Here’s what happened. At the age of six, this self-proclaimed woman of twenty had been undergoing hypnosis therapy for her anxiety when she mentioned incest during a session. Over the next two years, the therapist used the clues she provided while in a trance to deduce and finally solve the case, working out that between the ages of five and six the girl had been repeatedly raped by her father. She’d completely forgotten this traumatic episode, but hypnosis had brought the memories back. This coupled with her parents’ messy divorce was enough evidence to bring the father to court, where he was almost bankrupted by the legal fees, and his reputation was destroyed. The therapist went on to write a bestselling book about the affair, turning their trauma, fake or real, into gold. With his final words, written before his suicide, the father wanted the girl to understand that he would die bearing a grudge—he and she were both victims of persecution. As an adult, the girl gradually came to understand that her father might truly have been innocent, that it was the therapist who’d induced her, while she was little, to say what she did—maybe for fame or chasing a Freudian theory—so her words could then be further twisted into testimony against her father. The outcome had been terrible. Now all grown up, she believed it was impossible to completely forget such a harrowing event. No matter what Freud might have hypothesized about humanity’s ability to repress memory, the fact that she didn’t remember these rapes could only mean they never happened in the first place.
Hongmei read through Nini’s email printouts, her eyes lingering on the final paragraph: “This will be my last message to you. I know I’ve disppointed you, because you weren’t looking for a girlfriend like me.” The same misspelling.
She asked Nini if she really believed the secret talker was a twenty-year-old girl.
Nini said she was utterly confused and had no idea what she did or didn’t believe.
They were at the campus sports field. Half the townspeople had congregated here, watching some radical students get ready to burn the flag. The protests in San Francisco, a two-hour drive away, had been going on for two months now, though this was the first major activity at the university. One student was reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech over a loudspeaker while others climbed the pole and brought down the flag. As with most other places in America, sixty-five percent of the people in this town were fat. A visual reminder of their wealth, their excess—something Hongmei hadn’t understood until she moved here. The overweight populace was raising a cheer when the police arrived. At the same time, the flames started.
Police cars surrounded the crowd. An obese police officer waved at people he recognized. The students led a chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.”