Byline: JAN WONG
A lmost everyone has something in their past which they are ashamed of. Some people are able to wear their guilt lightly and get on with their lives. Others, like me, feel the sharp stab of regret every single day. After more than 30 years, I had the opportunity to apologise to a woman whose life I had ruined. It was a chance to assuage my guilt - but I was far from sure that she wanted to hear from me.
In 1973, a young stranger at Beijing University asked me, a foreign student from Canada, to help her get to America. I'd come to Beijing to learn Chinese and to explore my roots (a century before, my family had emigrated from China). I was 20, and idealistic, and wanted to save the young stranger from capitalism. The next day I ratted on her to my language teacher. Except for a brief entry in my diary, I didn't give it another thought.
In 1994, I reread that diary. I felt shock, followed by nausea. At the time Replica prada wholesale I had no inkling that the regime punished 'thought crimes' with prison, exile and hard labour. In the intervening years, China's human-rights abuses had become common knowledge. I had even gone on to become a foreign correspondent based in Beijing, covering the struggle for democracy and the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. How could I have forgotten this young woman? How could I have ignored the fate that had most likely befallen her? My penance would be confession. I wrote a memoir about my time in China and came clean about my betrayal, even though I knew it could destroy my reputation. After the book was published, people called me a snitch, a tattle, a horrible human being. But no one was harsher on me than myself. That chance ten-minute encounter with a stranger became the indelible stain on my past.
My sons, then five and eight years old, were a balm, so pure and innocent, so nonjudgmental. I tried to put it in a child's context. 'Sometimes Fendi Replica Handbags you see something bad happening in the playground so you tell your teacher,' I said. 'And someone gets punished. Later you realise you were mistaken, but it's too late.' I doubt my boys understood, but they gave me hugs.
My thoughtless act of betrayal remained an ever-present reminder that I was not a good person. Again and again, I scoured my memory. In 1973, did I truly not comprehend that thought crimes would be punished? My friends in the West avoided the subject. My friends in China assured me that almost everyone had turned someone in.
Four years ago, after wallowing in my guilt for more than a decade, I resolved to try to find the woman. In my diary, I had recorded only her family name: Yin. What hope did I have of tracing her in a country of 1.3 billion people? What if I did find her and she refused to see me? After 33 years, perhaps I should just leave a bad situation alone.
Against all odds, I found her - Yin Luyi. She embraced me warmly and invited me home. Over cups of pale green tea, she told me that she had been arrested, expelled from Beijing University and exiled to hard labour in Manchuria. I apologised formally several times. Each time, she replied calmly, 'Don't be sorry.' Eventually I realised I was shifting the burden of my guilt on to the person I had wronged. I stopped apologising.
Moral failure, like misery, loves company. To my sheepish relief, I learned that the outcome was not wholly my fault. Yin generously revealed that 25 or 30 others had betrayed her, too. She had told so many people of her dream of going to America.
In 2000, Yin finally made it to the West, living for several years in New York City an
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