His father went to the United States frequently. Not once a year for a conference, but sometimes three, four times annually. He brought back strange gifts: a baseball cap from a team Jian didn't recognize, a mug that said "World's Okayest Dad," a T-shirt with a picture of a bear and the words "California Republic." Jian's classmates had fathers who went to Guangzhou for business, or Chongqing for family. None of them had fathers who casually mentioned "meetings in Washington" or "research exchanges at Stanford."
"Your father is special," his mother would say when Jian asked why. "He works on important things."
The important things meant long absences. It meant phone calls at odd hours, his father speaking in English in the other room, voice low and careful. It meant coming home from school to find his mother crying quietly in the kitchen, then pretending she hadn't been.
By high school, Jian understood that his father's work was not ordinary. Ordinary PLA officers didn't get visas to the United States so easily. Ordinary researchers didn't have encrypted phones or colleagues who visited in the middle of the night. Ordinary men didn't come home from trips abroad looking like they'd aged ten years in two weeks.
But Jian had his own problems. The gaokao was coming, and it was the only thing that mattered.