, but I could tell he really didn’t like it.”

“He didn’t like Joey?” Naomi says, surprised.

“No, no. He loved Joey in his way, of this I am sure. It was the holding part he didn’t enjoy. He kept saying, ‘I’m afraid I’ll break him.’ He was frightened. I was frightened, too, but not about holding Joey. I loved that part right from the start. It was being a mother that scared me. I had no idea what to do, not at first.”

“It’s our understanding that soon after giving birth you returned to Hong Kong.”

“Yes, true. When Joey was about a month old I went home.”

“This was your idea?”

“I made no objection-I wanted to go home, to resume my old life-but no, it was not my idea. They arranged