One of my favorite TV shows is The Americans on FX.  The story is about deep cover Soviet agents who infiltrated and operated in the US during the end of the Cold War. What is fascinating to me is how the show portrays the everyday struggle that a spy must go through to keep focused on their purpose and to keep true to their values and principles without anyone knowing what they are thinking, feeling or doing-not even their own children!

In the Map of Betrayal, Jin explores this inner dissonance in a spy’s life even more deeply. Gary Shang was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. As a CIA mole he was responsible for the deaths of numerous US agents and had leaked numerous valuable documents to the Chinese during his more than 30 years as a spy. Lillian, his daughter knew this about her father but it wasn’t until she began reading his journals which were given to her by his mistress after her mother’s death, that she begins to truly understand his loneliness and the guilt he carries for leaving his wife and children in China.  When she realizes that she has siblings and relatives in China that she never knew exsisted, Lillian decides to try and visit them on her next trip to China where she is often lectures and teaches.

Switching between Gary’s journal entries which expose his increasingly conflicted loyalties and Lillian’s journey to China to find her father’s family, the complicated life that Gary led and the manipulations by his own government to preserve their valued asset are revealed. But even as Lillian makes contact with members of her family and learns from them the personal cost of China’s volatile history, she begins to suspect that the map of betrayal her father began is still unfolding and is still influencing her family even now.

Gary is an enigmatic character who has lived with his conflicted loyalties and dissonance for so long that he seems unable to see his own actions for what they are.  Based on the life of the real Chinese spy Larry Wu-Tai Chin, Jin gives voice to a spy’s inner life while giving a context for how it could happen, and although I might not be sympathetic to his choices, I at least came away with a better understanding of why he chose to do it.

As Lillian finds her relatives and hears their stories, which resonate with such sincerity, giving her deeper insights into the personal impact of the Great Leap Forward and the famines that followed. Jin is less successful with Lillian’s voice and character as she often sounds stilted or does things that would seemingly belie any kind cross cultural sensibility that a person of her background and education would have. But in spite of that,  I was still drawn to Lillian and her quest to understand her own history. This was an intriguing book and kept me interested until the very end.

Brenda’s Rating: ***1/2  (3 1/2 Stars out of 5)

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian and Ken

Book Study Worthy? Yes

Read in ebook format.