What do you think?
Rate this book
A Map of Betrayal
From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: a riveting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families.
When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father's diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary - an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia - reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father's long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected.
As Lilian begins to fathom her father's dilemma - torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country - she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.
When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father's diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary - an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia - reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father's long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected.
As Lilian begins to fathom her father's dilemma - torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country - she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published November 3, 2014
157 people are currently reading
3572 people want to read
About the author
Ha Jin
60 books836 followersHa Jin is the pen name of Jin Xuefei, a novelist, poet, short story writer, and Professor of English at Boston University.Ha Jin writes in English about China, a political decision post-Tiananmen Square.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 360 reviews
October 19, 2014
I was very excited to read this book and actually voted to include it in our Holiday Catalog. But after finishing it, I have to say I was so disappointed that I took my nomination away. The story is about a Chinese man, Gary Shang, who grows up in China during WWII. He becomes a spy for the Chinese government and takes a job as a translator for the CIA. He lives a dual life, with a wife in China and his American family in the US, and for decades, he passes secrets to the Chinese government. The novel is trying to depict the inner conflict he feels between his loyalty to his mother country and the admiration to his new home.
There were several things that bothered me about this book. First, I did not find Gary Shang to be a sympathetic character. Rather than feeling guilt about his betrayal of the US, his primary concerns were about self preservation. He showed no loyalty or faithfulness to his American wife, keeping a mistress through most of his life, so it seems odd to think that he would be torn up about loyalties to 2 countries. But my biggest gripe about this book was its portrayal of the immigrant experience in America. Gary Shang came to the US in the 1950’s right after WWII. He has no problems integrating into American society or finding an American wife. That completely does not ring true. My parents emigrated from China to the US post WWII and they did experience quite a bit of racism and bigotry. The US had just finished a war with the Japanese and were understandably wary of Asians. Jhumpa Lahiri’s books do a wonderful job depicting that difficult immersion into another society. Ha Jin makes it seem like a walk in the park. Not to mention that interracial marriage was pretty rare and was very shocking to many people, and illegal in many states in the 1950s. And the other subtle point that bothered me was similarly how his daughter who is half Chinese and half Caucasian is able to pass herself off as completely Chinese while traveling in China. Having 2 Eurasian children and knowing dozens more, I can’t think of a single example where a Eurasian would be mistaken for a Chinese person. Not to mention that even ABCs (American Born Chinese) can’t pass themselves off as native Chinese. Our dress, our mannerisms, the way we walk and talk, etc. make us stand out.
I’m sure this book will appeal to some – but definitely not my cup of Jasmine tea!
There were several things that bothered me about this book. First, I did not find Gary Shang to be a sympathetic character. Rather than feeling guilt about his betrayal of the US, his primary concerns were about self preservation. He showed no loyalty or faithfulness to his American wife, keeping a mistress through most of his life, so it seems odd to think that he would be torn up about loyalties to 2 countries. But my biggest gripe about this book was its portrayal of the immigrant experience in America. Gary Shang came to the US in the 1950’s right after WWII. He has no problems integrating into American society or finding an American wife. That completely does not ring true. My parents emigrated from China to the US post WWII and they did experience quite a bit of racism and bigotry. The US had just finished a war with the Japanese and were understandably wary of Asians. Jhumpa Lahiri’s books do a wonderful job depicting that difficult immersion into another society. Ha Jin makes it seem like a walk in the park. Not to mention that interracial marriage was pretty rare and was very shocking to many people, and illegal in many states in the 1950s. And the other subtle point that bothered me was similarly how his daughter who is half Chinese and half Caucasian is able to pass herself off as completely Chinese while traveling in China. Having 2 Eurasian children and knowing dozens more, I can’t think of a single example where a Eurasian would be mistaken for a Chinese person. Not to mention that even ABCs (American Born Chinese) can’t pass themselves off as native Chinese. Our dress, our mannerisms, the way we walk and talk, etc. make us stand out.
I’m sure this book will appeal to some – but definitely not my cup of Jasmine tea!
April 7, 2015
I’m a big fan of Ha Jin. To have originated in China, his English language skills are amazing. Perhaps I find all his novels interesting because I have been lucky enough to travel to China and was able to observe their culture.
History, especially political history is not my forte. So, I enjoy an easy to read historical fiction novel that allows me to learn about something that I previously possessed hazy knowledge. The Politics between the USA, China, Russia, Korea, and Taiwan between the years of 1949 and 1980 are fascinating. Who could NOT remember the stress of the Bay of Pigs or the assassination of JFK? Ha Jin writes of major historical events while still maintaining an interesting story. It helps that one of his main characters is a Chinese spy infiltrating the CIA.
The book jacket summarizes the plot well. What Ha Jin adds in his novel are Chinese cultural nuances. You’ll learn what a “little third” means in China. Jin gets in his feelings of China’s lack of infrastructure. He’s not a big enthusiast of China.
Also, I enjoy some of his insights “They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshiping the evasive and the fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness.” I’m a big fan of straightforwardness, which is how Jin writes. And Jin provides a George Bernard Shaw quote: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I recommend this book to historical novel devotees, especially if you are interested in the Chinese culture. This novel is straightforward and easy to read. The plot is entertaining and the characters are well developed.
History, especially political history is not my forte. So, I enjoy an easy to read historical fiction novel that allows me to learn about something that I previously possessed hazy knowledge. The Politics between the USA, China, Russia, Korea, and Taiwan between the years of 1949 and 1980 are fascinating. Who could NOT remember the stress of the Bay of Pigs or the assassination of JFK? Ha Jin writes of major historical events while still maintaining an interesting story. It helps that one of his main characters is a Chinese spy infiltrating the CIA.
The book jacket summarizes the plot well. What Ha Jin adds in his novel are Chinese cultural nuances. You’ll learn what a “little third” means in China. Jin gets in his feelings of China’s lack of infrastructure. He’s not a big enthusiast of China.
Also, I enjoy some of his insights “They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshiping the evasive and the fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness.” I’m a big fan of straightforwardness, which is how Jin writes. And Jin provides a George Bernard Shaw quote: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I recommend this book to historical novel devotees, especially if you are interested in the Chinese culture. This novel is straightforward and easy to read. The plot is entertaining and the characters are well developed.
November 11, 2014
What has turned out to be a timely read. Going to work this morning I heard that the US postal service has been hacked and that the hackers were possibly located in China. This is a novel about a man, who was a Chinese spy for decades.
Starting from 1949 Gary was hired as a translator forma US company, eventually ending up in the United States working for Mao and the Chinese government. Leaving his young wife in China, he was never able to return, and eventually, encouraged by his handler, to start a new family in the US. It is his American daughter Lilian, given his journals by his mistress, who sets out to track his family in China.
In very subtle, understated prose this is about a man, conflicted between the love of his home country and his growing love for the United States. Conflicted also between the guilt he feels for leaving his family in China and the love he feels for his life and for his daughter in the US. It covers an amazing amount of history, from the Cuban missile crisis to the assassination of President Kennedy. China and Russia's collusion and China becoming a nuclear power. Their break from Russia and the growing hostilities that ensued. What he is told from his handlers about the starving masses in China, caused by the Great Leap forward.
As Ha Jin is now writing in the US, leaving China after that governments actions at Tiananmen Square, this book was written with a great deal of knowledge and authority. A very good story about a man who convinced himself he was doing the best thing for both his countries.
Starting from 1949 Gary was hired as a translator forma US company, eventually ending up in the United States working for Mao and the Chinese government. Leaving his young wife in China, he was never able to return, and eventually, encouraged by his handler, to start a new family in the US. It is his American daughter Lilian, given his journals by his mistress, who sets out to track his family in China.
In very subtle, understated prose this is about a man, conflicted between the love of his home country and his growing love for the United States. Conflicted also between the guilt he feels for leaving his family in China and the love he feels for his life and for his daughter in the US. It covers an amazing amount of history, from the Cuban missile crisis to the assassination of President Kennedy. China and Russia's collusion and China becoming a nuclear power. Their break from Russia and the growing hostilities that ensued. What he is told from his handlers about the starving masses in China, caused by the Great Leap forward.
As Ha Jin is now writing in the US, leaving China after that governments actions at Tiananmen Square, this book was written with a great deal of knowledge and authority. A very good story about a man who convinced himself he was doing the best thing for both his countries.
April 6, 2017
Who is the betrayed, and who the betrayer? It’s clear from the outset that there’s plenty of blame to spread around in this deeply engaging novel about a Chinese mole in the CIA.
Gary (nee Weimin) Shang is a young secret agent for Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists in the culminating days of the Revolution. A graduate of prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, sometimes referred to as China’s Harvard, he is singled out by his handlers to infiltrate an American intelligence unit in Shanghai which later moves to Okinawa, then to suburban Washington, DC, and is finally absorbed into the CIA itself. Despite begging his handlers at every turn to permit him to return to his wife and children in rural China, Shang is progressively more and more generously rewarded as he rises through the ranks through three decades. He marries an American woman and fathers a daughter, the principal narrator of the novel. The tale is told decades following Shang’s unmasking and conviction of espionage, in first-person chapters narrated by his Chinese-American daughter alternating with third-person accounts of Shang’s life through the decades.
The author, Ha Jin, experienced first-hand the tumultuous events portrayed in A Map of Betrayal, having lived his first three decades in China. His depiction of the Great Leap Forward and the tragic famine that followed, the Cultural Revolution, and the internecine warfare within the Chinese Communist Party during and after Mao’s final years is the stuff history is made of. By placing his protagonist at the center of US-China relations during the 1960s and 70s, Jin tells the little-known story of the touch-and-go relationship of the two aggressive world powers with a knowing touch, showing an understanding of the complex dynamics at work on both sides.
A Map of Betrayal is not a cookie-cutter spy novel. The suspense (not knowing) is subtle, and the action moves forward at a deliberative pace. In the end, the book is fully satisfying for its insight into the complex human dynamics at play in any difficult relationship — and what relationship isn’t?
Jin Xuefei, who writes under the pen name Ha Jin, joined the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, leaving at age nineteen for university studies. A decade later, he was on a scholarship at Brandeis University when the Chinese government violently suppressed the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The incident moved him to emigrate and to write in English “to preserve the integrity of his work.” The author of numerous novels and volumes of poetry and short stories, he has won a passel of literary awards, including the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He currently teaches at Boston University.
Gary (nee Weimin) Shang is a young secret agent for Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists in the culminating days of the Revolution. A graduate of prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, sometimes referred to as China’s Harvard, he is singled out by his handlers to infiltrate an American intelligence unit in Shanghai which later moves to Okinawa, then to suburban Washington, DC, and is finally absorbed into the CIA itself. Despite begging his handlers at every turn to permit him to return to his wife and children in rural China, Shang is progressively more and more generously rewarded as he rises through the ranks through three decades. He marries an American woman and fathers a daughter, the principal narrator of the novel. The tale is told decades following Shang’s unmasking and conviction of espionage, in first-person chapters narrated by his Chinese-American daughter alternating with third-person accounts of Shang’s life through the decades.
The author, Ha Jin, experienced first-hand the tumultuous events portrayed in A Map of Betrayal, having lived his first three decades in China. His depiction of the Great Leap Forward and the tragic famine that followed, the Cultural Revolution, and the internecine warfare within the Chinese Communist Party during and after Mao’s final years is the stuff history is made of. By placing his protagonist at the center of US-China relations during the 1960s and 70s, Jin tells the little-known story of the touch-and-go relationship of the two aggressive world powers with a knowing touch, showing an understanding of the complex dynamics at work on both sides.
A Map of Betrayal is not a cookie-cutter spy novel. The suspense (not knowing) is subtle, and the action moves forward at a deliberative pace. In the end, the book is fully satisfying for its insight into the complex human dynamics at play in any difficult relationship — and what relationship isn’t?
Jin Xuefei, who writes under the pen name Ha Jin, joined the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, leaving at age nineteen for university studies. A decade later, he was on a scholarship at Brandeis University when the Chinese government violently suppressed the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The incident moved him to emigrate and to write in English “to preserve the integrity of his work.” The author of numerous novels and volumes of poetry and short stories, he has won a passel of literary awards, including the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He currently teaches at Boston University.
March 27, 2015
About a third of the way through A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin writes this about graduate students: “They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshipping the evasive and fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness.”
Indeed, Ha Jin himself believes in lucidity and straightforwardness – arguably, to a fault. His latest book chronicles the story of post-war Chinese translator Gary Shang, reportedly based on the real-world Chinese spy, Larry Chin.
Gary Shang straddles two worlds. A loyal Chinese Communist, he is reasonably content in a newly-arranged marriage and in the presumably temporary position he has working for the Americans. When the Americans leave, they ask Gary to go with them – a boon for Gary’s Communist handlers. Gradually, he settles into a double life, married to the narrator (Lilian’s) Irish-American mother, and torn between his love for the country he lives in versus the country he left…and still loves.
It’s all fascinating stuff, but I couldn’t help but feel as if Ha Jin was torn between presenting his readers with a history lecture or focusing on the fictional world he creates. There are many insights into the 1950s and 1960s mileau (including John Foster Dulles’ desire to use a nuke on Red China). And there are many passages like this one on Vietnam: “Some Chinese army hospitals south of Kunming City has been treating wounded Vietcong soldiers. It looked like China was becoming the rear base of North Vienam. If the Chinese continued backing up the Vietcong on such a scale, there’d be no way the Americans could win the war.”
So I come back to my first paragraph: can straightforwardness embrace eloquence and ambiguity? It can, but not always here. In the end, I learned a lot but wasn’t quite able to immerse myself in a fictional world. Like Gary Shang, Ha Jin seemed to want it both ways.
Indeed, Ha Jin himself believes in lucidity and straightforwardness – arguably, to a fault. His latest book chronicles the story of post-war Chinese translator Gary Shang, reportedly based on the real-world Chinese spy, Larry Chin.
Gary Shang straddles two worlds. A loyal Chinese Communist, he is reasonably content in a newly-arranged marriage and in the presumably temporary position he has working for the Americans. When the Americans leave, they ask Gary to go with them – a boon for Gary’s Communist handlers. Gradually, he settles into a double life, married to the narrator (Lilian’s) Irish-American mother, and torn between his love for the country he lives in versus the country he left…and still loves.
It’s all fascinating stuff, but I couldn’t help but feel as if Ha Jin was torn between presenting his readers with a history lecture or focusing on the fictional world he creates. There are many insights into the 1950s and 1960s mileau (including John Foster Dulles’ desire to use a nuke on Red China). And there are many passages like this one on Vietnam: “Some Chinese army hospitals south of Kunming City has been treating wounded Vietcong soldiers. It looked like China was becoming the rear base of North Vienam. If the Chinese continued backing up the Vietcong on such a scale, there’d be no way the Americans could win the war.”
So I come back to my first paragraph: can straightforwardness embrace eloquence and ambiguity? It can, but not always here. In the end, I learned a lot but wasn’t quite able to immerse myself in a fictional world. Like Gary Shang, Ha Jin seemed to want it both ways.
November 25, 2014
Lately, we’ve been consumed with how our own government is spying on us, but, of course, there are foreign agents peering at us, too. My friends in the game say corporate espionage — stealing manufacturing and software secrets — is where the action is now, which is enough to make an old spook pine for the Cold War. Those were the days when monomaniacal leaders banged on about their superior ideologies and the fate of the earth hung on just one launch code. Whatever the wisdom of risking humanity, those decades produced some fine le Carré novels, and we’ve still got FX’s superb TV drama “The Americans.”
While that show presents a pair of slick spies from the Soviet Union, Ha Jin’s new novel, “A Map of Betrayal,” looks toward China. The action, as might be expected from this famously modulated writer, is more Walter Mitty than Walter Raleigh. Jin’s anti-hero is Gary Shang, “the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America.” If that superlative conjures up an underwear model flying a helicopter through the Lincoln Tunnel and dispatching enemies with toxic lip balm, you need to calm down right now. “A Map of Betrayal” is the perfect thriller for the reader with a heart condition. Gary is a torpid man who works as a translator for the CIA in the Washington area. He’s neither shaken nor stirred.
This tale of betrayals and disappointments is a natural one for Ha Jin to publish. As a teenager, he served in the People’s Liberation Army and survived the Cultural Revolution. But he watched the Tiananmen Square massacre from Brandeis University, where he was finishing a dissertation on American literature. Disillusioned by his country, he never returned. “To preserve the integrity of my work,” he said several years ago, “I had no choice but to write in English.” That has proved a spectacularly successful choice. He’s since won a National Book Award and two PEN/Faulkner awards.
“A Map of Betrayal” explores themes of alienation and “bone-deep loneliness” that Ha Jin has written about in such novels as “Waiting” and “A Free Life,” but with an extra element of intrigue. The story comes to us along two time frames. In the present day, a middle-aged American woman named Lilian describes her efforts to piece together the duplicitous life of her late father, the convicted spy Gary Shang (loosely based on the true story of Larry Wu-Tai Chin). Her sudden interest is inspired by receiving six volumes of his secret diary, in which he recorded his life from 1949 to 1980, when he was finally caught by the FBI.
“There was no denying that my father had been a top spy,” Lilian says, “but the more I worked on his materials, the more I was convinced that money hadn’t been the primary motivation in his espionage for China. . . . I came to believe that he’d been not only a betrayer but also someone who’d been betrayed.”
While Lilian is describing her search for her father’s abandoned family in China, alternating chapters present Gary’s life through the decades of political and military turmoil. “A historian by profession,” Lilian says, “I wanted to tell it in my own fashion while remaining as objective as possible.” Usually, that sort of claim to objectivity is an irony marker as subtle as the Washington Monument, but in this case, that’s exactly what she provides: an efficiently detailed story of a modest man pulled away from his family and into spycraft by twisted strands of patriotism, egotism and naivete.
Starting in the years after the war, when the tension between Taiwan and China seems always ready to explode, “A Map of Betrayal” sweeps by like a time-lapse photo of geopolitical conflict. Embracing his “protracted mission,” Gary does whatever he can to relay information about the American’s uneasiness with Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek, their efforts to deal with Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets’ ever-expanding nuclear arsenal. “Despite the distance of an ocean and a continent, he could feel China’s pulse,” Ha Jin writes, “which beat irregularly, racing feverishly, as though he could at last grasp intimately his vast homeland in its entirety.” At the same time, in his faux job at the CIA, he makes an effort to shade his translations in hopes of prodding the United States to be more cautious. In other words, he imagines himself, from his tiny office, steering the superpowers toward peace and their mutual interests.
Hewing to the historical facts, Ha Jin makes little effort to dramatize the methods of espionage with nail-biting drop-offs, arcane codes or false mustaches. Year after year, Gary carries out “his simple, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” He takes documents home, photographs or summarizes them, passes the information on to Beijing. Money appears in his bank account, and life in Alexandria rolls along. He’s marooned, a “nameless hero . . . on the invisible front.” The psychological damage wears on him like the effects of a bad diet, and that’s the real subject of this novel. Gary is a man trapped in a peculiar conspiracy of circumstance and character. “His heart was always elsewhere,” Jin writes. “Wherever he went, he’d feel out of place, like a stranded traveler.”
Cut off, for security reasons, from his wife and children in China, he’s encouraged to start a family in America, but that entanglement of affection and deception brings him no joy. In his lifelong pursuit of secret knowledge, he never managed to accept the obvious fact that he was being irreparably used by the motherland. Years later, Gary’s old handler tells Lilian, “A nail must remain in its position . . . and rot with the wood it’s stuck in, so a spy of the nail type is more or less a goner.”
One of the great collateral benefits of Lilian’s investigation of her father is her always astute comments about contemporary China, a land racing toward capitalism while still haunted by the horrors of starvation and massive social disruption. And as she uncovers the details of Gary’s espionage, she discovers troubling truths about others’ capacity for deception, including herself. But her placid voice never betrays any emotion beyond earnest curiosity. Her regard for her father — the man who raised her in what she now realizes was a web of lies — betrays almost no psychological entanglement. There’s a special poignancy in the closing pages, but the novel’s restrained tone makes the whole enterprise feel too severely pruned for such a world-spanning and fraught tale.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
While that show presents a pair of slick spies from the Soviet Union, Ha Jin’s new novel, “A Map of Betrayal,” looks toward China. The action, as might be expected from this famously modulated writer, is more Walter Mitty than Walter Raleigh. Jin’s anti-hero is Gary Shang, “the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America.” If that superlative conjures up an underwear model flying a helicopter through the Lincoln Tunnel and dispatching enemies with toxic lip balm, you need to calm down right now. “A Map of Betrayal” is the perfect thriller for the reader with a heart condition. Gary is a torpid man who works as a translator for the CIA in the Washington area. He’s neither shaken nor stirred.
This tale of betrayals and disappointments is a natural one for Ha Jin to publish. As a teenager, he served in the People’s Liberation Army and survived the Cultural Revolution. But he watched the Tiananmen Square massacre from Brandeis University, where he was finishing a dissertation on American literature. Disillusioned by his country, he never returned. “To preserve the integrity of my work,” he said several years ago, “I had no choice but to write in English.” That has proved a spectacularly successful choice. He’s since won a National Book Award and two PEN/Faulkner awards.
“A Map of Betrayal” explores themes of alienation and “bone-deep loneliness” that Ha Jin has written about in such novels as “Waiting” and “A Free Life,” but with an extra element of intrigue. The story comes to us along two time frames. In the present day, a middle-aged American woman named Lilian describes her efforts to piece together the duplicitous life of her late father, the convicted spy Gary Shang (loosely based on the true story of Larry Wu-Tai Chin). Her sudden interest is inspired by receiving six volumes of his secret diary, in which he recorded his life from 1949 to 1980, when he was finally caught by the FBI.
“There was no denying that my father had been a top spy,” Lilian says, “but the more I worked on his materials, the more I was convinced that money hadn’t been the primary motivation in his espionage for China. . . . I came to believe that he’d been not only a betrayer but also someone who’d been betrayed.”
While Lilian is describing her search for her father’s abandoned family in China, alternating chapters present Gary’s life through the decades of political and military turmoil. “A historian by profession,” Lilian says, “I wanted to tell it in my own fashion while remaining as objective as possible.” Usually, that sort of claim to objectivity is an irony marker as subtle as the Washington Monument, but in this case, that’s exactly what she provides: an efficiently detailed story of a modest man pulled away from his family and into spycraft by twisted strands of patriotism, egotism and naivete.
Starting in the years after the war, when the tension between Taiwan and China seems always ready to explode, “A Map of Betrayal” sweeps by like a time-lapse photo of geopolitical conflict. Embracing his “protracted mission,” Gary does whatever he can to relay information about the American’s uneasiness with Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek, their efforts to deal with Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets’ ever-expanding nuclear arsenal. “Despite the distance of an ocean and a continent, he could feel China’s pulse,” Ha Jin writes, “which beat irregularly, racing feverishly, as though he could at last grasp intimately his vast homeland in its entirety.” At the same time, in his faux job at the CIA, he makes an effort to shade his translations in hopes of prodding the United States to be more cautious. In other words, he imagines himself, from his tiny office, steering the superpowers toward peace and their mutual interests.
Hewing to the historical facts, Ha Jin makes little effort to dramatize the methods of espionage with nail-biting drop-offs, arcane codes or false mustaches. Year after year, Gary carries out “his simple, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” He takes documents home, photographs or summarizes them, passes the information on to Beijing. Money appears in his bank account, and life in Alexandria rolls along. He’s marooned, a “nameless hero . . . on the invisible front.” The psychological damage wears on him like the effects of a bad diet, and that’s the real subject of this novel. Gary is a man trapped in a peculiar conspiracy of circumstance and character. “His heart was always elsewhere,” Jin writes. “Wherever he went, he’d feel out of place, like a stranded traveler.”
Cut off, for security reasons, from his wife and children in China, he’s encouraged to start a family in America, but that entanglement of affection and deception brings him no joy. In his lifelong pursuit of secret knowledge, he never managed to accept the obvious fact that he was being irreparably used by the motherland. Years later, Gary’s old handler tells Lilian, “A nail must remain in its position . . . and rot with the wood it’s stuck in, so a spy of the nail type is more or less a goner.”
One of the great collateral benefits of Lilian’s investigation of her father is her always astute comments about contemporary China, a land racing toward capitalism while still haunted by the horrors of starvation and massive social disruption. And as she uncovers the details of Gary’s espionage, she discovers troubling truths about others’ capacity for deception, including herself. But her placid voice never betrays any emotion beyond earnest curiosity. Her regard for her father — the man who raised her in what she now realizes was a web of lies — betrays almost no psychological entanglement. There’s a special poignancy in the closing pages, but the novel’s restrained tone makes the whole enterprise feel too severely pruned for such a world-spanning and fraught tale.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
March 2, 2021
Khác xa Đợi chờ, Con đường phản bội là cuộc đấu tranh hướng ra ngoại hàm - giữa quê hương xứ sở và khát khao tự do, của một gián điệp nhị trùng, nhưng cũng đồng thời là của chính ông như một tiểu thuyết bán tự truyện về nội tâm mình. Văn học di dân luôn bị gắn mác một mặt nào đó như là 'phản động', nhưng với Trung Quốc dưới chính ngòi bút ở nơi Ha Jin, ta không kịp thẩy những dòng chụp mủ hay là đánh đồng những lời vô tri. Trung Quốc trong Con đường phản bội đầy đủ sắc thái, biến một người ái quốc mù quáng thành ra nhận thấy tự do. Ha Jin lại một lần nữa dồn ép những nhân vật đàn ông của mình. Nếu Đợi chờ là lão Lâm với cuộc tình tay 3, thì Con đường phản bội là Gary với nước Mỹ, với Trung Quốc, với nỗi cô độc và khát khao yêu đương. Tác phẩm này chưa đựng rất nhiều cảm xúc trong cách dẫn dắt tuyến tính, trung tính nhưng đầy mê hoặc, với Con đường phản bội nỗi nhớ quê hương đã phát triển thành nỗi đau âm ỉ trong tim, làm cho con người ta trở nên mụ mẫm không thể thoát ra, một thiên đường mù dang tay chờ đón.
February 5, 2015
This is a novel that doesn't quite work for me as either a compelling spy story or as a fictional doorway into history, although that is the main reason to read it. It provides the author with a platform to reflect on US-China interactions during the second half of the 20th century and to present aspects of the Chinese-American experience. It's an okay read, but not a book I would recommend to friends. Themes of interest to me were: spies who may grow to want to serve two countries; patriotism and nationalism; the role of nationalism in our world today; the complexity of opinions surrounding the Chinese and Chinese Americans about their country; how family bonds trump nationalism.
It was about halfway through the book that I became uber-critical of the author's tendency to always provide physical descriptions of individuals that were pretty irrelevant and at times judgmental, especially with a sort of name-calling. I also felt that he was unable to authentically provide a steady, real, and feminine voice for Lillian, his protagonist. There is rampant use of colloquial phrases in dialogue, perhaps in an attempt to make dialogue sound more down to earth. Also, I found it highly unlikely that Gary Sheng would have kept a diary detailing his spy work and his feelings about his home country and the U.S. To do so simply would have been too risky.
Sample sources of irritation:
" she was slightly thick-boned but looked smart and energetic" Who is he to play the judge here on appearance? Would Lillian really have summarily criticized the appearance of her nephew's girlfriend
in that way? Sounds false.
"what a flameout"
Lillian: "I had to manage his paltry retirement plan for him" (would this university professor have put it in such a petulant way?)
"the flat-chested cross-examiner"
"the pot-bellied...."
It was about halfway through the book that I became uber-critical of the author's tendency to always provide physical descriptions of individuals that were pretty irrelevant and at times judgmental, especially with a sort of name-calling. I also felt that he was unable to authentically provide a steady, real, and feminine voice for Lillian, his protagonist. There is rampant use of colloquial phrases in dialogue, perhaps in an attempt to make dialogue sound more down to earth. Also, I found it highly unlikely that Gary Sheng would have kept a diary detailing his spy work and his feelings about his home country and the U.S. To do so simply would have been too risky.
Sample sources of irritation:
" she was slightly thick-boned but looked smart and energetic" Who is he to play the judge here on appearance? Would Lillian really have summarily criticized the appearance of her nephew's girlfriend
in that way? Sounds false.
"what a flameout"
Lillian: "I had to manage his paltry retirement plan for him" (would this university professor have put it in such a petulant way?)
"the flat-chested cross-examiner"
"the pot-bellied...."
January 26, 2015
I thought Ha Jin's Waiting was a work of brilliance. This book is solid but nothing approaching that level of skill, wit, and drama. The characters are excellent and interesting. The book alternates between the present (the story of Lilian's discovery about her father) and the past (her father's story). I liked both Lilian and Gary a lot but there is something missing in Lillian. She seems to merely be the person who needs to be there to tell the story. Gary is better drawn and the most interesting person in the book. If you are a China historian or more familiar with some of the events of the 1950s and 1960s in Sino-American relations, you might see more in the discussions of these events. I know enough but I wondered if I might find it all a lot more clever if I really knew the events (and could therefore see how he was shifting them or being more clever). I also felt there were patronizing moments about both the US and China -- and I had trouble figuring out if that was on purpose. Perhaps a reflection of my shortcomings as a reader here.
The theme of many of my reviews seems to be the ending. The challenge of the novel is not -- imho -- not merely to have a good story with great characters but to have an ending. There is an ending but nothing at the level of the characters. Reflecting on my desire for an ending, I do understand that some people just love books with great dialogue and they don't need as much plot. We are all very different readers. Jay gave me the book and he will read it next. I will be interested in seeing if being a China person makes a difference.
The theme of many of my reviews seems to be the ending. The challenge of the novel is not -- imho -- not merely to have a good story with great characters but to have an ending. There is an ending but nothing at the level of the characters. Reflecting on my desire for an ending, I do understand that some people just love books with great dialogue and they don't need as much plot. We are all very different readers. Jay gave me the book and he will read it next. I will be interested in seeing if being a China person makes a difference.
April 15, 2018
A Map of Betrayal, the story of Gary Shang, a Chinese spy who served as a translator for the CIA, is a slow paced account of Gary’s activities from 1949 to 1980 and his daughter’s search to discover who her father really was. Accounts of the progress of relations between China and Russia were interesting but the book moved at an uneven pace frequently getting bogged down in details such as food or clothing which didn’t serve to add to the focus of the story-the conflict Gary felt between his loyalties to his homeland and the affection he had come to feel for his adopted home of America.
February 11, 2015
It’s difficult to believe that you are reading fiction when you read A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin. You may also entertain the preconceived notion that you find foreign books boring or dense with historical references you will not understand. You will not need to understand Chinese history to be fascinated by this story, although you may learn some things about China.
This author has classified this story as a work of fiction but my gut keeps saying that “only the names have been changed”. There is no reason to believe that my gut is talented at perception: this willingness to “suspend my disbelief” is most likely due to the author’s skills at storytelling.
Ha Jin chooses Lilian Shang to be our narrator. She has in her possession the diaries left by her father. She already knows that her Dad, called Weimin in China but Gary Shang in the US, translator for the CIA in Washington, DC, was actually a Chinese spy. He was exposed and arrested just as he was considering retirement. Lilian has all the articles from the newspapers about his trial. She knows he was found guilty and sent to prison.
As a child Lilian did not ever see any signs that her father was a spy. Her Mom, Nellie, an American, also did not have any knowledge of her husband’s covert activities, although Gary betrays Nellie in another sense. Lilian learns, among other things, that her father has another wife in China; a wife he is never able to see. He has children he knows nothing about and grandchildren.
The story does not show us a cold-blooded spy who hated the country he was embedded in or even a man who came to betray his native China. Gary Shang is full of complex emotions about the wife he left behind. He is led to believe that she is being taken care of financially due to the risks he takes as a spy. He is led to believe that he is some kind of national hero, although his work is known only to those in power. When Lilian goes to China to find her father’s other family, her relatives, and to teach at a university in Beijing, she learns how China really treated her Dad’s first wife and her Dad, who betrayed his adopted country, America, but never the country of his birth.
I have always been “gobsmacked” by Mao and his Cultural Revolution. He just tipped China like a chessboard and tossed all of the pieces around. Except that China is a giant chessboard with millions of people. Mao took scholars and made them work the farms and he put the farmers in charge of local governments. Talk about redistribution! As you can imagine, if you don’t already know, havoc and misery ensued. This Cultural Revolution may not have hit Gary Shang, he only read about it in the press, but it certainly affected his family.
If you think Gary Shang had the best of both worlds until he was arrested you would be wrong. His diaries reveal his loneliness and his guilt. Ha Jin has given us a new take on a spy story and still in the back of my mind I feel that this could easily be a true story masquerading as fiction. The author gets to make that call, however, and if there had been a real spy in America like Gary Shang he would be known to all of us, although by another name.
Once again this is nothing like the Bourne books or 007 or stories full of action and modern spycraft. The way Gary Shang was a spy required a loyalty and a quiet dedication that is difficult to see as heroic under the circumstances, but that surely was of great value to his beloved China. It was a life that involved periods of great internal struggle for Gary Shang and one that might prove impossible for today’s citizens who are addicted to instant gratification and acknowledgment. Trudging silently along, with only the occasional desire to revolt against the machine, is hardly our style. This is a book of subtle understandings. Ha Jin is an author who is always on my wish list.
This author has classified this story as a work of fiction but my gut keeps saying that “only the names have been changed”. There is no reason to believe that my gut is talented at perception: this willingness to “suspend my disbelief” is most likely due to the author’s skills at storytelling.
Ha Jin chooses Lilian Shang to be our narrator. She has in her possession the diaries left by her father. She already knows that her Dad, called Weimin in China but Gary Shang in the US, translator for the CIA in Washington, DC, was actually a Chinese spy. He was exposed and arrested just as he was considering retirement. Lilian has all the articles from the newspapers about his trial. She knows he was found guilty and sent to prison.
As a child Lilian did not ever see any signs that her father was a spy. Her Mom, Nellie, an American, also did not have any knowledge of her husband’s covert activities, although Gary betrays Nellie in another sense. Lilian learns, among other things, that her father has another wife in China; a wife he is never able to see. He has children he knows nothing about and grandchildren.
The story does not show us a cold-blooded spy who hated the country he was embedded in or even a man who came to betray his native China. Gary Shang is full of complex emotions about the wife he left behind. He is led to believe that she is being taken care of financially due to the risks he takes as a spy. He is led to believe that he is some kind of national hero, although his work is known only to those in power. When Lilian goes to China to find her father’s other family, her relatives, and to teach at a university in Beijing, she learns how China really treated her Dad’s first wife and her Dad, who betrayed his adopted country, America, but never the country of his birth.
I have always been “gobsmacked” by Mao and his Cultural Revolution. He just tipped China like a chessboard and tossed all of the pieces around. Except that China is a giant chessboard with millions of people. Mao took scholars and made them work the farms and he put the farmers in charge of local governments. Talk about redistribution! As you can imagine, if you don’t already know, havoc and misery ensued. This Cultural Revolution may not have hit Gary Shang, he only read about it in the press, but it certainly affected his family.
If you think Gary Shang had the best of both worlds until he was arrested you would be wrong. His diaries reveal his loneliness and his guilt. Ha Jin has given us a new take on a spy story and still in the back of my mind I feel that this could easily be a true story masquerading as fiction. The author gets to make that call, however, and if there had been a real spy in America like Gary Shang he would be known to all of us, although by another name.
Once again this is nothing like the Bourne books or 007 or stories full of action and modern spycraft. The way Gary Shang was a spy required a loyalty and a quiet dedication that is difficult to see as heroic under the circumstances, but that surely was of great value to his beloved China. It was a life that involved periods of great internal struggle for Gary Shang and one that might prove impossible for today’s citizens who are addicted to instant gratification and acknowledgment. Trudging silently along, with only the occasional desire to revolt against the machine, is hardly our style. This is a book of subtle understandings. Ha Jin is an author who is always on my wish list.
November 15, 2014
I am a great fan of Ha Jin, but I did not find his new book, A Map of Betrayal, held my interest. I finished it with a sigh of relief, rather than with the regret of having finished a truly engaging book. It is the story of a Chinese spy, Gary Shang, who gets caught out in the cold as a mole in the CIA. After years in the USA, he is torn between his love of his homeland, and that of his native China. Although he rises high (by title) in the Chinese Security hierarchy , his government misleads, abuses, lies to him, and eventually repudiates him. I lost patience with Shang's inability to adapt and overcome his sense of guilt and abandonment, as a result of having accidentally found himself acting as a spy. He is skewed on the horns of dilemma: does his loyalty belong to his U.S. family or to the bride he left behind in China? His one life-affirming action leads to his downfall. As a character, Shang impressed me as being an intelligent, but passive, individual. The basic concept of the book was interesting and topical.
January 10, 2018
It's strange. The first half of this book didn't interest me much so I took my time reading it. And although the second half is no more eventful than the first, I suddenly couldn't put it down. I suppose as the novel progresses, the characters become more complete, thus more compelling. Ha Jin interweaves a biography of Gary Shang -- a mole inside the CIA working for communist China -- with the story of his adult daughter, who is writing the biography after the fact. And he thoroughly succeeds in making Gary a sympathetic character, despite his betrayal of the United States (and other complex betrayals). People expecting a suspense-filled espionage story will be greatly disappointed. While many events are extraordinary, Jin puts them down in his trademark, straightforward, relaxed style. There are no cliffhangers or car chases, but because of this, the novel is actually believable, powerful, and one of the author's best.
December 6, 2017
Onvan : A Map of Betrayal - Nevisande : Ha Jin - ISBN : 307911608 - ISBN13 : 9780307911605 - Dar 304 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2014
February 7, 2017
I have read a Ha Jin novel before and enjoy his writing. This nice tale was a gift from my daughter for the winter holidays, so it was even more special! It is a tale that goes back and forth between the USA and Lilian in the modern day (very recent past) and the tale of her father, a spy for China. There are all kinds of betrayal in this book, but the biggest really is how a country betrays its own citizens who have often given their literal or figurative lives for it. I also like the undercurrent of how one grows to love a country one lives in for any length of time, especially if one has set down the roots of family there. This was part of the dilemma for master spy Gary Shang, torn between two countries. But the real sadness to me in Gary's story is how he didn't set out to become a spy... he stumbled into the job by being hired as a translator in the American Embassy before that entity was kicked out of China; his "superiors" then push him to remain with his American employers and gradually become focused on spy work, ostensibly for the glory of his country, but of course he also feels he is protecting his wife back in his home province. It is only gradually over decades that he realizes his government has no intention of every allowing him to see his wife again.... nor the twins born after his employment began but whose existence he doesn't even find out any many years later. He also realizes that he won't every be allowed back into China, as he is too "valuable" where he is. He is even encouraged to marry and have a family in the USA to legitimize his status. A conflicted and very sad existence. Lilian, his daughter, travels to China to try to find his original family long after his death, so that is the second thread of this nice novel. I did find the dialogue a but stilted sometimes, but it is a thought-provoking tale with many layers, and I am glad I read it. "On what basis should a country be raised above the citizens who created it? History has proved that a country can get crazier and more vicious than an average person." All in all, this is not a heavy book, as so much revolves around the main characters just trying to understand their lives and Gary's, so no proselytizing or long descriptive passages. A final nice touch is how one thing which helps Gary become "American" is jazz: "Unpredictability--that was what he loved about jazz--everything was free-wheeling, unprepared, yet always under control." A bit like his life, except he didn't love his life.
March 30, 2016
I won the audio-book version of this in a Goodreads giveaway. Alas, I didn't realize I was signing up for an audio-book (I can't do any media format other than actual printed paper and the occasional ebook in extreme circumstances, i.e. on extended trips). Naively I hadn't caught up to the 21st century, it never crossed my mind to do this before, but now I make certain to check the format of giveaways I enter.
I tried to listen to this, but I couldn't (but that's not on the book, it's on me). Since the author/publisher was kind enough to send me a copy, I ended up soon after with the library copy so I fulfill my duty to read/review.
A Map of Betrayal presents some fascinating history; the story revolves around a 20th century Chinese spy working within the US government (while much of it is narrated by our spy's daughter, years later), and, in the process of exploring Chinese history and US-China relations, also addresses the "new immigrant" question - as an immigrant myself, I appreciated this aspect.
But, as a novel, A Map of Betrayal fell flat for me, for its reeking explicitness. I like my fiction subtle, mysterious, intangible, a bit bizarre, witty, open-ended. I do not at all enjoy being bashed over the head with an author's pronouncements, I do not believe anything is really "straightforward" (even the simplest thing is so complex when placed in proper context), and I'm also not a fan of anti-intellectualism. Ha Jin seems to hold ambiguity in contempt, and continuously makes pronouncements like this one: "They [grad students] mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshipping the evasive and fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness." Ugh.
Still, I appreciate learning (stuff, anything), so for what this book teaches re: Chinese-American relations, I give it a 3.
I tried to listen to this, but I couldn't (but that's not on the book, it's on me). Since the author/publisher was kind enough to send me a copy, I ended up soon after with the library copy so I fulfill my duty to read/review.
A Map of Betrayal presents some fascinating history; the story revolves around a 20th century Chinese spy working within the US government (while much of it is narrated by our spy's daughter, years later), and, in the process of exploring Chinese history and US-China relations, also addresses the "new immigrant" question - as an immigrant myself, I appreciated this aspect.
But, as a novel, A Map of Betrayal fell flat for me, for its reeking explicitness. I like my fiction subtle, mysterious, intangible, a bit bizarre, witty, open-ended. I do not at all enjoy being bashed over the head with an author's pronouncements, I do not believe anything is really "straightforward" (even the simplest thing is so complex when placed in proper context), and I'm also not a fan of anti-intellectualism. Ha Jin seems to hold ambiguity in contempt, and continuously makes pronouncements like this one: "They [grad students] mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshipping the evasive and fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness." Ugh.
Still, I appreciate learning (stuff, anything), so for what this book teaches re: Chinese-American relations, I give it a 3.
September 24, 2014
This book did two things very well: it offered insight into the political climate of China in the latter half of the 20th Century and a glimpse into the immigrant experience. But Gary Shang is no ordinary Chinese immigrant. Recruited as a translator by the CIA, he is sending America’s secrets back to his homeland. Despite having a family in China, a wife and child in America, and a mistress, he finds himself isolated as he protects his true identity. He manages to gain the trust of his government colleagues and the respect of high-ranking Chinese officials, but his double life is a lonely one. He is not allowed to return to China, having never met his children there. But he is not truly an American, though he learns to appreciate the privileged life it offers.
Decades after his death, Gary’s American daughter Lillian is seeking the truth about Gary’s role as a Chinese spy. She rediscovers the family he left behind and comes to terms with the decisions he made. Gary’s predicament gave me a better understanding of American-Sino relations and I appreciated how Gary attempted to justify his love for both countries in helping them exist on friendly terms. Jin’s prose is straightforward and matter-of-fact, but at times poetic when relating certain sentiments and describing particular sensations (it certainly left me with a craving for Chinese food). I always enjoy how he presents different Chinese perspectives and the challenge of learning to fit in.
I received a complimentary copy of this book via the Amazon Vine program.
Decades after his death, Gary’s American daughter Lillian is seeking the truth about Gary’s role as a Chinese spy. She rediscovers the family he left behind and comes to terms with the decisions he made. Gary’s predicament gave me a better understanding of American-Sino relations and I appreciated how Gary attempted to justify his love for both countries in helping them exist on friendly terms. Jin’s prose is straightforward and matter-of-fact, but at times poetic when relating certain sentiments and describing particular sensations (it certainly left me with a craving for Chinese food). I always enjoy how he presents different Chinese perspectives and the challenge of learning to fit in.
I received a complimentary copy of this book via the Amazon Vine program.
March 31, 2016
I received this book as an ARC from Edelweiss.
Ha Jin shows his versatility in this work. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of fiction by a man, not the memoir of a woman tracing the life of her father. The mood and voice was utterly convincing. Gary Shang was the ultimate patriot of China. He followed blindly, naively, believing all the while that his sacrifice would be rewarded, that he would return home. No Westerner would unquestioningly sacrifice his whole life for country. This is the great success of the Chinese and the great failure. While China acts as a unit it is strong and if it splinters as a result of capitalism it will weaken. (The failure of The Great Leap forward was the government's failure to plan a unified, concerted effort that included feeding the populace. Without that leadership, the Chinese people would not act independently to provide for their future.) Gary Shang sacrificed, but his grandson, Ben, will not sacrifice. The new men and women of China question and rebel and abandon China if abandonment is in their best interest.
Lilian is the second generation American-Chinese, questioning and seeking answers and attempting to remain faithful to the ideals of old China while remaining independent. She is shocked by the naivete of the Chinese -- by her niece, who thinks herself sophisticated, but is taken in by a second rate actor, by her nephew, who thinks that China will stand behind him if he is found out.
Ha Jin shows his versatility in this work. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of fiction by a man, not the memoir of a woman tracing the life of her father. The mood and voice was utterly convincing. Gary Shang was the ultimate patriot of China. He followed blindly, naively, believing all the while that his sacrifice would be rewarded, that he would return home. No Westerner would unquestioningly sacrifice his whole life for country. This is the great success of the Chinese and the great failure. While China acts as a unit it is strong and if it splinters as a result of capitalism it will weaken. (The failure of The Great Leap forward was the government's failure to plan a unified, concerted effort that included feeding the populace. Without that leadership, the Chinese people would not act independently to provide for their future.) Gary Shang sacrificed, but his grandson, Ben, will not sacrifice. The new men and women of China question and rebel and abandon China if abandonment is in their best interest.
Lilian is the second generation American-Chinese, questioning and seeking answers and attempting to remain faithful to the ideals of old China while remaining independent. She is shocked by the naivete of the Chinese -- by her niece, who thinks herself sophisticated, but is taken in by a second rate actor, by her nephew, who thinks that China will stand behind him if he is found out.
November 17, 2014
A Chinese spy who leaves his life and family at home in order to work as a deep cover agent who translates for the CIA. Gary Shang who is torn between two countries. The novel oscillates back and forth between Gary's daughter who lives in the aftermath of her father's subsequent outing and imprisonment for spying against the United States of America AND Gary Shang's life of espionage and domesticity. The two story-lines are sometimes worked clumsily and I am not sure that I needed Gary Shang's daughter's POV. While her character is interesting enough, the real story rests with Gary and his troubled life as an agent. This is the first time I've read a book by Ha Jin. The writing is simple and straightforward. It felt rather flat...err..maybe that is not the right word. The writing felt direct. There is a kind of purity to his writing where it feels like a straight line, something solid, sure, and reliable. It feels effortless and that in itself is probably something that requires a tremendous amount of effort to achieve as a writer. I look forward to returning to some of his earlier works.
March 9, 2018
The spare prose of Ha Jin's novel acts as a clear revealer of the complexity of its subject: fidelity to self/family/country and its rationalization, as well as the dire antics of countries long engaged in stealing from one another.
Gary Shang's story, in his voice and that of his daughter Lilian, covers key events in world history, focusing on relations between China and the United States. After distinguished college training in China, he leaves his new family (and never sees them again although he does support them for a long time with spy work) and ends up working as a translator for the CIA. In America, he finds and makes a new family; Lilian is his well-educated only daughter.
In the back and forth of father and daughter, the "dots are connected" after she is given his years-long diaries. She tries to piece his story together from there while trying to guide and save her nephew from her father's fate.
Betrayal, love, the depth of family connections, the importance of truth and the necessity of lies link events and characters.
The map of any sort of betrayal is dense with emotion and detail.
Gary Shang's story, in his voice and that of his daughter Lilian, covers key events in world history, focusing on relations between China and the United States. After distinguished college training in China, he leaves his new family (and never sees them again although he does support them for a long time with spy work) and ends up working as a translator for the CIA. In America, he finds and makes a new family; Lilian is his well-educated only daughter.
In the back and forth of father and daughter, the "dots are connected" after she is given his years-long diaries. She tries to piece his story together from there while trying to guide and save her nephew from her father's fate.
Betrayal, love, the depth of family connections, the importance of truth and the necessity of lies link events and characters.
The map of any sort of betrayal is dense with emotion and detail.
January 8, 2016
A wonderful reading experience!
A Map of Betrayal is the first book by Ha Jin I've read (yes, yes, I now, shame on me!) but it will certainly not be the last.
It's a story about loyalty, about a man being torn between two lives and two countries: China (his land of birth) and the US (where he has lived for most of his life, as a spy for the Chinese governement). And along the way, the reader also gets insight into China-US-politics after WWII and life in 21st century China. Although these parts are very 'factual' I never had the feeling I am reading a wikipedia-article.
What struck me most about the book was the language, the way the story is presented. Ha Jin writes in a style that could be called prosaic, the novel almost reads like a non-fiction book, or maybe a memoir. But strangely, this only adds to the enthrallment.
4,5*
A Map of Betrayal is the first book by Ha Jin I've read (yes, yes, I now, shame on me!) but it will certainly not be the last.
It's a story about loyalty, about a man being torn between two lives and two countries: China (his land of birth) and the US (where he has lived for most of his life, as a spy for the Chinese governement). And along the way, the reader also gets insight into China-US-politics after WWII and life in 21st century China. Although these parts are very 'factual' I never had the feeling I am reading a wikipedia-article.
What struck me most about the book was the language, the way the story is presented. Ha Jin writes in a style that could be called prosaic, the novel almost reads like a non-fiction book, or maybe a memoir. But strangely, this only adds to the enthrallment.
4,5*
October 17, 2014
I was really looking forward to reading this book. It started out ok. Then I kept reading and was not getting intrigued as much as I had hoped. In fact, I can not remember much of what I did read up until the point that I put the book down. I thought it was just me and I was not in the right mood for this book so I walked away from it for a while. I came back to it and tried it again. Nope it was not really me. It was the book. While I did see promise in it. The book just felt stiff. It does not have a lot of moving, action parts. Which I would expect from a spy story. The author more just was writing a story about the history of China. Which was fascinating but to a point. Plus, neither past or present was exciting. None of the characters were memorable.
February 8, 2015
To be honest, I was interested for most of the book (both in Gary, the Chinese spy living a new life in the US in the fifites, sixties, etc. and in his daughter Lilian's attempts to find out more about his first life (and first wife) back in China). But, the end is a total let-down as we are suddenly supposed to transfer our attention and interest to Benning (or Ben) - Lilian's nephew - but the third generation just doesn't come off the page. Maybe because he arrives too late in the story and the events concerning him seem so contrived. The writing style is efficient. I'm ready to give Ha Jin another chance, though, especially since I see that Waiting and War Trash received very good reviews from the New York Times Book Review.
March 2, 2015
Without question one of the worst book I've read. Lillian, a middle-aged Chinese-American woman discovers her father's journal and finds out he was a double agent working both for the CIA and Chinese intelligence. She also discovers he had a mistress. (How many books lately have there been about children discovering the secrets of their parents?) The chapters are set up by years her father (Gary) was a double agent, and Lillian's trip to China to discover the family Gary left behind.
Lillian doesn't quote the journal only tells us what she wants to tell us out of it. But she does tells the night after he first sleeps with his mistress there was a limpid moon in the sky. I'm still not sure what that looks like.
Lillian doesn't quote the journal only tells us what she wants to tell us out of it. But she does tells the night after he first sleeps with his mistress there was a limpid moon in the sky. I'm still not sure what that looks like.
January 14, 2015
3.5 stars--Ha Jin is one of my favorite authors, and reading his book remind me of a pot of simmering soup-perhaps nothing popping or bubbling over but always consistently a very good story boil or in this case a very good story.
A Map of Betrayal is the story of a spy torn between two countries (China and the US)finding himself with deep allegiance for both countries and the inner conflict that what was once a simple job has become his life.
Jin's writing is clean, simple, and engaging and instead focuses on what one would expect in a book about espionage, he focus on the risks the loss of continuity in his two homes and families and bridges the gap between character and reader.
A Map of Betrayal is the story of a spy torn between two countries (China and the US)finding himself with deep allegiance for both countries and the inner conflict that what was once a simple job has become his life.
Jin's writing is clean, simple, and engaging and instead focuses on what one would expect in a book about espionage, he focus on the risks the loss of continuity in his two homes and families and bridges the gap between character and reader.
March 9, 2015
There were moments when I was truly captivated by the characters' explorations, however diverse in time and execution they might have been. I also really enjoyed journeying through China in such depth.
I'm still not a fan of shifting points-of-view each chapter, and although I understand why Jin wanted to tell the story this way, I felt as if cold water was being splashed on my face every time the narrative swept back into the harsh analyzation of Gary's perspective. I also didn't like how much of his portions were written: one paragraph intensely emotional or sexual, followed immediately by three paragraphs of war/spy/factual dictation.
I'm still not a fan of shifting points-of-view each chapter, and although I understand why Jin wanted to tell the story this way, I felt as if cold water was being splashed on my face every time the narrative swept back into the harsh analyzation of Gary's perspective. I also didn't like how much of his portions were written: one paragraph intensely emotional or sexual, followed immediately by three paragraphs of war/spy/factual dictation.
April 11, 2016
Well-written, slow-moving novel of a Chinese spy working as a CIA translator. Told in alternating POV of Gary Shang, the spy, and his daughter, Lilian Shang, a history professor who has obtained his 6-volume diary, the story relates the agony of Gary Shang's life as he tries to reconcile his love of two countries and his responsibilities to two families.
While it was a heartbreaking story, some of it seemed told in a detached way that robbed the novel of its potential emotional impact. Still, an author worth reading for his overall narrative skills.
While it was a heartbreaking story, some of it seemed told in a detached way that robbed the novel of its potential emotional impact. Still, an author worth reading for his overall narrative skills.
November 1, 2015
With very spare prose Ha Jin takes the reader into the heart of Chinese villages, the CIA, the 1950's, Hong Kong, and the mind of a spy. A history lesson on Chinese, Russian and American tensions in mid-twentieth century is intertwined with the tensions in the life of a Chinese mole in the CIA. This novel gave me a much fuller understanding of both international relations and the mental, emotional and physical hardships of being a spy.
November 1, 2018
This book has a very odd style. I learned a lot about 20th century Chinese politics. After finishing it, l ate cottage cheese for breakfast, because it is high in protein and low in carbohydrates.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but the inclusion of meaningless detail, often but not always about food, is an ongoing thing. The dialogue can also be pretty stilted and suddenly swerve into totally out of place obscenities. All in all, an unusual reading experience.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but the inclusion of meaningless detail, often but not always about food, is an ongoing thing. The dialogue can also be pretty stilted and suddenly swerve into totally out of place obscenities. All in all, an unusual reading experience.
December 15, 2017
I can always tell when a book is headed to mediocrity when it takes me more than a week to get through it. I expected so much more than this slow moving, moribund novel. Jin missed a chance to move me, educate me, with the promising premise of a double agent between our nation’s frenemy, China.
Too bad, as Jin was masterful in “Waiting” which is very much worth your time.
Too bad, as Jin was masterful in “Waiting” which is very much worth your time.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 360 reviews