One of the two interwoven plotlines in A Map of Betrayal, the seventh novel from National Book Award winner Ha Jin (Waiting; War Trash), is narrator Lilian's reconstruction of the life of her father, Gary Shang, the most important Chinese spy ever caught in North America. In the other plotline, Lilian's Caucasian mother has died, which frees Lilian, a 50-ish professor, to contact her father's Chinese mistress, a silver-haired broadcaster in Montreal who gives her his six-volume diary. In it, Lilian discovers that her father had a previous wife whom he was forced to leave behind.
An expert, longtime mole for three decades in the CIA, highly valued by Chairman Mao, Gary is revealed to have been homesick during his entire life on a "protracted mission," forced to move to the U.S. at age 31 and remarry. Convinced that the government is looking after his Chinese wife, he grows to love the America he needs to betray and tries to benefit both countries--until he makes one mistake, out of love for his American wife.
When Lilian is granted a Fulbright lectureship in Beijing in 2010, she seizes the opportunity to reconstruct the part of her father's life she doesn't know by secretly contacting his first wife and children, in spite of Chinese government prohibitions. Though she's too late to find them alive, she does find her half-niece, and then discovers her half-nephew already back in the U.S. The charming, handsome twentysomething runs a small business outside Boston and begins to entangle Lilian's husband in unusual microchip purchases, acting more and more like his grandfather the spy.
Jin quietly piles up facts, creating an impossible situation in which a good, patriotic man becomes emotionally entangled with two nations intent on deceiving each other. A confident and knowledgeable explicator of China, Jin probes the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the inequity between country Chinese and city Chinese, Internet censorship, the national problems of food contamination and the illiteracy of more than half the population, while placing historical touches throughout (such as the Russian astronaut dog Laika and the Kennedy assassination).
Written without the slightest whiff of melodrama, in a cool, factual, unadorned style, A Map of Betrayal is a quietly humane, painstakingly detailed portrait of an idealistic man who tries to set himself morally apart. Ever present in this dense, compelling tale are provocative questions about the nature of patriotism: When do you betray your country? When does your country betray you? --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: A lonely Chinese spy is forced to leave his young wife and remarry in the U.S. in this compassionate study of a man caught between two wives and two countries.