Is China Running a Really Half-Assed Honeypot Operation on Me?

Let’s look at the evidence

The news that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with a woman thought to be a Chinese spy was shocking. The scandal raises serious questions, including: What are China’s goals with AI? Are our secrets safe? And is there any chance — no matter how remote — that our intimate partners are foreign agents using us for information?

I’ll admit that the last question has been on my mind recently. I rarely write about my personal life, but my wife has some behaviors that are, frankly, odd. And the tale of Huang being seduced and manipulated by a cunning and beautiful spy seemed eerily familiar…albeit with several extremely notable differences. I don’t want to be paranoid, but I have started to wonder if my wife might be part of a really shitty, D-minus Chinese “honeypot” operation.

I met my wife at a Popeye’s in Skokie, Illinois. I was in Skokie doing standup, she was in Skokie for reasons that she’s never explained. She walked up to me, and — in heavily-accented, broken English — said “You Jeff Mau? I blow you. I blow you now — hurry, let’s go!”

That’s not the type of thing that normally happens to me. I’m no troll, but it’s not like I commonly get unsolicited offers of oral sex. And while this woman — my future wife, Jane Baseball — was what rural folk might call “barn fodder”, it still seemed strange. But she was insistent: “Let’s go! Blow time!” she wailed. “Blow time now, get you things! Hurry!” I honestly went with her mostly to get her to stop yelling about blow jobs in public.

After receiving what can only be described as a “surly” blow job next to the dumpster behind a Popeye’s, my future wife yelled “Okay — the end! You marry me now!” When I expressed shock, she only yelled louder: “I BLOW YOU, NOW WE MARRY! LET’S GO, GET YOU THINGS!” When I tried to explain that that’s not how it works in America, she shrieked “I AMERICA! I AMERICA, BORN HERE! FLEENT CEE-TEE, MEE-SHEE-GAN!” I considered pointing out that people from Flint don’t call it “Flint City”, but I was also kind of afraid of seeming racist.

In hindsight, this meet cute fits the classic template of a “honeypot” scam (even if it contained several grim oddities within that template). The archetype of a honeypot scam is a gorgeous femme fatale encountering her mark at a Monaco casino and then enticing him upstairs for a night of mind-blowing sex — is that meaningfully different from a flat-faced wench with the hands of a stevedore intimidating a guy into three minutes of angry mouth friction on a pile of trash by a Midwest chicken restaurant? I’d argue “no”. And since I’m not in Monaco, an intelligence operation would need to meet me where I am — it’s really my fault that the encounter only resembled a James Bond film in some ways.

If my wife Jane Baseball is a spy, then she might not be a very good one. The name “Jane Baseball” is uncommon in America, but it could be a name that a lazy spy who didn’t want to do any homework might come up with. Jane Baseball speaks English badly but Mandarin fluently, though she continues to insist that she was raised by a farmer and a movie star in “Fleent Cee-Tee”. Several times, I’ve caught her fiddling with the knobs on a radio that she keeps behind a false wall in the basement, which I’ve often heard emitting male voices speaking in Mandarin and the occasional broadcast of Chinese military anthems. When I ask Jane Baseball about any of this, she yells “Shut up dumb American! Go protest data center, dumb Yankee pig!” Which is something a spy might say, although maybe she just really values her personal space.

She’s also always trying to get me to write about Taiwan. “YOU WRITE ABOUT TAIWAN TODAY!”, she’ll yell at me most mornings. “YOU TELL WORLD: THEY SMELLY PIGS! THEY LEADERS TERRORISTS — THEY IGNORE CAIRO DECLARATION OF 1943!” On the rare occasion when I do write about Taiwan, she says “I SEND TO MOTHER!” and then takes photos of the computer screen with a tiny camera hidden in a pen. She’ll then pin a single red sock to the laundry line in the yard, and ten minutes later a mailman who is not our normal mailman shows up, takes only the pen, and hops into a 1969 Jaguar E-Type and speeds away.

Is that normal? What’s your marriage like? I feel a bit used, but I’m also not sure I can do better. I have a friend who says that Jane Baseball can’t be a honeypot because she’s crabby, unsophisticated, and — in my friend’s words — “has a face like a bag of smashed assholes”. But I don’t know; surely some honeypots are better than others, right? It makes sense to send the bewitching, erudite one to seduce the head of a company that makes cutting-edge technology, and a blogger might get one who lays on the couch all day eating Cool Whip and playing Chinese casino games on her phone. I hate to admit it, but all the pieces fit!

Don’t get me wrong: I love my wife. I wish she’d stop nagging me to get a government security clearance and take her on a tour of the Pentagon, but I love her. And I respect her freedom to wear disguises, receive encoded messages from a mysterious man known only as “Onyx”, and sing the Chinese national anthem every evening at sundown without me getting suspicious. And I won’t take it personally when she glowers at me and says “I can’t believe I get assigned to worthless, joke-writing LOSER!” That’s just her love language. And even if this isn’t the world’s most sophisticated honeypot operation, it might be the honeypot operation I deserve.

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