The 'spy' who loved me
Given recent revelations of Chinese espionage in the United States and Hollywood's demand for films that involve America's present enemy, directors could well turn Meihong Xu's memoir into a big-screen thriller. Born shortly before the Cultural Revolution, Xu was a young, married Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) intelligence officer assigned in the 1980s to discover whether a visiting American professor was a spy. Instead she fell in love with him.
The book begins with Xu in an interrogation room, where she is being questioned about her emotional involvement with Larry Engelmann, a divorced academic more than 20 years her senior who has published two non-fiction books and who would become her husband, co-author, and eventually, her ex-husband. Xu weaves seamlessly between past and present, using the interrogation as a reference point for the first half of the book. At 17, she was one of a dozen women selected to train for the PLA's intelligence unit and was sent to improve her English at an institute in Nanjing where Engelmann worked.
Xu reveals little about Engelmann at the beginning of the book, referring to him simply as the 'American', apt, since he represented, in her mind, everything that China was not - open and honest.
Sadly, Xu does not give much evidence that the relationship hinged on more than that, and it is here that the book's clean, fluid prose occasionally loses its lustre. It turns out, however, that Engelmann, now a history professor at San Jose University in California, was not a spy. Their relationship was merely used as a political tool by the PLA's conservative faction - those who supported Mao Zedong's fading ideologies rather than those of Deng Xiaoping - to bring down reformists bent on modernising China, including one who was a colleague of Xu.
Xu's memoir is fascinating: Trained as an intelligence officer, she had a better chance than most of predicting the tactics of her interrogators and undermining them. As she is pushed to betray the people who are most important in her life, she recalls what she learned: 'In time, everyone has a breaking point far short of death. They only need to be convinced that death is imminent and that all that separates them from doom is confession and co-operation.' Driven largely by her emotions, but also by her disenchantment with China and its pervasive culture of half-truths and lies, Xu refuses to cave into pressure by authorities to help them expel Engelmann from the country and to expose a general working with reformists to modernise China's economy, politics and military. Her refusal to co-operate results in her being relegated to a life of a peasant, a great disappointment since being a part of the PLA seemed to guarantee a comfortable existence. Xu decides there is little left for her in China and in her attempt to reunite with Engelmann, she shows that the bureaucratic system that can be manipulated for the country's political ends can also be used for her personal ones.
Inevitably, Daughter treads on the turbulent ground of China's recent history, and revisits experiences made more familiar by the memoirs of other overseas Chinese: the public denunciation of a beloved aunt during the Cultural Revolution, her ambition to obtain the status of a 'people's hero', the events of Tiananmen Square. But Xu's insight into China's political machinery and the PLA (they tried to convince cadets that being assigned to Tibet would lead to greater glory, when the Tibetans' hostility towards Chinese soldiers made it a miserable place to live) is as readable as any other.
Xu is to be admired. Battling the force of China's politics, she remained loyal to loved ones in the face of her own uncertain future, then lied and broke the law to be with the one she loved. Engelmann, too, can be praised for his perseverance, in helping her leave China in 1990. At one point, he even plans one far-fetched scheme for the two to leave China as boatpeople, telling Xu, 'If we do it, we'll have a great story to tell our children one day.' As if this story was not good enough.
Daughter of China by Meihong Xu and Larry Engelmann Headline Book Publishing $140
