The Expat by Hansen Shi

Author:Hansen Shi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The captain’s cabin announcement to secure our seatbelts and prepare for landing alerted me to the fact that we had breached American airspace. Thirty minutes later, the plane connected on the runway with a shuddering throttle that gave me the unsettling sensation of being re-aborted onto native soil. Moving through the Jetway, I tried to reshelve the memories that had been dislodged during the flight and focus on the task at hand. But when I reached the gate, something looked wrong. Two large men in blue jackets were leaning against the far wall.

There was a Chinese American man and a brown man. As soon as they spotted me, their broad bodies sprang into action and homed in on me. The Chinese American man wrung my hands behind my back and handcuffed me while the brown man read my Miranda rights. As they marched me through the crowded terminal, I kept staggering as the force of the agent’s hand at my back constantly threatened to push me over. Somewhere a side door opened and the men ushered me through it to a gray room where they photographed and fingerprinted me. Then, they brought me to a different, smaller room down the hallway with no windows and left me alone there for about five minutes.

It’s important for you to understand that prior to this, I had never really gotten in trouble. The last time I had been so nakedly at the mercy of the authorities was in Mrs. Greenberg’s classroom in the sixth grade. I’d let Tiffany Chen, a girl I was too afraid to approach even in Club Penguin, copy my earth science homework, which Mrs. Greenberg explained was as bad as doing the copying myself. Now if Tiffany had copied my homework without my permission, Mrs. Greenberg said, now was the time to tell the truth, before adding that Tiffany herself was waiting in the classroom next door. I remember saying loudly with my lunchbox-sized chest that not only had I let Tiffany copy my homework, I had offered it to her in the first place. Mrs. Greenberg shook her head and wrote something down with exaggerated slowness, as if inscribing it onto my permanent record. Then she called my mother in. My mother’s voice was shaking as she pleaded for Mrs. Greenberg to give me another chance, to count on her to punish me, if only to spare my future at the school. Even then, sitting in the interrogation room, I wondered if my mother was looking in through a two-way mirror, begging the agents for forgiveness on my behalf.

The men came back into the room and took their seats across from me. They introduced themselves as Agent Lim and Agent Reddy from the FBI. Agent Lim spoke first.

“On April 1, an individual named Bo Song reached out to you and you met him for breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco. He invited you to an academic conference in Beijing the following week, where you

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