Ming-Mei says, “She means my old boyfriend, Sammy Lee. He’s a four eight nine, okay? Triads have numeric codes. That way names are not used, for protection in case of arrest. Four eight nine is the dragon head. He’s the big boss. You must do what the dragon head wants, no question. When I went with Sammy the first time, I was seventeen years old and more than anything I want to be a big Cantonese pop star like Gillian Chung, and sing songs on TV and be a movie star.” Ming-Mei laughs ruefully. “I was a very stupid girl.”
“You had ambition,” Naomi points out.
“Oh yes, ambition. But no brains. I thought, just let me succeed, let me have a hit song, I can separate myself from Sammy Lee, no problem. But that is impossible. It doesn’t work that way. Once a dragon has you in his claws, he holds on tight.”
“Tell us about Professor Keener,” Naomi suggests. “How it all started.”
Ming-Mei’s small, perfect chin thrusts out. “Four eight nine will kill me if he finds out, but I don’t care. He won’t help me find Joey, and you will, is that not so?”
Naomi says, very carefully, “If Joey can be found, we’ll find him.”
Ming-Mei registers the chilling subtext, but it does not deter her from continuing.
“Okay,” she says, hands folded primly in her lap. “Three years go by. I don’t have a hit song yet, I’m not a movie star, but I sing in Sammy Lee’s clubs five nights a week and he pays for acting lessons and provides me with a flash apartment and spending money, even a car and driver. The driver is there to keep an eye on me, of course. He’s a forty-nine, a triad soldier, and everything I do or say, he reports to the dragon head. It makes me feel very important because, like I say, I’m a stupid girl with only one thing on her mind, becoming famous like Gillian Chung. I have a good voice. Not good enough to sing opera, but good enough for Cantonese pop, which is more about the look of the singer, okay? And even more about the producer, what song they choose, the beat, how they arrange the sound. Without a good producer, there is no chance of success, and Sammy, he keeps promising he will find me a top-cat producer. That’s what he calls them, ‘top cats.’ But it’s all a lie because by then I am too old for Sammy Lee, he wants only girls seventeen and younger. When he stops coming to my apartment for sex I don’t complain. Why should I? He’s disgusting. But then when I try to find a producer on my own, Sammy sends his four two six, his enforcer, to make sure the producers all know who owns me. He threatens to take away my apartment and make me a prostitute if I don’t stay in his clubs and obey. The dragon head owns many prostitutes, so this is no idle threat. I want to run away but I don’t know where to go and I have no money. Stupid girl, what was I thinking?
“Then one day everything changes. The dragon head comes to my apartment, but this time not to threaten. Suddenly he’s acting very nice, very gentlemanly, and this is because he wants a big favor. He has important friends 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.”