A Map for the Missing(34)
That night, she told Guifan about the visit. He’d been looking over a packet of papers at the desk by their bedside, but his eyes shot up when she mentioned the International Prosperity Center.
“They came here?”
“They came straight to the door. I don’t know how they got past the guards.”
“How did they know where we lived?”
“Maybe you should answer that.”
His eyes, behind his glasses, were large in disbelief.
Her own courage was faltering but she willed herself to press on. She didn’t want to know about the problem at the same time she saw that she had to. She inhaled and said, “I never ask you about anything you do at work, but they came to speak directly to me and threatened Yuanyuan. I won’t be angry with you, but you have to tell me.”
She could tell he was relieved when he confessed. She wondered how long he’d kept the story bottled inside.
What he told her about was a large scheme, the kind sometimes described on the news, accompanied by grainy footage of policemen pushing a crowd of handcuffed men, exactly the type of thing in which she never imagined Guifan would be involved.
Mr. Qian worked for the Li Corporation, a national real estate development company. She’d heard of the firm—they had the tallest buildings in many large cities across the country. He’d first approached the mayor, who’d taken some money from them in the past. They had even grander ambitions for a new shopping complex. The proposed site was in the economic development zone under Guifan’s authority. He would need to approve the demolition of a maze of old alleyway houses for the project to continue.
He’d balked at forcing people out of their old homes to build a new structure that there weren’t enough businesses in town to fill. He thought it would be obvious they were completing the project at the behest of the corporation’s interests and there would be backlash to follow. The mayor first tried to cajole him, telling him how much they each stood to make if Guifan did this one small favor. But then, after a few months of Guifan’s refusals, the mayor began to imply he’d find an excuse to report him to the central disciplinary committee, on grounds of corruption.
“A few months?” Hanwen interrupted. “This has been going for that long? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was—I was afraid.” Guifan hung his head. “I didn’t know how to tell you, and I didn’t want you to be worried.”
“Well, should we be worried? Could he really report you like that? You haven’t done anything wrong,” Hanwen said.
Guifan sighed before continuing. “All these gifts. It doesn’t matter that every official has things like this, or that what we’ve received is nothing compared to everyone else. If he wanted to find an excuse, it wouldn’t be difficult.”
Of course, she’d wondered about the gifts early on. Businessmen or constituents who wanted to give Guifan a token of thanks for a small ask—fast-tracking a restaurant permit or getting someone’s child into the city’s best high school. Inconsequential favors. Red-ribboned bottles of maotai, rubber-banded bundles of foreign currency, once even a calligraphy scroll from the late Qing dynasty. Hanwen didn’t like to look at the gifts, which made her feel like a foreigner in her own life. She knew none of these could have come from Guifan’s salary, which was laughably low, part of the Party’s public commitment that the leaders should live like common people. Everyone accepted that there would be perks that made up for the low pay, like the subsidized housing and their drivers. She’d asked him only once about them, early on. “It’s nothing. I won’t ever let it get out of hand,” he said. She’d decided to believe him. The country was awash with money, anyone could see that. Imported cars whizzed and stirred up dust from the construction sites springing up all around town. Investors came to erect new office buildings and apartment complexes, created shiny pamphlets to sell the city on the place it could become.
She’d been wrong to listen to Guifan, she saw. She’d underestimated the size of the troubles that could come from the gifts and put too much faith in Guifan to handle them.
“So what have you done?” she asked Guifan now.
“I’ve been hoping they’d back off. That the mayor would give up.”
“Hoping? That’s it?”
“What else would you have liked me to do?”
“Your hoping didn’t work. Now they’ve come to our house.”
If the government decided to make an example of an official, the punishment could be ruthless. Stripped of Party membership and their position, certainly. A long jail term. It was uncommon, but at worst they would find out about the crime on the nightly news broadcast: executed by gunshot for corruption, the news anchor would inform them, her voice cold and neutral. The decision on punishment happened in some room where men in power met, through some calculus she would never understand.
She couldn’t believe that Guifan had subjected their lives to such an arbitrary whim and was now acting so helplessly before it. She’d sacrificed the whole other life she’d wanted for the safety of this one, so that her mother, and now her son, could have the stability she’d never had. If what she’d collected could be taken away so easily, then for what had she made those choices?
For the next few weeks, passing by any person smoking on the street, she was made dizzy by the reminder of Mr. Qian, standing so close to her that she could smell his breath. She began writing a desperate letter to Yitian. I know it’s been a long time since we last spoke, but I wonder if I could ask for your advice on something, she started. But what would he think, hearing about how far her life had strayed from the person she’d once been? She ripped the letter to shreds and tossed the remnants.