“That sounds impressive.”
He smiled his disarming smile. “It is not really very interesting, I am afraid.”
“I’m also impressed by your English. Did you learn it in school?”
Ren shook his head. “Not as a child. Later, I went to a school for international trade relations. There I had an English teacher from Canada. She was extremely effective. This is one of the reasons I am allowed to come here. My government considers me to be a much-valued asset.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Of course, many people wish to leave China and come to the West.”
“Do you?”
A smile flickered and died. Ren held Dan’s gaze. “There are many things I would like.”
“Such as?”
“I would like to change certain things. For instance, there is almost no homosexual life in China. What is there is purposely hidden. For many years, I did not even know such things existed. No one spoke about it. Chinese say it is a Western disease.”
Dan nodded. “I believe Mao claimed that homosexuality was the result of a corrupt capitalist society.”
China’s great leader, Dan knew, was just one in a long line of politicians who had used scare tactics to intimidate people, equating the inferred slur of homosexuality with corrupt political practices. Ironically, both sides in the communist-capitalist debate fostered the same kind of fear, with gays caught in the middle, as usual. The infamous red-baiter, Senator Joseph McCarthy, went so far as to defend his beliefs by saying that anyone who stood against them was “either a communist or a cocksucker,” neither of which most Americans wanted to be called at the time. On the other hand, a committed communist named Harry Hay, founder of one of the first gay liberation groups in the U.S., was subsequently kicked out of the Communist party for being a homosexual. In an almost-farcical turnaround, he was expelled from his own Mattachine Society for being a communist. For queers, there was just no middle ground.
Dan smiled. “You can blame anything on money, I guess.”
Ren nodded shyly. “This may be true, but I did not grow up rich. My family came from Chengdu in Sichuan province. Although my father was in the military, we were still very poor.”
“Well, there you go,” Dan said. “You were gay and poor. So neither assertion is correct.”
“Yes.”
Ren’s face grew solemn.
“Thank you for coming today,” he said, as though addressing a will reading. “I would like to discuss a matter with you for professional reasons.”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket. A single black-and-white image slid onto the table. Dan picked up the photograph. A massive sculpture of a lion filled the background, while two teenagers stood in the foreground. Ren’s nascent beauty was already palpable; the girl beside him seemed ghostly, pensive.
“This is me with my sister, Ling. She died in Tiananmen.”
“My condolences.”
“Thank you. I would like to hire you to find her.”
Dan shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. You want me to find a dead woman?”
Ren shook his head vigorously. “Excuse me, please. Perhaps she is not dead now. I have found her on the Internet. I believe she lives here, possibly under a false name.”
Dan’s expression must have been comical, because Ren suddenly began to laugh.
“Yes, it is a mystery!”
Dan flashed on the envelope that had showed up at breakfast two days earlier, the one filled with clippings on the Tiananmen massacre.
“You sent me photocopies of articles on Tiananmen.”
Ren smiled shyly. “Yes, I did this. It is true.”
“Why?”
Ren’s face was all seriousness now. “I did not know if you would be acquainted with the history of my country and the student revolts.”
“Tiananmen was famous. Everybody remembers it. Everybody who was alive then.”
Ren shook his head. “In my country, it is already being forgotten. It is buried along with the past.”
Dan’s mind was backtracking as he studied Ren’s face. “Then you already knew who I was when we met.”
“You will please forgive me. I tracked you down, as they say in the West.”
“Is that why you slept with me?”
Ren looked chagrined. “No. Please do not believe this was to take advantage. I was pleasantly … surprised to find myself attracted to you. Only because of this did I sleep with you, I promise.”
“Sorry, that was rude of me.” Dan glanced down at the photograph. “You had better explain what this all has to do with your sister.”
“When I learned my government was sending me to Canada, I investigated the Internet to learn about Toronto. To my surprise, I found a Chinatown with many Chinese people.”
“More than one,” Dan said, thinking of the second Chinatown in Riverdale close to his own neighbourhood, as well as several established Asian neighbourhoods in the city at large.
“I believe I have found a picture of my sister at the Kowloon Bakery.”
The name sounded familiar. Dan thought he recalled such an establishment from his student days. “I think I know it,” he said.
“In the picture, my sister is sitting at a table eating with other customers.”
“Are you sure it’s her?”
Ren nodded. “I am very sure it is her.”
“When did you last see her?”
“At Tiananmen Square on the night the fighting started.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It was my eighteenth birthday. We were at a restaurant called Red Dragon. Ling, myself, and two friends from school. On the way home, we heard the noise of many people gathered in the square near the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. We already knew there was unrest and anti-government protests, but not the fighting. I said to my friends, ‘Let us go and see what is happening.’ We all went. Then the tanks arrived. When the fighting started, we tried to escape. I was shot.”
“You were shot?”
Ren gripped his thigh. “Here.”
Dan remembered the scar he’d seen on Ren’s leg, the worm at the heart of the perfect rose.
“I fell down. Others were screaming and yelling. My friends ran away. When I got up, Ling was gone. I never saw her again.”
His expression was subdued.
“I loved my sister very much,” he said softly.
“What happened after that?”
“I hid until the fighting was over. Some people took me in. I could not go home for two weeks. There was no telephone. My mother was very scared, but my father was angry. He beat me when I came back without Ling.”
“And your leg?”
“It healed eventually. It still hurts sometimes.”
“I’m not surprised,” Dan said.
The waiter returned with drinks. Dan waited till he left again before continuing.
“Tell me about your sister. What was she like?”
“Ling was a well-behaved girl and always obedient to our parents. She obtained very high marks in school.