The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  In the café, he invited me to order some pastry. “Be my guest, pick something,” he said, opening his leather billfold, which was shiny from use. I chose two pieces of macadamia biscotti, one for him and the other for myself. He paid for the biscuits and his coffee and my latte. The jazz was loud, a woman’s hoarse voice scatting as if she were constipated, so we went to sit in a corner where it was quieter. Larry looked nervous and kept smiling, his face showing more wrinkles than it had when I’d run into him a month before. He blinked his lackluster eyes. I explained I’d been reporting a news story in my column that involved both Haili and him.

  He looked astonished, exhaling heavily. “What’s it about?” he asked and stopped midway through pouring Splenda out of a packet.

  “About a novel Haili wrote.” I pulled some pages of her manuscript out of my shoulder bag.

  He stirred his coffee with a wooden stick. “I know she’s been working on a book, but she hasn’t told me what it’s about.”

  “The main characters are a young couple—a Chinese woman and her American husband, who was tragically killed on 9/11. His name is Larry Clements.”

  “Really? You mean I’m in the book?” Larry looked oddly flattered.

  “Yes,” I said, “but you’re supposed to have disappeared four years ago, lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Here’s how Haili describes you when you first appear in the novel.” I flipped to a page marked with a Post-it and began to read my translation aloud to him: “Larry was six foot one with long limbs, yellow hair, and melting blue eyes, and a youthful bounce in his step. When he spoke, I felt the air around me vibrating with his caressing, lulling voice. Though a businessman on Wall Street, he was also a philosopher, passionate about Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Lao-tzu. Furthermore, he was highly knowledgeable about fine arts, butterflies and spiders, and European history. On our first date he talked in detail about how a nuclear power plant was constructed. I was deeply impressed and amazed. What a man! I kept saying to myself.”

  To my surprise, Larry giggled. “I wish I were like that. Honest to God, I don’t even know how to build a table.”

  I was nonplussed but pressed on. “Okay, here’s a passage describing your ass.” I turned to another page and read again: “His backside, white like cream and perfect in size, dazzles me and makes my breathing flutter. I caress his skin, soft and smooth like silk, which reminds me of a baby’s cheek. The marvelous feel turns me on, and I start showering kisses on his behind like mad, his skin wet with my tears. Oh, I’m so fortunate, so happy! I murmur in my heart and close my eyes.” I paused for effect, then added, “That’s quite a piece of ass, isn’t it?”

  Larry blushed. He gave me a lopsided grin and said, “To tell you the honest truth, my butt is hairy and perhaps smelly.”

  I laughed out loud, and he cackled too, one eyebrow tilting higher than the other. Our laughter drew the reproachful eyes of the half-Asian barista, barely out of her teens and wearing a bleached pageboy, a nose stud, and eye shadow that brought to mind a panda. I gave Larry an A for sportsmanship and said, “Tell me, to what degree have you been involved in this novel? Did you really not know anything about it?”

  “I knew Haili was working on a book. That’s about it. I suppose this is what anyone who’s married to a writer always worries about—or hopes for: being a character in your wife’s novel.”

  “It’s intended to become a best seller in China.”

  “I have some idea about the Chinese book market. Over there you can sell lots of copies, but books are so cheap that you don’t really get paid royalties. Even worse, there’s no way to keep track of how many copies of a book they’ve actually sold. And every best seller has a couple of pirated editions there.”

  “Do you know Haili announced publicly that she sold a movie adaptation of her novel to Hollywood for 1.3 million dollars?”

  “Jesus.” Larry looked tempted to roll his eyes. “I wouldn’t believe her if I were you. Sometimes her brain can get all worked up with wild fantasies and can’t separate fiction and reality. She’s an artist, very visionary, you know.”

  “But it’s not a fantasy, it’s a lie. The scandal has already been exposed in the Chinese media. I wish I didn’t have to tell you this.”

  There was a long silence—even the jazz was gone.

  Larry raised his head; his eyes flickered as though he was hurt. “Look, Danlin,” he said, “I shouldn’t go on gossiping about Haili like this. She can be nuts sometimes, and you shouldn’t take her words at face value. She’s too imaginative, all right?”

  “I may not be taking her seriously, but others are. She has been giving interviews. She’s amassed an Internet following of young girls who have already gone gaga over her. Her photos are all over the Chinese media.”

  Larry said, “Just keep in mind that I have nothing to do with the book. She’s the writer, that’s her business. I’m not involved.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Larry.” I felt relieved and thanked him for meeting me. If he wasn’t involved, that also meant he wasn’t backing whatever lawsuit Haili claimed to be filing against me. I wondered how he could be so cavalier about a scandalous novel that mentioned him by name, but like most Americans, he must not care about anything that happened outside his own country.

  —

  I TOOK THE SUBWAY back to Flushing. As I stepped onto Main Street, I remembered I needed a newly published memoir by a Zen Buddhist master in Taipei, so I went to the World Journal Bookstore. Beyond the traffic held up by a prolonged stoplight, an advertisement for Continental Airlines flaunted a row of characters: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU HAD A TÊTE-À-TÊTE WITH YOUR OLD FRIEND? A giant Boeing, painted on the board, was forever sailing above those words, apparently toward the other shore of the Pacific. Another billboard admonished: ONE PERSON ADDICTED TO GAMBLING CAN RUIN A WHOLE FAMILY! A third commanded: SAY ALOHA TO ATM FEES! At the corner of Thirty-eighth Avenue a kebab stand was sending up little spirals of smoke, and the air was fragrant with the aroma of roasted meat. I stopped to buy a stick of grilled lamb.

  “Two, right?” suggested the fiftyish woman behind the stand. She wore canvas oversleeves and smiled at me with a face like a dried apple. I often stopped at her stand; she was from Gansu province and knew me by sight; my usual order from her was two kebabs. I liked the exotic but genuine taste and the tender texture of her meats in spite of the strong seasoning she brushed on them over the charcoal fire.

  I gave her a single and four quarters for the two sticks of lamb. Chewing the meat, I made my way up Thirty-eighth Avenue toward the bookstore. In front of a Cantonese restaurant I passed a straight-shouldered man leaning against a BMW and talking into his phone. “Fuck their ancestors!” he cried in Mandarin with a Fujian accent, his long chin jutted up. “Of course we won’t let them. When you get there, rough them up some, but don’t kill anyone.” He hocked up a gob of phlegm and spat it on the curb. His bulging eyes glanced at a young woman and a little girl as they passed by.

  His words almost stopped me in my tracks, but I continued walking, keeping him in the corner of my eye. I recognized him—he was from the Chinese consulate. I had seen him several times at public gatherings. He seemed too coarse to be a diplomat—he must have been a bureaucrat or the head of a guard unit. Why was he hiding in this side street, barking such frightening orders into his phone? Who was he speaking to? Why did he sound so exasperated?

  The store didn’t carry the book I needed, so I headed back to my apartment, strolling south along Main Street. The sidewalk bustled with pedestrians, mostly tourists and shoppers. At a storefront, a sign, planted in a pile of lychees, announced in Chinese: FRESH, JUST ARRIVED—$1.75 PER LB. There were also big pink peaches—four for a dollar, cherries at $1.49 a pound, golden husk melons at ninety-nine cents apiece, pitayas, pineapples, coconuts, longans, papayas, fresh dates, assorted beans, peanuts, mushrooms, walnuts, all at reasonable prices. I loved the groceries on this street—even their messiness gave me a feeling of energy an
d vitality. It reminded me of a regular county seat in China. The air smelled clean today, without the stench of rotten vegetables and fish, thanks to a thunder shower early in the morning. The sky was opening, islands of clouds floating across the blue, driven by a late September breeze.

  Crossing Forty-first Avenue, I saw more than twenty Falun Gong, some of them in yellow tunics, standing before the public library, each holding a placard. HEAVEN WILL WIPE OUT THE COMMUNISTS! LET THE CHINESE PEOPLE HAVE OUR COUNTRY BACK! RENOUNCE YOUR PARTY MEMBERSHIP, NOW! NEVER TOO LATE TO REDEEM YOURSELF! CHOOSE YOUR FUTURE—HEAVEN OR HELL! In silence they waved the placards above their heads.

  “They’re so bold,” I grunted under my breath. I didn’t like Falun Gong much. They were zealous, uncompromising, mixing religion with politics, although in China many of them, classified as practitioners of a subversive cult, were victims of brutal suppression, crippled in torture chambers and trapped in prisons and labor camps. Haili’s mother, a chatty old coot I’d never gotten along with, used to practice Falun Gong’s breathing exercises every morning in Victory Park in downtown Changchun and would rage at anyone who raised doubts about her religious group. She even berated her bewildered husband for being an atheist without any spiritual life. Then one day she was summoned to the police station. Afterward she cut her ties to Falun Gong completely, never mentioned them again, and began to practice tai chi instead. She also warned her daughter, in her phone calls and emails, not to mix with the believers in the States.

  As I crossed Kissena Boulevard, a black Land Rover pulled up to the library and released six beefy men, all Asian, all wearing work boots and dark sunglasses. They stormed the demonstrators and began throwing them to the stone steps. They seized the placards and stamped them to pieces; they wielded leather straps on the believers and struck them as they screamed. A woman shrieked as a thug beat her and pulled her hair. She was a nurse, still in her scrubs and sneakers.

  The demonstrators cried out, but none of them fought back, taking the beating as meekly as though they had prepared for it, as though it had happened before. The passersby stopped to watch, and a few gasped. Some stepped closer to take a better look, but no one intervened. On impulse I walked up the steps to the attackers and, shaking with outrage and nerves, shouted, “Stop! Don’t use force!”

  “Go to hell!” yelled one of the thugs. But he stopped to look me over.

  “Who sent you here?” I cried.

  “Who the fuck are you?” another voice jumped in.

  “Why are you doing this?” I shot back.

  “Go ask your mother!” barked another man.

  Before I could say anything more, all six of the men, as if on cue, withdrew into the SUV. After four slams of the doors, the Land Rover pulled away and merged into traffic.

  “The Chinese consulate is behind them,” a heavyset Falun Gong woman said quietly, wiping her bleeding nose with a wad of tissues.

  A man with a black eye struggled to his feet and told me, “I recognized two of them. They’ve threatened us before.”

  My mind was awhirl. Now that the attack was over, I remembered that this wasn’t my business—I felt uneasy listening to them. I wasn’t Falun Gong, and their fight had little to do with me, so I walked back down the library steps, leaving the scene behind me.

  As I turned the corner, I suddenly remembered the bulging-eyed man I had passed on Thirty-eighth Avenue. He’d been directing the attack from there. I felt a twinge in my stomach, and I turned around, hurrying back to the demonstrators to listen and write down their words. I also told them to call the police and report the incident, but they said they’d done that before and the cops couldn’t help them. Nevertheless, the nurse dialed the police, saying they must update the record of violence committed against them.

  TEN

  I spoke to Kaiming about the attack in Flushing, and he was outraged. I admired him for his anger—there weren’t many Chinese immigrants here whose hackles could still be raised like his. Just a few weeks ago a young woman had been assaulted on Maple Avenue in Flushing by a complete stranger, a man who’d slashed her face with a knife, but though many pedestrians heard her screaming for help in the dark, not a single person had intervened. They might have thought that the attacker was her husband or boyfriend. It was hard to persuade immigrants that domestic violence was unlawful assault, not a family’s private matter. Kaiming told me to report on the Falun Gong incident, but not to antagonize the Chinese consulate overtly.

  I reported the attack for GNA under a pen name, Elegant Brother, that I had used a number of times and grown attached to. In my account, I emphasized that only by chance had I run into the man who was directing the six thugs from a side street. As they’d attacked the demonstrators, I had tried to intervene and question them, but they’d only cursed at me. I wrote about this now not only to report the facts but also to condemn this kind of lawless intimidation. “We are in the United States,” I concluded, “where any act like this will have legal consequences. The victims have already reported the attack to the police.”

  The article was posted and picked up by many Chinese-language websites and newspapers as part of their daily news aggregations. Though I’d used the pseudonym, I was startled to find that some people identified me as the author and even wrote me directly, posting their comments on my column. “We need more of this type of on-the-scene journalism, Feng Danlin,” one reader wrote. “Let those hoodlums know they broke the law and will face charges.” Messages like that disquieted me, because it showed my style of writing bore some signature that could not easily be disguised.

  The Chinese consulate called us the next afternoon. I was in Kaiming’s office when he took the call and let the official rant at him, insisting that we had distorted the facts and that no one on their staff had heard of the incident until it appeared in the news. My boss denied that he had known anything about the report prior to its publication. “Mr. Tao, we publish about a hundred pieces of news a day,” he said calmly, “and I can’t personally check every one of them before it’s posted. But I can assure you that the writer of this article is not our employee. Elegant Brother is a pseudonym used by several of our freelancers.”

  Although it was Lucheng who approved pieces for publication, Kaiming as the boss could publish anything he wanted to. He had read my article before it was put out. Kaiming paused to listen. The caller, Vice Consul Tao, must have been demanding to know the author’s name, for my boss said, “No, it’s not by Feng Danlin at all. If it were, it would have appeared in his regular column—he’s been too busy to write anything else. As I said, this writer happened to come upon the scene when the attack took place. Please read the article carefully—you can see that the author hardly expressed any personal opinion. He or she just recorded the incident and quoted the victims.”

  Seated in a swivel chair and chewing the inside of my bottom lip, I tried to guess what the caller was saying. Kaiming spoke again after a small chuckle. “How could we have known something like that would happen and dispatched a reporter beforehand? Like I said, the author of the article stumbled upon the scene by accident….All right, I hear you, Mr. Tao. We’ll be more careful and won’t rush to publish anything like that again.”

  Hanging up, Kaiming heaved a sigh. “We might be in a pickle. Bastards, they’ll never leave us alone.”

  I didn’t know what to say and felt I’d done what I ought to do.

  —

  I GOT SOMEWHAT CARRIED AWAY and wrote my next column about my meeting with Larry. I reported that even Haili’s husband couldn’t trust her and had himself been completely unaware of her novel, even as he was depicted as the saintly husband within its pages. “In fact,” I continued, “I had coffee with Larry Clements last Friday. He is congenial and unassuming, forty-something, five foot eight, his hair scattered with gray. He was dumbfounded when I told him about his wife’s newfound literary stardom. Then he said I mustn’t take her seriously. ‘She can be nuts sometimes,’ he told me. But everyone
can see that this hoax of a novel was not due to absentmindedness. Yan Haili is a liar. Granted, she might have been inveigled into the scheme by her publisher, Jiao Fanping, and her editor, Gu Bing. It is time the three of them admitted their wrongdoing publicly; otherwise, we won’t let them off the hook.”

  This article put new pressure on the threesome, but what shocked me was that Haili, without warning, turned up at my place the next evening. Katie happened to be there. I was unsettled to see my ex-wife’s figure, double her normal size, through the peephole, but I braced myself and undid the door chain. As soon as Haili stepped in, Katie said to me, “I should leave.”

  “No, please stay,” I urged, winking at her. I needed her to see and hear everything.

  Haili glared at me but made no comment and just nodded at my girlfriend, so Katie stayed. She poured a cup of jasmine tea for our guest and placed a bowl of spiced fava beans beside the teacup. Haili glanced at the snack contemptuously. With a fistful of the beans, Katie retreated to the papasan chair near the window, about ten feet away from the two of us.

  Haili appeared a little haggard; probably she’d been unable to sleep well lately. “You’ve become more and more petty. Why did you go to Larry behind my back?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you publicly threaten to take me to court? I had to do something. Honestly, I was shocked you’d kept Larry in the dark about your novel.”

  “So? That doesn’t justify bringing him into this.”

  “Of course it does. What would you have me do? Kiss your ass and just sit tight waiting for annihilation?” I attempted a light tone but must have sounded quite desperate.

  Katie tittered, then stopped short.

  “I know you,” Haili said. “You’re vindictive and want to destroy my marriage.”

  I nearly burst out at her: Didn’t you dump me like a bag of trash? Didn’t you drive me to the brink of suicide? But I told her instead, “Your husband is wealthy. If he and you joined resources to bring a suit against me, I could lose everything. I’m scared shitless by just the thought of it.”