The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  Before I could counter him, Kaiming raised his hand. “Fanping, let’s find a quiet place where we can have lunch and talk calmly, all right? My colleagues here have to work and shouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “Okay, I wouldn’t mind that,” the visitor grunted.

  Kaiming whispered that I should stay behind, and I nodded my agreement. I was not only angry but also rattled by my exchange with Jiao—I had to stay away to gather myself. The three of them left, all smoking Jiao’s Panda cigarettes. They went to Duckling, a Thai place down the street. Though I knew Jiao had plenty of pull back home, his threat didn’t bother me. I felt confident that he and his collaborators couldn’t do much to hurt me here. I congratulated myself for having anticipated this kind of intimidation and getting naturalized as soon as I had held my green card for five years. I felt that for once I had outsmarted China.

  With a squirt of ketchup, I hurriedly finished the ham sandwich I’d brought along for lunch, then headed out for a walk. I again went to the construction site on Crufts Street, where a small clubhouse was being put up. Beside it stood a row of mailboxes that resembled a low aluminum wall. The last of the four apartment houses had its roof now, and workers were busy installing windows on the top floor. A parking lot, just paved and marked with numbers, stretched alongside a driveway, sending up ripples of fumes in the sunshine. I spoke with a young Mexican worker by the name of Sergio for a while. To my amazement, he tossed out a word or phrase in Mandarin now and again, such as “no problem,” “not bad,” and “a little bit.” He told me that he had worked in a Chinese restaurant for six years, washing dishes, peeling shrimp, cutting vegetables, chopping meats. He was going to leave New York when the Indian summer was over. “You can find work down South because people there still build homes in winter,” he said, his large eyes smiling. “I hate the snow.” He sucked in his breath as if some snowflakes had just fallen down his neck. He might go to Atlanta, where he said there were a lot of Mexicans.

  At one twenty, I headed back to the office. In the distance, on the brownish beach, a band of young boys were roughhousing and showing off to one another, doing handstands and cartwheels. I wondered if they were cutting school. One of them could do back handsprings, two in a row, but when he tried a backflip he landed on his knees. Beyond them, seabirds were standing motionless or skittering along the edge of the frothing surf, fluttering their wings and tails. Every now and then the birds let out squawks. Two speedboats chased each other, drawing whitish wakes in the bay. A breeze was wafting over a whiff of stinking seaweed. In spite of the fall, the sea looked warm and inviting.

  Kaiming and Lucheng were already at GNA when I returned; they both looked more relaxed now. My boss didn’t say anything about their lunch, but later I asked Lucheng how it had gone. He shook his head and said, “Jiao is a pain in the ass.”

  “Why is he so angry at America?” I asked. “Did he really live here?”

  “He did, on the West Coast. He lost his wife to another man there, so perhaps he has a number of reasons to be angry.” Lucheng shrugged. “He still seems to want to do business here, in any case. He told us he was planning to start a publishing house in Brooklyn.”

  “To bring out books in Chinese or English?”

  “Both.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Hard to tell. He said he’d been looking for a representative in New York. Danlin, you shouldn’t rile Jiao up anymore. We didn’t realize he was such a loose cannon—he could cause a lot of damage.”

  “I shouldn’t rile Jiao up anymore?” I said, appalled. It was a moment before I could speak again. “All this time,” I said, “I’ve been following your directions—yours and Kaiming’s.”

  “The situation is different now,” Lucheng said patiently. “Kaiming said we might do business with him to expand our own publishing arm. Jiao is extremely ambitious, and so are we.”

  For the rest of the afternoon I kept mulling it over. It seemed clear that my boss was capable of cooperating with Jiao eventually. Just before the end of the day, Kaiming called me into his office and told me to be more careful when I wrote about the scandal. He stressed that I should continue to report on it, but with more restraint, and that I should avoid personal attacks. I couldn’t help but wonder what Kaiming had promised Jiao, and how I could continue to do my work when my boss’s loyalties were now divided.

  That evening I got a message from my editor at the Writers Publishing House. My book of essays had been pulled from the list “due to instructions from above.” She did not elaborate and just said she was sorry about the cancellation but couldn’t do a thing. The two thousand copies already bound would have to be pulped.

  Just like that. I was so stunned I didn’t go to bed with Katie that night. She slept alone, swaddled in a woolen blanket. Through the opened door of my bedroom, I could hear her murmur from time to time. For hours I sat alone before my computer, thinking about all the hours I’d put into those essays—all the time I’d spent in front of this screen stringing words together to become a book. I hadn’t felt a loss this keenly in a long time, as if my book were a person.

  The next stroke came at work the following day, when we heard from The Readers’ Guide Weekly that they would no longer reprint my articles, not even the vetted and modified versions that had passed through the censorship bureau in Shanghai. The editor at the weekly did not explain and just said that no article by Feng Danlin would be allowed to see print. It was official: I’d been blacklisted.

  The Ministry of National Security and the Party’s Propaganda Department maintain several lists, organized by degree of “unacceptability.” The top one consists of names that can’t even be mentioned in newspapers and magazines—these names are also wiped from the Chinese Internet. By their very nature, the workings of these lists are secret.

  No one in the office was discussing the ban openly. Even though I didn’t know for certain if I could fully trust Lucheng anymore, he was my best source of information. I asked him to tell me everything he knew about the blacklists. He sighed, then said, “I don’t know which one of them you’re on. The way these things operate is that they give you as little information as possible—they keep you in the dark, and let your own fear be your worst censor.” He paused, then seemed to reach a decision. “When we got lunch the other day, Jiao Fanping tried to convince Kaiming to fire you,” he told me quietly. “He said you were labeled an advocate of the independence of Tibet and Taiwan—a separatist—and a Falun Gong supporter. He said that to the Chinese government you were a criminal.”

  I let out my breath. “What did Kaiming say?”

  “He doesn’t seem willing to let you go. He told Jiao that he wouldn’t want to get sued and there were employment regulations here, so he couldn’t fire you without a solid reason.”

  I nodded, relieved for the moment. I said, “I wonder if he’s really afraid of a lawsuit, or if he wants me to keep doing the dirty work here.”

  “You have to be careful, brother. Those bastards must be desperate—they could do anything. They already have.”

  By presenting me as a secessionist to the Ministry of National Security and the Propaganda Department, Gu Bing and Jiao Fanping had succeeded in killing my book. I needed to figure out how to respond.

  The following day Kaiming told me that he had contacted some colleagues on the mainland, and found that any article that mentioned Feng Danlin, even in passing, was automatically blocked in Chinese cyberspace. That meant that no publication in China was permitted to reprint anything I wrote. I felt a grim satisfaction that I had ended up on the top blacklist. One magazine in Guangzhou even removed my name from a recent interview with a Hong Kong philanthropist that both Wenna and I had conducted in a hotel on Park Avenue. She was listed as the only interviewer, though she had just introduced the man formally and I had posed all the questions. I was crushed.

  —

  THE NEXT WEEK began with a large white envelope delivered to me at our office. As th
e strapping UPS man was pulling away in his van, I stood at my window, wondering where the letter had come from. The sight of the sender’s name followed by “Esq.” set my heart racing. I ripped open the envelope and began to read. The letter was a summons stating that litigation against me was under way and that I was being sued for half a million dollars in damages. The plaintiffs were both Yan Haili and Jiao Fanping, represented by a law firm in Manhattan, and they were suing me for libel. Though shaken, I wondered if they would actually spend the money for the lawsuit. They’d already poured so much energy into trying to silence me, but everything they’d done so far had been in the economy of favors and politics, not dollars and yuan. Jiao was successful in China, but I didn’t believe he could afford the legal costs here. Once converted into dollars, the Chinese yuan, worth about twelve U.S. cents each, would not amount to much, and it was unlikely that Jiao would invest in litigation that might not guarantee a return. Haili didn’t seem to have the means either—unless Larry had agreed to foot the bills.

  I shared the summons with my boss. After reading it, Kaiming seemed relieved and smiled secretively. “I told you to be careful,” he said. “It looks like this case might drag on for a while.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was angry about his assigning me the scandalous case and now abandoning me to face the charges alone. Then I realized that Kaiming was relieved because they were not suing GNA, which should have been included in such an action. Unlike an individual, a company would be more able to pay the damages should it lose the case. Isolated and unprotected, I was helpless in fighting the accusation alone. Probably Kaiming and Lucheng had worked out some agreement with Jiao Fanping when he had popped up here the previous week. I felt betrayed but said nothing, knowing GNA would never intervene on my behalf.

  When I booted up my computer in the office and accessed my email, the newest message was from Haili. She wrote: “We’re going to sue your pants off. You might have to borrow Katie’s outfits.”

  Despite my panic, I responded immediately. “The public is still waiting to see the movie contract you signed with Panorama Pictures and also to see the translations of your great novel into thirty languages,” I wrote, my fingers punching hard against the keys. “When does the Chinese edition come out? I will do a write-up, I promise. How about the English translation? Has it been delivered to the White House yet? Any feedback from President Bush? Don’t forget to send him and the First Lady an autographed copy. Laura Bush is an avid reader of novels. How about the Nobel Prize nomination? Have you begun composing your acceptance speech yet? You should start considering what to wear for that grand occasion.”

  That evening I showed Katie the summons. I wanted to know if I should hire an attorney without delay. She said one of her colleagues, Rudolph Jones, had once been a trial lawyer and we should talk to him first.

  SIXTEEN

  Rudolph was a black man in his mid-thirties; he was compact and wore a restrained Afro and wire-rimmed glasses that complemented his delicate, intelligent features. He lived in Douglaston, an upscale area in Queens. His spacious living room was lined floor to ceiling with shelves of books and journals. At the far end of the room, next to the wide bow window, stood a large birdcage in which a parakeet perched, its feathers shiny and gray, its bill cherry red. On the other side of the window was a potted camellia, about five feet tall but without flowers among its glossy leaves. As soon as Katie and I sat down on a blue corduroy sofa, the bird squawked, “Hello, Luke wan’ cookie.”

  “Quiet, Luke, you just ate breakfast,” Rudolph scolded. “You’ll get high cholesterol.”

  I glanced at a beer stein sitting on a bookshelf containing tiny chocolate bird-cookies. Does cholesterol level have something to do with sugar intake? I wondered. The bird hopped onto the other wooden perch in the cage and shook its wings, its head drawn in a little. Katie said with a smile, “Luke is being naughty again. Does he have a sweet tooth?”

  “No, he just wants attention,” Rudolph answered. “He ate lots of cornflakes and blueberries just now.”

  I gathered that the bird might feel lonely when its owner wasn’t home. This place was very quiet, if not isolated. Through the east-facing window I could see only pointed cypresses and junipers in the backyard and the roof of another condo building. There were no roads or traffic in sight.

  I showed Rudolph the summons from Haili and Jiao’s attorney. He adjusted his glasses and started reading it while his bony hand lifted a cup of coffee to his lips. He smelled of piney shampoo. The previous night Katie had spoken to him on the phone, so he already knew the situation. The Oriental rug on the parquet floor displayed a mahout-led elephant, astride whose back a young couple sat, the young man wearing a turban and piping a bamboo flute while the woman tapped a tambourine over her head. Katie picked a few pistachios from a redwood bowl on the coffee table and began cracking their shells. She loved nuts, any kind, even water chestnuts and coconuts.

  Rudolph put down the letter and gave a small sigh. I asked, “Do you know anything about this law firm?”

  “I’m familiar with it.”

  “Is it a major one?”

  “Not really. A middling firm, I would say.”

  “Rudolph,” Katie broke in, “what do you think Danlin should do? Should he hire a lawyer?”

  “They don’t have a case,” I said. “They lied to the public in the first place. They’re already known as a bunch of crooks.”

  “They may not intend to win the case. They may simply want to harass you, or force you into a settlement.”

  “I make less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and can file for Chapter Seven at any time,” I said, using the expression that I’d heard on the radio the previous week.

  “You mean you have no property or savings?”

  “I live paycheck to paycheck and have less than one thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “Then you’re safe.” Rudolph laughed out loud.

  Both Katie and I were puzzled. “What do you mean?” she said.

  He told Katie, “Danlin might not need a lawyer and can represent himself. Actually, he should write to tell their attorney that he has no money and is not afraid of litigation.”

  “What will happen next?” I asked.

  “They might drop the case, because they won’t be able to squeeze anything out of you. People start lawsuits to get damages. If there’s no money in it, nobody will bother. In the legal field, everything comes down to dollars.”

  “It’s the same in every field,” Katie said, shaking her head.

  I said, “But Yan Haili’s husband is in the financial industry, so he has significant resources.”

  “This letter doesn’t mention him as a plaintiff,” Rudolph went on. “Tell you what, I know someone who’s still at that law firm and I might be able to find out something about this case. I can’t promise any results, but I will try. Lawyers are not supposed to reveal this kind of information. In the meantime, you should write back, deny the allegation, and tell them you have no money and are not afraid of any charges.”

  Following Rudolph’s advice, I wrote my reply, denying any act of defamation and stating that I would represent myself because I could not afford an attorney. I made it clear that they couldn’t get anything from me, a poor man who just had a few changes of clothes, an old computer, a three-speed bicycle, four pairs of shoes, and about a hundred books. If they continued to pursue this suit, it would amount to publicizing the scandal and making a spectacle of themselves, so they should think thrice before plunging deeper into the litigation. I concluded, “You can beat a dead horse as hard as you wish, but it will not hurt anymore.”

  After mailing the letter, I made the summons the subject of my column for the next day. When the piece ran, it refueled the uproar. Many people wrote in, condemning the crooks and saying that the threesome should be the defendants, indicted for throwing dust in the eyes of the public. “This is a typical case in which the victimizer plays the victim,” one perso
n commented. “An ultimate insult to people’s common sense!” another wrote. I noticed that this time there were few comments in the simplified characters, which confirmed that my writings were blocked online on the mainland, reminding me that Gu Bing and Jiao Fanping might have survived the crisis there. That upset me.

  —

  I GOT A CALL from the Chinese consulate about a week later. The caller was Tao Wuping, a vice consul, who had reprimanded Kaiming on the phone for our reporting on the Falun Gong incident five weeks earlier. I’d met this man before—he was very educated, very accomplished. He sometimes went to the UN building on the East Side to represent China—he spoke English fluently and some French and was savvy about Western etiquette.

  He invited me to the consulate, saying he wanted to have “a heart-to-heart.” I felt uncertain about this. What if they wouldn’t let me out of the building? What if they interrogated me and beat me up? What if they forced me to sign something? Then I scrapped these thoughts. I was not important enough for them to detain, which might make a piece of news and unnecessary trouble for themselves. As a U.S. citizen, I was no longer in their grasp. So I agreed to come, and we settled on three o’clock the next afternoon.