“No I’m not, you lunatic. Leave me out of it.” Tinseng cackled and let Cheuk-Kwan throw off his hand. “Come on,” Cheuk-Kwan continued, and Tinseng caught him hiding a smile with a shake of his head. “Are we playing tennis or not?”
On the tennis court, Tinseng and Cheuk-Kwan play-fought just the way they used to, putting on a show for the ladies who’d come to watch handsome young men in tennis whites. It was so easy to fall into their old routine that Tinseng easily tricked himself into believing nothing had changed. He showed off for Jinzhao, too, who did an admirable job of pretending to ignore him except for all the times Tinseng caught him staring. Eventually, the match devolved: Cheuk-Kwan laughed at Tinseng for smacking himself with his own racket, which prompted Tinseng to jump over the net to chase Cheuk-Kwan around the court until he got a few hits in. Jinzhao and Yukying were long gone by then, so they ate lunch together, and Tinseng thought of his daydream again and how incomplete it was without Cheuk-Kwan there, the only person who humbled him so completely, and the only one who fully called Tinseng out on his bullshit. He didn’t want to live without his brother, he realized. How could he have forgotten that?
He was still daydreaming in the late afternoon when something possessed him to ask Yukying when she fell in love with Yingtung. She pulled his head out of the clouds with her answer. It was too dangerous to think this way; after all, it wasn’t as though he planned to confess to Jinzhao or ask him to stay in Hong Kong. It was all just idle fantasy, something to pass the time. He’d told Cheuk-Kwan he had a plan, but of course that was a lie. He had a hope, nothing more, and he knew better than to put any faith in that.
He’d promised Jinzhao that if the topic of the Mei Affair came up, he’d stay out of it. The first night he’d been able to hold his tongue, mostly. Tonight, he simply couldn’t keep that promise. Neither could Jinzhao, apparently.
“‘Every Party member, every branch of work, every statement and every action must proceed from the interests of the whole Party.’” Jinzhao spoke softly, but they all quieted down to listen. “‘It is absolutely impermissible to violate this principle.’”
Cheuk-Kwan thought Jinzhao was speaking of Li Xifeng. Tinseng knew better. Jinzhao spoke of his father; it was his father who had really betrayed the Party, his father who had chosen a single individual over the dozens Li Xifeng could have ruined with her list. Jinzhao hated his mother for seeing a traitor in him, but it was worse that his father was a hypocrite.
“We’re lucky there wasn’t a trial,” Cheuk-Kwan said.
Tinseng turned on him. “And why’s that?” he asked, because as long as he was breaking promises, he was going to speak his full mind. For months he’d been holding back his opinions from Jinzhao, but there was nothing holding him back from a few vicious rounds with Cheuk-Kwan.
“No one’s asking questions now about why she might’ve been interested in leaving the CCP in the first place,” he said, feeling Jinzhao’s attention like a brand. “Real, legitimate complaints with the way things are being run—instead, all that’s been silenced. Behind the scenes, I guarantee they’re ecstatic. They succeeded in burying it all, every stinking corpse.”
Old blood smelled of rotting iron. You could never mop it all away. He knew Jinzhao would have wanted a trial, instead of the coverup that had left him questioning everything. It would have been painful, but Jinzhao pursued the truth unsparingly no matter the pain it caused him. It made him a truly good man: he upheld his values, even when it didn’t benefit him. It was why Li Xifeng had put his name on her list in the first place.
“Better these things end quickly, without fanfare,” Yingtung said, the absolute slug. “Bad enough it was leaked to the press.”
“Without answers?” Tinseng asked, voice rising. He was forgetting himself. “Without justice?”
“Did the Rosenbergs get justice?” Cheuk-Kwan pushed back. “Did the truth come out in their trial? Given the death sentence by their country without a second glance at all that sham evidence, even with so many of their own citizens protesting in the streets. How do you think a trial in China would end? Dead by assassin or by jury—how’s it any different?”
It would have been different for their sons, he couldn’t say, but instead heard himself saying as he pressed his palm flat on the table, “We could have heard her arguments! Why she did what she did. People need to know.” Tinseng couldn’t help looking at Jinzhao then. Jinzhao’s face held a faraway look, the one that meant Jinzhao was trying his hardest not to have any emotion at all. Tinseng’s eyes snapped away. “Isn’t public debate in the interest of the Party? It’s important that people hear the reasons she lost faith in the CCP. To do anything else is silencing the truth.”
“She didn’t believe in truth,” Cheuk-Kwan spat, “or she wouldn’t have thought it so easily conquered.”
Jinzhao stood, and Tinseng knew he’d fucked up. As soon as he could, Tinseng followed.
“I’m sorry,” he said the moment he caught up with him in the hallway. “Hey, I’m sorry, J—Shan Dao, I’m—”
“Don’t.” It was an instruction.
Tinseng pressed his lips together. Through the hallway to the staircase, he maintained silence, but as they passed the grand hall, he pulled Jinzhao by the elbow. “Come on, in here. It’s better to be seen, and I need to wait for the Grodescus here anyway.”
Jinzhao reluctantly followed Tinseng into the ballroom where the band was playing a standard Tinseng recognized from the radio. They walked to the shorter edge of the bar, Jinzhao facing inward, Tinseng pressing his back against the wood to look out at the room. The noise of the music and crowd gave him an excuse to stand close.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked. A joke, of course, and a poor one. Two men couldn’t dance together. They never had before, and only now Tinseng realized they never would. He rubbed his forehead. “Have I said sorry yet?”
Jinzhao looked down at the bar’s polished top as Tinseng ordered a whiskey neat and took out his cigarettes. There were words lodged in Jinzhao’s chest, Tinseng could tell. Tinseng felt them in his own throat; he could barely swallow around them. It could have been any number of secrets. They kept a lot from each other still, out of necessity. Out of fear.
“You really think she believed in truth?” Jinzhao asked eventually.
“I do.”
“Is that why he did what he did? Because he could see that?”
“I don’t know. You knew him better than me.” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but Jinzhao only smiled wryly.
“You once said you wanted to be a spy because you wanted to do something to help the people you loved.” Jinzhao took the cigarette from his fingers and took a drag. It was rare that he smoked at all. Tinseng shook out another, letting Jinzhao have his. “I thought the same about my path.”
“Your father’s plans for you?”
“A good path. The right path.” Jinzhao shook his head. “That’s all gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘Truly great men look to this age alone,’” Jinzhao said, quoting the poem he’d been named after, the poem his mother had used to mark him weak in his own conviction, or maybe the other way around. Mao had written the line to urge his country to look toward the future; the heroes of old had little poetry in their souls, he’d said. In 1936, the year Jinzhao was born, Mao had written in verse the longing in Mei Hankong and Li Xifeng’s hearts; the dreams for their country had been the same as the dreams for their son.
But no two people dreamed the same.
The bartender came and went with Tinseng’s whiskey. The first sip cleared some of the lump in his throat.
“You know why I picked Shan Dao for you?”
“Because you delight in the absurd.”
“Well, yes. But no. Because of one of the stories in the chapter about praise. ‘Shan Dao could not be described or named. Pure, deep, mysterious and silent—no one saw his limits, yet all agreed that he had, indeed, entered upon the Way. Therefore no one who saw him could say what he was but bowed nevertheless before his greatness.’ Anyway, I can see why your mother wanted to recruit you.” His voice was a little watery. “You could convince anyone of anything.”
Jinzhao’s face gained a shadow, the way it always did when Tinseng mentioned his mother’s list. But Tinseng had lived with these shadows for a year now, and he thought this one was different. More thoughtful, maybe.
“Are you still okay to meet him tonight?” Grodescu would be waiting for Jinzhao in his room while Tinseng made sure everyone was distracted here.
Jinzhao nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”
