“Let’s go over everything together in detail. You start, Arun.” Lingyi glanced at me and nodded toward a red velvet armchair.
I sank down, facing the wall screen. The main part of the spacious loft where we were sitting felt cozy, lived-in, with thick cushions thrown on the seats and old books spread on the long teakwood table before us. Metal pendants in geometrical shapes strung at varying heights dangled from the tall ceiling, making our headquarters bright, despite the steel-shuttered windows.
Arun clicked on his Palm and the chamber dimmed. “Lingyi’s been working on establishing your new identity online these past months, Zhou. You’ve been studying like we’ve asked you to?”
“I’ve been reading more novels in English—”
“Who’s your favorite American author?” Victor interjected.
“Poe,” I replied.
“Poe! He’s strange,” Victor said.
“I like strange.”
“Chinese?”
“Cao Xueqin,” I said.
“You’re a romantic.” Victor draped himself onto the sofa beside me and smirked.
I ignored him.
Arun tilted his chin at me. “Zhou, in your new identity, you went to university at fifteen and are a prodigy.” He spoke the last word in English.
“So act prodigious,” Victor added, also in English.
“Are you joking? I haven’t been at the American School since thirteen,” I replied in Mandarin. “I’m a dropout.”
Arun turned from the wall screen and caught my gaze, his brown eyes serious. “You’re the most well-read guy I know. You’d run circles around all those spoiled you kids with your smarts.”
“Your new identity will be solid,” Victor said. “Jin’s men are looking for a gambler, a druggie, some rich, stupid criminal. Not an educated you boy from the United States. Besides, I barely recognized you when you walked in that door.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s true,” Lingyi replied. “You look like you’ve gained fifteen pounds of muscle since I saw you a few months ago.” She squeezed my bicep for emphasis, and I felt my face grow hot. “What have you been doing in that apartment of yours?”
Sleeping past noon. Staying indoors all day and night, reading novels and comics, and trawling the undernet. Following the net diaries of a few you boys and girls, caught between revulsion and fascination over their vapid lifestyles. Then, come two a.m., I left my studio and headed to the twenty-four-hour gym, lifting weights and doing indoor rock climbing to blow off steam. “I’m eating more,” I said after a pause. “And I go to a hole-in-the-wall gym in the dead of night.”
“Well, it shows,” Victor said. “You’re bigger. And pale as a white foreigner. No one will make the connection between the blond, thin street urchin in that photo and your new, rich-boy identity.”
Iris had told me to put on some muscle, which seemed to work out in the end. But I had been going to the gym because I needed to—because I had to get out of my dark studio, but also to sweat out my frustrations in having to wait, and to curb my anger over, well, everything.
“Let’s continue,” Arun said. “Zhou, you’ve just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in world literature from Berkeley in their accelerated program. Lingyi’s laid the groundwork to back all this for anyone who might want to dig up info on you.”
An image of me flashed onto the projection wall. My hair was clean-cut and black. Instead of a worn black T-shirt, I was wearing a white dress shirt and a gray vest. “I don’t look like that,” I said, blinking at the dapper young man on the screen—Victor’s clone.
“Actually, you look like this now.” Arun pointed his Palm at me, and I was momentarily bathed in green light as the device scanned my face, just like when Vic had done the same three months ago at the Rockaroke. His fingers raced over the Palm. My tanned face with the sharp cheekbones and chin morphed before our eyes on the wall screen. My coloring grew more pallid, rendering my brown eyes almost black, even as my face filled out, making what had appeared sharp before more defined. Mature.
They were right. I barely recognized myself.
“You look the part of the pale you boy to me,” Arun said. “Unless you’re the kind to go for the unnatural tanned look.”
Vic snorted, retrieving a monogrammed handkerchief from some hidden pocket to dab at his forehead. Our headquarters’ air was cool enough that there was no way he was sweating. He just wanted to show off his latest Victor accessory.
“I guess we all know where your share of the cut went, Victor?” Lingyi said in a teasing tone.
Victor winked with his usual cockiness, but I didn’t miss the color that rose to his tanned face.
“We’ve decided to go with your English name as your alias,” Arun continued. “And your surname is common enough that you’re keeping it. We’ve changed your birthday to May first from the twenty-third. The best false identity, for our purposes, is one that is most closely tied to your true one.” Arun swiped a fingertip across his Palm. “It’ll make you more believable in your role.”
JASON ZHOU flashed across the wall screen next to my image.
I jerked and bumped Lingyi in the shoulder.
Arun lifted an eyebrow at me. “We’re correct in thinking that no one called you by this name except for your mom, right? None of your records indicated an English name anywhere.”
“Yes.” I swallowed, trying to clear the knot in my throat. “Only my mom ever called me that.”
She had given the name to me after my father had died. And she never spoke English or called me Jason except in private, as if it were a secret language between us, reading me Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary when I was younger. She had enrolled me at the American School in Taipei when I turned six, an expensive private school that she was only able to afford due to the annual allowance she received from my grandparents in California. They had broken all contact with my mother after she became pregnant with me at twenty-three and married my father; their sole acknowledgement that she still existed was the deposit they made into her bank account each year. My mother never talked about her parents with me, but even at a young age, I heard snatches of conversation that made more sense after both my parents were gone.
I’m eating cold rice porridge with bamboo shoots and fermented bean curd, because it is too hot to light the stove. But this is one of my favorite meals anyway. All three of us sit in the cramped kitchen at the round wooden table; my feet dangle above the ground, and I swing my legs.
“Write to them; go see them,” my father says. All I can remember of my father was the solidity of him, how high he’d lift me in his arms, how his hugs enveloped me entirely. To be with my father meant I was safe. “They’ll be glad to meet their grandson.”
My mother sets down her chopsticks, then dabs her mouth with a napkin. “If they refuse to see you, then I refuse to see them,” she says in a soft voice.
Ba reaches over to fold his large hand over my mother’s slender fingers. Leans over to kiss the corner of her mouth.