The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  “I sent it in for renewal four months ago, but you haven’t returned it to me yet,” I replied. It was the truth. “I’m a U.S. citizen now. Why do you still need my old passport?”

  “Because you’re not a native-born American. See here, even your U.S. passport says you were born in China, in Jilin province, but without your original passport you cannot prove that. We have to confirm that you were a Chinese citizen originally.”

  “Can you check if my Chinese passport is still at your consulate?”

  He punched his keyboard while reading the screen. He closed the small opening on the window and turned to speak to a middle-aged woman. His voice became inaudible. They both looked at the monitor, nodding their heads and commenting on something.

  A moment later the young man opened the window and said to me, “We don’t have your passport here.”

  “Are you sure? I mailed it to you four months ago. Here’s a photocopy.”

  “This cannot prove we received it. We need the original.”

  “Damn it, you can’t say I’m responsible for it disappearing!”

  “Neither can we be responsible for that.”

  My head was reeling with confusion and anger, but I didn’t know how to continue. I could only stare at his lean face.

  “Well,” he continued, “I’m not authorized to process your application if your papers are incomplete. Go upstairs, to Window Number Eleven, and see if someone there can help you.”

  I went to the second floor and handed in my paperwork to a bespectacled thirtyish woman, who said the same thing: without my former passport I couldn’t possibly get a visa. “According to our rules,” she explained, smiling all the while, “there’s only one way for people in your situation to get a visa.” Her smooth face brought to mind a fine porcelain vase.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “We could give you a visitor’s certificate—it can be used only once. Once you are back in China, you must report to the police department of your home province and cancel your Chinese citizenship with them. Then you come back and submit the official proof to us. After that, we will treat you as a regular American citizen and accept your visa application.”

  “But the fact that I’ve become a U.S. citizen already means my Chinese citizenship is canceled, because China doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. You can easily verify the cancellation here.”

  “Rules are rules, and we have to follow them. You’ll have to check in at the police department back home. They will issue you an exit pass, which you will use to return. Are you willing to do that or not? If you are, fill out this form, write your statement on this page, swearing that you will report to the police, and then give me four copies of your current photo.” She handed me the form and a sheet of paper bearing the heading “My Affidavit.” I was supposed to fill the page with a brief description of my situation and with a statement that I would present myself to the police once I was in China.

  Driven by a sudden rush of eagerness to see my parents, I said, “All right, I’ll do what you said and come back shortly.”

  She kept smiling. “See you later. You can take your photo downstairs.” By now her moon face was quite friendly, the opposite of the standard officious face.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The instant I stepped away from the window, I realized there’d be no way I could turn myself in to the provincial police. Once I was in their clutches, I’d have to own up to my “misdeeds” abroad and might end up signing some agreement, or else they wouldn’t let me return. They could coerce me into cooperation, even into working for them as a semi-agent or an informer. In brief, once I got into their precinct, they could close the gate and torture me at will, and I’d be like the deaf-mute whose protests couldn’t be heard no matter how much pain was inflicted on him. I had a friend who’d once been imprisoned in Gansu province. The police were so brutal that they thrust a baton into his anus while stepping on his legs and forcing him to sing songs and curse himself. He was so traumatized that, even after fleeing China and going into exile in Western Europe, he couldn’t stop talking about the humiliating experience—on the radio, on TV, to anyone who would listen. A little crazed, he would publicly declare that China, as an evil empire, must disintegrate into small countries, as Lao-tzu advocates in the Tao Te Ching.

  Clearly, the so-called visitor’s certificate was just a snare for the people on a blacklist. A jolt of fear hit me in the gut—it was so strong that my legs almost gave way. I dumped the forms into a trash can and left the visa office, my mind in a whirl.

  Heading back to the subway, I kept saying to myself, “Fuck that! Fuck ruthless China!” Still, I was so saturated with grief that I could hardly breathe and my temples were throbbing. It had been drizzling, the neon lights along the street blurrier than three hours before, and my face was wet with both rainwater and tears, which I didn’t bother to wipe away.

  Despite my new misgivings about Kaiming, I told him about my visa problem the next afternoon—he had helped me with such things before, and with Haili’s lawsuit now hanging over my head alone, I figured he owed me a favor. He listened attentively and then said, “In fact, there’s still a way you can get a visa.”

  “How?” I asked eagerly.

  “Find someone willing to vouch for you—someone who is at least a vice minister. This is a new policy. If you want to get a visa, you must have your name removed from the blacklist first, and nobody but a powerful official can help you with that. Of course, you’ll have to write out a self-criticism to express your deep remorse and promise to toe the line. Keep in mind that they’ll have the right to publish your confessions anytime they like.”

  My excitement faded instantly as I realized Kaiming had been talking tongue in cheek. He knew I would never accept those terms. I said, “So I’d have to behave here or I’d compromise my guarantor.”

  “Correct.”

  I made light of it. “Well, I don’t know any big officials personally,” I said, “so I’ll just have to wait for the day you become a high official and can endorse me.”

  “No”—he laughed—“I would never do that for an incorrigible troublemaker like you.”

  I went into a deep funk. From now on I had to remain emotionally detached from China while trying my best to manage my pangs of loss and homesickness. As I had brashly advised in an essay: “Banish China from your mind.”

  In mid-November, Katie got another piece of good news. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had awarded her a fellowship that would enable her to live and do research in Beijing for six months. I knew she had applied to the academy’s scholar exchange program, but neither of us had expected her to get it, because her kind of research was likely to expose the sordid underbelly of China’s economic reform—the medical system in the countryside had been a shambles in recent years. Then why had Katie received the fellowship?

  I wondered if strings had been pulled because of her relationship with me—whether the officials intended to separate her from me to make me more isolated, more vulnerable, and more distant from the mainstream media here. Without an American partner, I could be easier for them to control, and they must have believed that without her involved, the English-language media wouldn’t pay attention to my work. That was merely my guess; I had no way to prove it. Yet I was certain that the consulate had issued her the visa with the intention of taking her away from me. (It’s always more troublesome for the officials to deal with a foreigner, especially a Westerner. In general, they treat a Chinese who has a foreign spouse with some courtesy for the sake of good appearances.) Undoubtedly some officials had been in contact with Jiao Fanping and Gu Bing.

  For days I was ill-tempered, full of misgivings about whether I should have engaged the trio to begin with. The anguish gave me bouts of indigestion, acid often shooting up my throat, and I would awake in the early morning hours, unable to go back to sleep. When I spoke to Katie, I couldn’t help but get sarcastic. For a while she was able to ignore my n
astiness. Then one evening she couldn’t hold back anymore and snapped at me, “For Christ’s sake, stop dumping on me like that!”

  “Who’s dumping who?” I spat back.

  “Don’t act like this is a surprise,” she said softly. “I’ve never lied about my feelings. I told you from day one that I might decamp at any time. Besides, we can have a long-distance relationship, don’t you think?”

  “Okay, we can try that.”

  I wanted to say I needed her more than ever to be here with me, but I thought better of it, knowing there’d be no use. For her, the opportunity was too precious to let go and would eventually ensure the publication of her book, which in turn would help her get tenure. So much of her career hinged on the fieldwork she would do in China. I added, “I wish we’d never met.”

  “I’m sorry, Danlin.” She spoke with so much sadness in her voice that I heard sobs behind her words. “If you meet another woman, feel free to be with her. I know I’m not the right one for you, but I’ll remember you fondly.”

  I said nothing, afraid of dissolving into tears if I opened my mouth. How could I have become so sentimental? Hadn’t I decided long ago that I wouldn’t marry her? Why couldn’t I just let her go? I realized that my feelings for her had changed considerably in recent months. I reminded myself to appear stolid and never to hold her back.

  She had to work on a senior’s thesis, so I turned away to watch the evening news. My eyes were on the TV, but I could hardly register what the anchorwoman was saying. I clicked it off and tried to read This Earth of Mankind, by Pramoedya Toer, a novel Katie had recommended to me. I had just started it and had been enjoying it, but now I couldn’t lose myself in the story. The words crowded together before my eyes and refused to make any sense.

  That night when we went to bed, I found myself unable to have sex with Katie. I held her in my arms, a strand of her hair between my lips, but I couldn’t continue—a dull backache seized my body while a gust of grief rolled over my mind, dissolving my concentration. I closed my eyes and bit back my tears.

  EIGHTEEN

  At work the next morning, I again ran into Jiao Fanping. His navy blazer was flapping open as he walked over. Why’s this crook here again? I wondered. He stopped to size me up, his triangular eyes glaring like a pair of tiny arrowheads. Then he turned and padded away down the corridor to Kaiming’s office, his hands clasped behind his back. The moment Jiao entered that room, Lucheng’s laughter rang out. I guessed that the three of them knew one another pretty well by now and were probably discussing the publishing business they planned to expand together in Brooklyn. Jiao’s presence made me anxious, though he left within an hour. I feared that my boss might get too close to him. Sometimes Kaiming would act like a gregarious fool and make friends indiscriminately. I had tried reminding him to be careful, but he said networking was essential for our business.

  Around midmorning, a hulking man with a shock of ginger hair arrived at our office. He introduced himself as Jay Trouton, from the Department of Homeland Security. He was so dressed up—in a dark blue suit, a red paisley tie, glossy wingtips—that with a visored cap on his head and less girth, I could have taken him for an airliner’s captain. His full forehead, doughy face, straight nose, and muffin chin made me think of Ben Franklin. What a classic American face! I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was descended from the founding father. My boss greeted Trouton as if he’d been expecting him and asked me to join their conversation, serving as the interpreter. Kaiming had a solid grasp of English, but once at a culinary competition he had made a roomful of people erupt in laughter by trying to say “cut to the chase” but instead saying “cut the cheese,” and since then, he had always used an interpreter. Even when he spoke English with someone in a private group, his tongue seemed to grow stiff and wayward. As a consequence, he tended to avoid big words like recapitulate, inconspicuous, osteoporosis, anachronistic, which he used to be able to toss out with some ease and flair. Worse still, for a year after the “cut the cheese” fiasco, whenever speaking to an audience, he suffered stage fright, accompanied by facial tics and eye twitches.

  Waving his fingers over a steaming cup of coffee, Trouton said he had come just to have a chat with my boss. Indeed, as I sat and translated, they didn’t talk about anything serious at all. Trouton could speak a smattering of Mandarin and threw in a Chinese word or phrase from time to time, such as “so-so,” “never mind,” “no end of trouble.” He had been to China two years before and liked Dalian the most, because its climate reminded him of his hometown, Boston. I thought that Boston was much colder in winter and more humid in summer than the Chinese coastal city, but I didn’t interject. Kaiming said he loved Dalian too—an aunt of his lived there, working in a Pfizer plant that made animal health products.

  I was puzzled. Why would an official like Trouton come just to chitchat with Kaiming? They went on to talk about the situation in China. “I was there three months ago,” my boss told him, and I translated his words. “The country has changed so much that I felt like a foreigner when I walked down the streets. I was lost several times. Lord save me, the Chinese jaywalked at will, but I didn’t dare to do that, and people laughed at me. They could tell I was from abroad.”

  “There’s no doubt about the huge changes. Things are slowly getting better there,” Trouton said, smiling without opening his mouth, as if tasting something cautiously.

  Kaiming went on, “But when I spoke with my neighbors and old friends, I found they were the same—their mind-sets hadn’t changed at all.”

  “That must be true,” Trouton agreed. “We should give them time. China’s on the right track.”

  “Yes, slowly it’s moving forward.”

  I was sure Kaiming understood Trouton perfectly, but he wouldn’t respond until I’d finished translating—he seemed to want the extra time to think before he spoke. Their conversation shifted to the relationship between China and the United States. They both agreed that the two countries needed each other, actually depended on each other. “China has become an ally of a sort,” Trouton said. Though taken aback, I rendered his words accurately. He stressed that as a U.S. partner, China was of course problematic and even troublesome, but there was no alternative—we had to work with the Chinese government in a mutually beneficial way. Surely we’d like to see a democratic China, but that was impossible for now, so we had to make do with what was out there, and not disrupt things by pressing the regime too hard. If the Chinese government collapsed, the world economy would suffer along with it, and there’d be famine and refugees everywhere, so, for now, the status quo had to be maintained.

  I still couldn’t figure out why Trouton was here. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but we were strangers to him and he was acting too friendly. Around half past eleven, Kaiming offered to take him to lunch, and he accepted the invitation readily.

  Together the three of us went to the Thai restaurant down the street. Trouton ordered coconut chicken soup, saying he had to watch his weight. Both my boss and I had pad Thai. I’d eaten only a donut for breakfast, so I was hungry and wanted beef in my noodles, while Kaiming picked fried tofu, which he didn’t often get to eat at home because his wife was allergic to soy products. Instead of the beers that the other two ordered, I opted for a mango puree. I was to continue to translate for them.

  Our food came quickly. “This is excellent,” Trouton said. His heavy jaw moved sideways as he chewed, pushing his cheeks with his tongue from time to time. Purplish veins like filaments were visible on his nose, and his nostrils were partly blocked with reddish hair.

  He and Kaiming picked up the thread of their conversation about the relationship between China and the United States. Trouton said, “We understand that your agency handles news differently from the official agencies in China, and once in a while you give the Chinese government a hard time.”

  “We don’t have to deal with censorship here,” Kaiming replied. “We want to remain independent, but it’s not easy. We beli
eve in advocating some democratic causes, like the free election of village leaders in China’s countryside and the Tiananmen Mothers.” I explained to Trouton that the latter referred to a group of women who’d lost their children in the violent suppression of the student movement in 1989 and who had continued appealing to the government for a public apology and compensation.

  “I can sympathize with you,” Trouton replied. “But like I said, China is a country we cannot afford to alienate while we’re fighting two wars. It has begun playing a major role in the international arena, and we need its cooperation now. So you guys ought to help us improve and strengthen our relationship with your country.” He smiled, his greenish eyes twinkling.

  I felt it odd that he used the term “your country,” given that Kaiming had been naturalized for years and called himself an American, and I had just received my U.S. passport. (My boss often mocked his patriotic Chinese friends, saying, “You know what? China is your illness, your heart problem, and your spiritual jailhouse. You’d better quit the drug of patriotism.” His friends would fire back, declaring they didn’t believe in the crap about world citizenship: “No matter where you go, you cannot shed your yellow skin.”) I was pretty sure that Trouton knew we were U.S. citizens, but he didn’t take us as his countrymen.

  My boss sparred gently with him: “By relationship, do you mean ‘friendship’?”

  “Well, you could put it that way.”

  “In fact, we all want to see the two countries get along,” Kaiming continued. “Together China and the United States can make the world a better place.”