The hardcover copy of Ha Jin’s latest book resembles a manual. All red except where a broken eagle insignia is etched in the middle, the cover suggests that perhaps this volume will be presenting us with the procedure by which something highly explosive can be done. A MAP OF BETRAYAL lives up to its name, a novel posing as a memoir of the daughter of the greatest Chinese spy of all time. In clear, concise language, a twisted story unfolds, holding you at its mercy from cover to cover.

Gary Shang is a spy. In fact, he is a double agent for both China and the United States. He gets a job as a translator for the CIA and thus begins to secure and send out information about America’s daily routines as well as its future moves in Asia to his communist Chinese bosses (who may or may not also include Chairman Mao himself). As his daughter finds out after his death, through a well-worn set of diaries loaded with unbelievable material, he was lying to everyone around him for most of his adult life. And in that deception, he seems in hindsight never to have had an authentic moment with anyone who thinks they really knew him.

"A MAP OF BETRAYAL is an excellent and compelling read. Love, war, duty and the march towards progress, for better or for worse, make up the stepping stones of this wide-ranging novel. This is a map that you won’t mind getting lost in."

Gary’s story about his work and his loves (a first wife, a second wife, a mistress) coincide with his daughter Lillian’s discovery of his real story and the way it changes how she feels about their family history. The truth is devastating and unreal.

Lillian is a middle-aged professor who is awarded a Fulbright lectureship at a teachers college in Beijing. It is highly auspicious timing that she has just come into contact with her father’s diary and has heightened interest in her Chinese jaunt. In the diary, Gary is discovered to be “the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America,” and his daughter makes a point in her travels to alight on the rural Shandong province to look for missing members of her family: Gary’s first wife and the children who are Lillian’s unknown half-siblings. This arranged marriage held great love and respect from spouse to spouse, and it is mentioned throughout the story that Gary never quite forgets how important and intense that initial relationship was for him.

Gary is a translator for the U.S. but remains based in China at first; eventually his job and his group is usurped by the Central Intelligence Agency. At that time, the Americans take Gary to Okinawa, and, as the Nationalists find defeat on mainland China, they force him to come to the States in 1955. When he arrives in Langley, VA, to continue working, he has no choice but to leave behind his family. However, to create a real foothold in the U.S., Gary marries into the white American world through his relationship with Nellie. His white wife gives him a place in this new world, but his heart remains restless. Eventually, he starts an affair with a Chinese woman named Suzie Chao, a relationship that is still going on when he dies.

As Lillian discovers more about her family and uncovers the unusual cultural constructs about love, friendship and loyalty under which her father lived his life, the U.S. goes through many changes in its cultural state as well. Gary is at the center of the Cold War, and Ha Jin, being the lithe storyteller that he is, manages to give us a full look at the historical repercussions and realities that someone like Gary would face in fulfilling almost impossible duties throughout some of the more disturbing times of the 20th century. Then he turns around and gives us Lillian’s perspective, the growing knowledge of what her father really was, and why he was like that, giving a heart to the context of the wartime struggles around which the story molds itself.

A MAP OF BETRAYAL is an excellent and compelling read. Love, war, duty and the march towards progress, for better or for worse, make up the stepping stones of this wide-ranging novel. This is a map that you won’t mind getting lost in.