The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  I noticed that Stefan got his glass refilled frequently. He said he liked the California wines because he could taste the sunlight in them. I wondered if that was nonsense since I’d never tasted anything unusual in those wines. At the end of the reception, he invited me to his home nearby—he still had some questions for me, if I would oblige him. Though somewhat reluctant, I agreed after he assured me that it would be easy to catch the train back to Charlottenburg.

  Stefan’s apartment was crammed full of books, even the living room divided by rows of bookshelves. The moment I sat down, he left the room while his wife, a tall Lithuanian woman, poured me a cup of pekoe tea and placed a plate of rolled wafers next to it. Stefan came back with an armload of books. He put them on the glass coffee table and said to me, “These are the German translations of contemporary Chinese novels—I read them all in preparation for the festival. Please take a look.”

  All the novels on the table were well known in China, and I tried to think of what to say. Stefan went on, “I want you to tell me honestly: Do these writers accurately represent Chinese literature today? Or are they just some authors we Germans picked according to our own preference?”

  I looked through the dozen or so titles again and found all of them were by the frontline writers in China, so I said, “These authors are major names and are regarded as the best ones writing now.”

  Stefan sighed and said almost inaudibly, “That country has more than a billion people.”

  His wife, a kind-faced thirty-something, piped in. “I read some of them. They’re interesting. Stefan is a critic—more of a stickler.”

  Why was I feeling uneasy, even a little ashamed? Why should I care? I was not a fiction writer and no longer held a Chinese passport—why should I give a damn about those novels and what some Germans thought of them? Was Stefan an arrogant prig? Or was he a competent critic, sincere and knowledgeable in his judgments? It was hard for me to decide. He seemed well-meaning.

  Those questions continued to nag me even after I had returned to Mr. Huang’s house. I regretted not having explained to Stefan that those writers, every one of them, were talented but had to toe the line, not only on the page but also in their imaginations, because they received salaries from the state and could not afford to jeopardize their livelihoods. I wondered whether Stefan would have shown sympathy or contempt for my explanation. Most Westerners didn’t have a clue how harshly and subtly censorship worked on an artist in China, whose talent, however prodigious, ultimately became docile and atrophied.

  The next day, after filing my article on the festival with GNA, I went downtown again for some sightseeing. It got gloomy quite early in the afternoon, so after a late lunch of curry wurst in the Zoologischer Garten, I returned to the Huangs’. Berlin’s winter could be depressing—the daylight was short and the air foggy. I thought of going to a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, but I was told that the tickets had sold out long ago.

  A computer that the guests could use sat in the Huangs’ study. When I scrolled through my emails on Tuesday night, among business exchanges and spam I saw a message from Niya. She wrote: “Danlin, I have news for you, but I should deliver it in person because I can’t make much sense of it. Can we meet tomorrow or the day after?” She added a smiley face.

  I answered: “Of course, I would be delighted to see you. I’m in Berlin on assignment right now—I wish we could meet here! I found an excellent Chinese restaurant in the center of Charlottenburg. They have amazing wheaten food. But I’ll be back in New York in a few days and we can catch up then.”

  The restaurant was actually on Kantstrasse. It was called Melina, an unusual name for a Chinese restaurant. The exotic name must have been intended to make the place stand out as one that served the authentic cuisine of western China. According to Mrs. Huang, it had opened just a month before.

  Amazingly, a few minutes later Niya’s reply arrived: “Berlin!? I love that city and can meet you there. I can take Friday off. I’ve earned tons of miles with Continental Airlines and the flight won’t cost me anything. My Turkish friend Aylin lives in Wannsee, and I can stay with her. Do you want to see me? Should I fly out?”

  I reread her message, trying to figure out what she hadn’t put into words. She didn’t ask why I was away from New York, and she must have assumed I was here alone. She must have been to Berlin before and be quite familiar with this city. I’d always taken her to be somewhat like myself, still unaccustomed to the rootless cosmopolitan life that circumstances had thrust upon us. Now she seemed to be a savvy traveler. I remembered she had once mentioned she was kind of obsessed with travel and often left New York on long weekends. I had thought she just went somewhere in the States—Las Vegas or Yellowstone National Park or even West Point. Now I realized she must be an international traveler.

  I took a few moments to gather my thoughts, and then wrote back: “Do come if you can. I would be happy to see you in Wannsee, which I am told is a wonderful area. I’ve finished my assignment and just been sightseeing. I’ll be back in New York next Monday.” I didn’t ask about the news she had for me, because I understood she might not want to have a written mention of it. I gave her my phone number here in case she decided to come.

  The Huangs had a daughter who was attending the University of Potsdam, a school just a few years older than herself, according to her. She majored in philosophy and still could speak some Mandarin but had forgotten how to read or write in it. She and I spoke English, which she had learned at the gymnasium. Unlike her heavyset mother, she was a string bean of a girl with walnut-shaped eyes. She had a German boyfriend, Andreas, who came to eat with us in the evenings. After dinner the girl and the boy would stay in the study doing schoolwork or just shooting the breeze. They smoked in there as well, which her parents allowed. They rolled their cigarettes with tobacco slivers from a pouch and folded tiny filters into the ends of the paper tubes. I chatted with them and discovered that Andreas’s parents were Russian Jews. He’d been born in a small lumber town outside Vladivostok and had come to Germany when he was nine. At home he still spoke Russian, and he used to go to Jewish school on weekends but had quit that years before. “I have to work hard to get my diploma in computer science,” he told me, his widow’s peak touching his eyebrows. He’d also been learning more English, in which all the software manuals were written. Unlike his girlfriend, he was attending a vocational school. He loved to spend time at the Huangs’ and often stayed late into the night.

  Mrs. Huang told me in perfect Mandarin about her daughter. “We pay her tuition and give her food and a roof, but she must make her own pocket money by tidying rooms on weekends.”

  “She has a good boyfriend,” I said.

  “What can I say? She’s grown up now. There’s no way we can dissuade her once she decides to do something.”

  “You don’t like the boy?” I said, surprised.

  “That’s not it. It’s just too early for her to have a boyfriend.”

  I once conversed with the daughter alone and was impressed by her intelligence and sharp tongue. The girl no longer viewed herself as either Chinese or Korean, nor did she miss China, which she’d left at seven. She said she preferred a European rural town to a city like Beijing or Shanghai or even Hong Kong. “I wouldn’t want to live in any of those cesspools,” she said, waving a lean cigarette and puffing out smoke. I reminded her that many Chinese were getting rich, and that those cities she loathed so much had become hubs of opportunity where even Europeans flocked. She responded, “I don’t want to make lots of money. I just want a quiet, quality life.” I didn’t know how to counter that; I supposed that everybody was entitled to their little portion of personal happiness. The girl seemed to be a spitfire.

  In contrast to her, her father followed events in China avidly, reading the news on several major Chinese-language websites at least twice a day. He happened to know my name and said he enjoyed my essays and was honored to meet me in p
erson, though he’d never thought I was under forty. “You’re practically a young man,” he said. “Amazing, tsk tsk tsk.”

  “You pictured me as an old fart?” I asked, laughing. We were both seated on the canvas sofas in the living room. “Tell me, Mr. Huang,” I went on, “how long have you lived in Germany?”

  “Eight years. Before this place we were in France and Italy.”

  “Do you speak French and Italian as well?”

  “Only some French.”

  “Do you like it here better?”

  He lifted his cup of aster tea and took a swallow. “A little better, I’d say. There’re so many Chinese in Paris and Milan that it’s hard to make a living in those cities.”

  “Have you been back to China?”

  “No, I left more than twenty years ago, and later my family joined me in Italy. My parents have died, and there’s nothing for me to return to.”

  “Don’t you miss home?”

  “Of course I do, but I can no longer tell where home is. That’s why my wife and I opened this guesthouse. We don’t make much from it, but we like meeting people from China and Korea. This makes our life less lonely. A busy bee knows no sorrow, like the saying goes.”

  I could see that they couldn’t earn much profit, given their rate, fifteen euros a day. In the off-season they also offered dinner for an extra two euros. How could they make money by charging so little? I said, “If you had your pick between Europe and China, where would you prefer to live?”

  “Our own country, of course. But our country is a cruel place—it’s like a crazy parent who enjoys torturing you until you lose your mind and your sense of being human. We can no longer live in China—once you leave, you leave for good.”

  I feared he was right, but asked, “Why so?”

  “Because you begin to see other places and think differently. You have choices now. Who wouldn’t choose a safer and more reasonable place to live?”

  “Do you think Europe is a better place than China?”

  “On the whole, yes.”

  “No prejudice, no mistreatment?” I pressed.

  “Of course there is,” he acknowledged. “There’s plenty. But in the West, especially in Germany, society works by codes. Every profession has its codes. There are architectural codes, educational codes, legal codes, hotel codes, even restaurant codes. So you know what to do and what not to do. Even the powerful have to follow the codes, and they cannot bully you as long as you haven’t broken any of those codes. This makes life easier and safer, especially for ordinary people like us. All we want is a life without interruption, today similar to yesterday and tomorrow similar to today.”

  He went on, “In China, there’re good rules, but nobody follows them. As a result, rules don’t mean a thing there, and an important person can bend the rules on a whim. This makes life unbearable for common people. When my wife went back two years ago, she saw how everyone there tried to take advantage of the little power in his hands—even a clerk at a small train station wouldn’t sell her a berth ticket unless she received it as a personal favor, for which she’d have to do something in return.” His voice grew frustrated. “How can you live comfortably in a place like that again after you’ve seen how people in other countries live and work? But for me, from my own experience, the worst part of life in China is that you must radiate menace to survive. You must be able to hurt others, to do damage with anger and bluster, or anybody can push you around. That’s why people there seek power any way they can. An honest, kindhearted person is nothing but a doormat.”

  “Isn’t that the same everywhere, unfortunately?” I said, mainly to keep our conversation going. “People take kindness and honesty for weakness and stupidity. In America there’s this saying—nice guys finish last.”

  “But in China this mentality of radiating menace is so prevalent that it has created a culture of paranoia and distrust,” he insisted. “It has become a condition for survival, and it can drive you out of your mind. You have to be alert to danger constantly and cannot relax, because people around you are all radiating menace as well—everyone’s afraid of becoming a clay pigeon for others to shoot. They all believe that even the devil would be afraid of meanness—the meaner you are, the better chance of survival you have. If I’d lived there longer, heaven knows what awful things I might’ve done. All that malice and sadness could have turned me into a wicked, spineless man. It’s impossible to live an honest life in a place of fear and hatred. Now, how long have you been in the United States?”

  “More than seven years,” I answered.

  “What’s that country like?”

  I thought for a moment about what to say. “Similar to Europe,” I said, finally, “in terms of the codes you mentioned.”

  “Then it must be a good place to live.” His mottled eyes glazed over. He took a gulp of the tea, his cheeks somewhat hollow, his perspiring scalp dotted with age spots. He must have been well into his sixties. I wondered if he had thought about returning to our motherland someday to die. But why should he want that? We have no choice about where we were born, yet sometimes we can choose where we die. We owe ourselves a chance to grow up, find home elsewhere, and realize ourselves.

  —

  NIYA ARRIVED IN BERLIN on Thursday evening and called me after she reached her friend Aylin’s place. We agreed to see each other the next day at three thirty. She would meet me at the train station in Wannsee. She said we could do some sightseeing in that area while we talked. I felt a twinge of uneasiness about the meeting, but I was also looking forward to seeing her. Katie and I emailed each other every day but didn’t have much to say. She was busy wrapping up the semester to get ready for her stint in China.

  When I got off the train at Wannsee the next afternoon, passing the vegetable and fruit stand in the middle of the underground tunnel to reach the exit, I saw Niya standing on the wide terrazzo stairs that led up to the front hall of the station. She was dressed in a black single-breasted coat, calf-high suede boots, and sunglasses. Her left shoulder leaned against the wall; her hair was a touch mussed. At the sight of me, her face opened up into a smile, showing her tiny eyeteeth; she hurried over and hugged me. Her coat gave off a faint smell of mothballs. I was caught off guard—we’d never been this close before. I said, “You should be hiding behind a magazine.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “That would make you more like a detective or a private investigator. More professional, you know.”

  She swatted my shoulder. “Stop making fun of me.”

  Together we went out of the station. Lake Wannsee was just across the street, patches of the water visible, flickering feebly against the sunset. I suggested we go to the lakeside, and maybe we could have a boat ride. There were a number of ferryboats in the docks and also signs that announced schedules and stops—Griebnitzsee, Glienicker Lanke, Pfaueninsel—although few people were around. One of the boats was named Moby Dick. “Come, let’s take a ride on it,” Niya said and tugged my forearm.

  I liked the sight of that tourist boat. It resembled the Melvillean monstrosity, with jagged teeth, silver sides, a streamlined back, an ebony belly, and huge diamond-shaped scales, half of them bright, the other half dark. But a man on the deck, working with an acetylene torch and a welder’s glass, told us that the boats were all docked for the winter. So Niya and I strolled along the lakeside instead, pointing out the moored yachts and birds bobbing on the waves. In the distance, we could see athletes sculling and rowing, their cries echoing on the water, its surface vast like an open bay glimmering in the twilight.

  We found a bench and sat down. Niya told me, “I’ve been talking with Haili. I believe that something terrible is going to happen and that you might get hurt, but I don’t know exactly what is going on. She’s being so vague, but everything she says about you sounds like a threat.”

  I nodded, my stomach tightening. “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘You’re not double-crossing me, Niya, are you?’ I
told her I wanted to be neutral because the situation had become political, and I didn’t want to be involved in politics. She started screaming—she accused me of befriending you and betraying her.”

  “But what did she say about me?” I asked impatiently.

  “She said, ‘Danlin is a nonentity now. His actions have made him an enemy of China.’ I asked her, ‘Don’t you have any pity for him? For better or for worse, you must have loved him once.’ She said, ‘I fell out of love. He wants to destroy others but has brought destruction on himself. If you see him, tell him I will forgive him only if he throws himself at my feet and licks my shoes.’ ”

  “So you have some pity for me?” I asked, my mind raging with misgivings and guesses.

  “I confess I do.” Niya lowered her eyes, then fixed them on me.

  “Still, you are a friend of Haili’s.”

  Niya shook her head. “I no longer feel close to her. In the beginning I knew she’d made a mistake in the way she handled her book deal, but I also believed that you were being vindictive toward her. When I defended her, in a way I wanted to help her make amends while preventing her from being attacked by you and others. But then she became spiteful and brought in the Chinese government to crush you.” Niya paused. “We all make the wrong decision sometimes. As long as we correct it in good time, it shouldn’t be a big deal. But if one persists in doing the wrong thing, at some point a mistake becomes unforgivable. That’s why I cannot align myself with Haili anymore. I often wonder what made her change so much. She’s become addicted to publicity and fame, and will do anything to chase after attention.”