Nine Days

Chapter 1
When Ti-Anna’s father disappeared, it wasn’t one of those sudden things. I didn’t see him get blown off a cliff or conked on the head and bundled into a windowless van. But he disappeared just the same, and Ti-Anna and I decided we had to do something about it.
It may seem, by the time I finish telling what happened, that that wasn’t the brightest decision. I ended up traveling halfway around the world without telling my parents. I nearly killed someone, and nearly got myself and my best friend killed too. And while we may not exactly have failed, we certainly didn’t accomplish what we set out to accomplish.
But every step of the way, it felt like I was doing the right thing, until we were in so deep that I wasn’t thinking anymore whether it was the right thing or not. I was just trying to survive, along with Ti-Anna.
Now my parents and the judge think I should be remorseful. I have to write how sorry I am, and if I’m not, I guess the judge could send me away.
So I know I should just write Yes, I am remorseful. How hard could that be?
But as I think about it all, I’m feeling a lot of different things. Of course I’m not delighted to have a cast on my leg. I’m remorseful about that. I wish I didn’t owe my parents so much money. And there’s definitely a lot I did along the way that I’m not proud of.
But can I honestly say I wouldn’t do it again? I don’t know. I really don’t.
So I’m going to write what happened, exactly as it happened, to the best of my honest recollection, from the very beginning, whether or not it looks good to the judge or anyone else.
When I’m done, maybe I’ll go back and stick in a lot of sorrys and take out a bunch of truth.
And maybe I won’t. I believe in the truth, maybe too much sometimes. In a way, that was how this whole thing started.

Chapter 2
Beginning at the beginning means taking you back to school—to Mr. Stoltz’s sleepy tenth-grade world history class, to be specific. I am remorseful about that. I apologize.
That’s where the story begins.
It was one of those groggy Washington afternoons in early May when just about everyone is staring at the clock and willing the buzzer to sound so they can get out of school.
I got into an argument about Mao Zedong.
Don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m a total nerd. I am not. I’m reasonably coordinated. I’m not terrible to look at. Maybe I’m not the most social kid in the world, but I have friends.
It is true that I don’t mind spending time by myself. I have two parents who love me, but they’re both absentminded physicists who are away at conferences a lot of the time. They had two kids, and then a long time after that they had me, and sometimes I think it slips their minds that there’s a third kid in the family.
Of course, my mother would deny that she’s absentminded and say that my saying she’s absentminded just proves I’m not a good observer. Which I would say proves how absentminded she really is.
My older brother and sister love me, but they don’t live at home anymore. So over the years I’ve learned to entertain myself. I love to draw, and to read. I’ve dived into Greek mythology. Ancient writing systems. Aztec religion. Medieval war machines. Code-breaking during World War II.
And China. I wouldn’t call China a phase. I’ve been reading about China for a long time, and the more I learn, the more I want to know.
So when Mr. Stoltz called Mao “the father of his nation,” the George Washington of modern China, it set me off.
On certain subjects I feel strongly, and sometimes when I hear something dumb, or wrong, I can’t stop myself.
This was one of those times.
I raised my hand.
Mr. Stoltz sighed.
“Yes, Ethan?”
I said I didn’t recall that George Washington ever caused a famine that killed twenty million of his countrymen.
To which one of my classmates, a boy with expensive sunglasses whose father is a diplomat in the Chinese embassy, said I was being culturally insensitive, because Chinese people were proud of Mao and what he’d done for their country. Mao had brought China from the dark ages into the modern world, he said, and who was I to go against the Chinese people?
At that point I should have apologized and said I respect their point of view.
Instead I chose to inquire what kind of father would make his nation take a “Great Leap Forward” in which impoverished peasants had to turn their backyards into iron factories and melt down their pots and pans so that before you knew it no one could cook dinner anymore.
And because that worked out so well, he tried something even crazier a couple of decades later (that’s right; no term limits in Communist China), which he called the Cultural Revolution. That involved getting young people to turn against their parents and even beat them, and punishing anyone who had any formal education.
I wasn’t quite as diplomatic as I might have been. Certainly it was more than Mr. Stoltz had bargained for. I’m sure he knew I was right; he knew what had happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
But instead of backing me up, he just tried to calm us all down with a little sermon about different perspectives on history, and how we all need to be open to each other’s points of view.
When the bell rang, the diplomat’s son glared at me as he walked out, with a couple of his buddies following him and glaring too. That would have been the end of it if Ti-Anna hadn’t waited until everyone else had left the classroom and then come over to talk to me.
I didn’t even notice her at first. I was staring at my desk, letting the blood drain from my face. She must have been standing there for a couple of minutes before I looked up.
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I’d known Ti-Anna since sixth grade, and of course I knew some basic facts about her, like you do if you’ve been in classes with someone. That her parents came from China, but that she didn’t hang out much with the other Chinese students. That she was smart but quiet, and hardly ever talked in class. And, yes, that she was, as they used to say in the old detective novels, easy on the eyes.
But if she had said a dozen words to me in the five years we’d been classmates, I couldn’t remember more than eleven of them.
So I was surprised to see her there, and even more surprised when she said, in her quiet voice, “Thank you, Ethan.”
“For what?”
“For being brave enough to say those things about Mao. Some Chinese people think that to be patriotic they can’t be honest about their country. I think the opposite. And every single thing you said was one hundred percent true.”
Then she tucked her hair behind her ear, smiled a dazzling smile and added, “Even if I might not have phrased them in exactly the same way.” And walked out of the classroom.
I spent the rest of the day, and a good part of the night, thinking about her.

Chapter 3
At my school you can leave at lunchtime, and most kids do. They go in groups and gaggles to fast-food places or to the deli on the corner. I usually bring a peanut butter sandwich and find a quiet spot to read. Ti-Anna usually brings lunch too, because her family doesn’t have much money, though of course I didn’t know that at first. Sometimes she sat in the cafeteria with her friends, but I had noticed that sometimes she ate by herself, in the same general area as me--out on the bleachers overlooking the track.
So the day after she talked to me in class, I waited until I thought she might be out there, and then I walked out and acted surprised to see her. I sat on the bench just above hers, and we started to talk. The next day we went out at about the same time and sat on the same bench, and we did that pretty much every day until finals, except when it rained.
After a few days, I started finding her when school ended, and I’d walk my bike alongside her while she walked home, a mile or so from school. We’d talk outside her apartment building. She never asked me in, and I never asked to go in. I got to know the bench in front of her building pretty well.
When I think back to our talks, of course the one I remember best is the day she told me her father had disappeared. But by then, we’d done a lot of talking--about her father, yes, because she was really proud of him, but about a lot of other things too. Ti-Anna didn’t like to talk about herself, but it turned out we had a lot in common, even though we were really different. Or we were really different in similar ways.
For example: my parents believe that if you are born intelligent, the only reasonable course of action is to become a scientist. They wouldn’t admit that, certainly not to me, but there it is.
And that’s a problem, because my big brother is a physics whiz, like they are, and my sister is probably going to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry by the time she’s thirty.
Whereas I’ve never once had a lab come out the way the teacher said it should. What I love is to read history, biographies, human rights reports. My parents pretend to think that’s fine too, when they notice. But they don’t really get it.
Ti-Anna was always two steps ahead of the lab teacher’s directions, but her parents didn’t really approve of her love of science. They’re both from China. Ti-Anna was born there too, but her family came to America when she was four, so she sounds totally American. Her father, as she explained to me one lunchtime while we watched the cheerleading team practice, was a big deal in the Chinese democracy movement.
“Wait--Chen Jie-min--that’s your father?” I asked.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Of course!” I said. “Wow. I had no idea.”
She looked pleased and a little surprised. But if you know anything about China today, you’ve heard of Ti-Anna’s father.
“But a man like him--I mean--I wouldn’t think he’d have anything against girls becoming scientists.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Ti-Anna said. “It’s more--it’s hard to explain.” She took a bite of her apple. “Ever since we came to America, he thinks about nothing except going back and helping China become a democracy. That’s his whole life, and it’s my mother’s life--typing his articles and letters, helping answer his mail, whatever needs doing. They think it should be my life too.”
She stopped, and I thought that was the end of it. The cheerleaders had collapsed in a laughing heap, and Ti-Anna seemed to be studying them as they untangled themselves.
But she continued. “Being good at science, and getting into a good college, and becoming a biochemist in the United States--for him, that would be a waste, something that a million other kids could do, that a million other Chinese immigrant kids will do. For them, there’s nothing wrong with it. For me, it would be abandoning the cause he’s given his life to,” she said. “And that I should be giving my life to also. Just look at my name.”
“What about your name?” I asked. A little unusual, maybe, but I said I was sure there were American biochemists with odder ones.
“The ‘Ti’ in Ti-Anna?” she answered. “In Chinese, it’s the same character as in ‘Tiananmen.’ ”
She knew that I’d recognize that word. Tiananmen is the giant square in the heart of Beijing where thousands of young Chinese gathered the last time there was open protest in China--way back in 1989--demanding more freedom. They put up a big replica of the Statue of Liberty, but in the end Chinese soldiers broke up the demonstration by killing a lot of protesters and putting a lot more of them in jail.
Including Ti-Anna’s father.
“So I’m named for a movement, and for the martyrs to freedom, and for my dad’s cause.” She sighed. “How could I grow up to be a postdoc in a lab at the University of Maryland?”

Chapter 4
One afternoon as we rounded the corner to her apartment building, Ti-Anna shuddered as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. She whispered for me to look at a blue Taurus parked across from her front entrance.
“It’s them,” she said. “From the embassy.”
“What for?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Sometimes they sit there for hours. Keeping track of who my father meets with, maybe. Or trying to intimidate him.” She studied the car with disgust. “Good luck with that.”
She said good-bye and went inside; I eventually realized that she never lingered when the Taurus was there.
On afternoons when it wasn’t there, though, she’d happily talk until close to suppertime, though it was hot, and not the most comfortable place. A lot of the time, we talked about China. She’d never been back, and her memories were fragmentary but vivid, she told me.
She could close her eyes and feel the padding as she clutched her mother’s jacket, her mother bicycling through a freezing Beijing morning with Ti-Anna perched behind. She could remember the cracks in the beige paint on the wall beside her bed, in the room she’d shared with her grandmother. She thought she could still hear police hammering on the apartment door when they took her father away one night, though her mother insisted she’d been fast asleep and couldn’t possibly remember.
Sometimes, she said, a smell from a diesel truck, or a restaurant exhaust fan, or something she couldn’t even trace, would carry her back with dizzying force.
“Though I know it’s changed completely since my parents left,” she said. “It was crazy in the old days, like you were saying about Mao. But it’s not like that now.”
Her parents sometimes talked about what it was like when they were her age, and you couldn’t do anything without Communist Party permission. The Party decided whom you could marry, where you could live, whether you’d go to college or spend your life growing rice. You could wear any color you wanted, as long as it was drab gray or faded blue.