A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin
A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin
1 Rating(s)
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A Map of Betrayal

Author: Ha Jin

Narrator: Angela Lin

Unabridged: 10 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 11/04/2014


Synopsis

From the award-winning author of Waiting: a spare, haunting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries-China and the United States-and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father's diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary-an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia-reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father's long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected. As Lilian begins to fathom her father's dilemma-torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country-she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.

About Ha Jin

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of two books of poetry; two collections of stories, Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1997, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1996; and In the Pond, a novel. He lives near Atlanta, where he is a professor at Emory University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara on April 07, 2015

I’m a big fan of Ha Jin. To have originated in China, his English language skills are amazing. Perhaps I find all his novels interesting because I have been lucky enough to travel to China and was able to observe their culture. History, especially political history is not my forte. So, I enjoy an eas......more

Goodreads review by Mal on April 06, 2017

Who is the betrayed, and who the betrayer? It’s clear from the outset that there’s plenty of blame to spread around in this deeply engaging novel about a Chinese mole in the CIA. Gary (nee Weimin) Shang is a young secret agent for Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists in the culminating days of the Revolution. A......more

Goodreads review by Jill on March 27, 2015

About a third of the way through A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin writes this about graduate students: “They mistook verbosity for eloquence and ambiguity for beauty, worshipping the evasive and fuzzy while looking down on lucidity and straightforwardness.” Indeed, Ha Jin himself believes in lucidity and st......more

Goodreads review by Ron on November 25, 2014

Lately, we’ve been consumed with how our own government is spying on us, but, of course, there are foreign agents peering at us, too. My friends in the game say corporate espionage — stealing manufacturing and software secrets — is where the action is now, which is enough to make an old spook pine f......more

Goodreads review by Minh on March 01, 2021

Khác xa Đợi chờ, Con đường phản bội là cuộc đấu tranh hướng ra ngoại hàm - giữa quê hương xứ sở và khát khao tự do, của một gián điệp nhị trùng, nhưng cũng đồng thời là của chính ông như một tiểu thuyết bán tự truyện về nội tâm mình. Văn học di dân luôn bị gắn mác một mặt nào đó như là 'phản động',......more