My father didn’t want to know what, if anything, the FBI had on him. Or at least that’s what my mother claimed. But after he died, as I sifted through his United Nations personnel documents and wartime correspondence to and from China, I couldn’t help thinking Dad must have been investigated at some point. So in 2014 I made a Freedom of Information Act request for his files. The following year I received two zipped digital folders containing more than a hundred pages of heavily redacted FBI records pertaining to my deceased father, Maurice T. Liu. Those copious field reports, sworn affidavits, and telegrams signed, alarmingly, HOOVER , would fascinate, enrage, and unmoor me.

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My dad cut a singular figure. From his scholarly Chinese father, he inherited a penetrating gaze and thick, wavy black hair, which he parted sideways above the same discreet widow’s peak that he passed down to me.…