Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 22 The Making of D2

D2 was born in Chengdu in 1955 and came of age during a period of organized brutality and mass suffering that left no one unchanged. She conformed to survive, unlike her parents. Her diligence as a laborer and her unforgiving hectoring of others earned her a coveted bed of straw in a loft above the pigs’ quarters. By candlelight, she read everything she could, and in particular, mathematics. She was in and out of the Red Guard before puberty. Her habits as an enforcer made her a natural drill sergeant and then she was made one formally, too. At eighteen she joined the Party and the Army, and married another young idealist of the same last name. By nineteen she was a mother. The husband’s career was fast-tracked into climbing Communist Party ranks and he disappeared from her life. With no parents and no husband, the demands of taking care of the toddling Wuang Huizong did not jibe with her job. She led, at that time, a training program for People’s Liberation Army drill teams, and she traveled all over China. She asked to be reassigned to a unit bound to Chengdu, preferably one that better suited her more mathematically inclined self. It was then that she entered the Army’s Security Apparatus.

In Security, D2 acquired basic skills in computer science, cryptography, and espionage. Survival in the Cultural Revolution had been her on-the-job training in management and business administration. She led a burgeoning effort in international corporate espionage, and dreamt up a bigger role for herself, one she was able to sell to her superiors.

She and young Huizong moved to Macau. By day and night she was a fearless, fear-inducing, and charming rising executive in the gambling and prostitution businesses, with some dabbling in trafficking girls, narcotics, and organs. Her casino clients were entranced by her Napoleonic personality. In the hour-after-hour conversations, in the year-upon-year they would spend with her, she acquired nearly bombproof English and an education in businesses from aeronautics to zeolites, all in exchange for a few free drinks, nicer rooms, and strange pussy she doled out with all the care and consideration of Halloween candy. By day and night she also ran a group of undercover PLA agents, male and female, who made important contacts with the same—or at least the same sort of—easily compromised businessmen traveling through, sampling what Macau had to offer.

Like mother, like daughter: Huizong was a natural at everything mathematical. When Max and friends made their Macau trip, Huizong was in her first year at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It would be another five years before she and her mother were again able to live close to one another.