The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  Niya shot me a hard look and spat, “What kind of man are you? Don’t you have a heart? Why do you take so much pleasure in tormenting her?”

  “Honestly, I don’t enjoy meeting either of you. I just want to stop this hoax before it spins completely out of control. If it keeps snowballing, some names will be ruined and many of us will get embarrassed. A lot of Chinese here will be ashamed.”

  “Then you ought to quit asking questions you don’t like the answers to.” Niya glowered at me, her large eyes smoldering.

  “It’s my job,” I said. “I can’t do otherwise.”

  “You just enjoy being a wet blanket.”

  “Who are you? You’re a toady and a snob. As a reporter I cannot lie to the public.”

  Niya looked astonished, her eyes going to discs and her cheeks reddening. But she pressed on. “You’re blowing everything out of proportion—this is overkill.”

  Haili sniveled and blubbered, “He always looks down on me and treats me like dirt. He’s full of himself and is vendetta incarnate. He despises Chinese women and hates any of us who succeed, he’s malicious like a mad dog, he’s a snake coiling around my feet—”

  “Goddamn it, stop acting the victim!” I cried. “Are you going to fall into a faint next?” I remembered the wrong she’d done me. Didn’t she hand me the divorce papers the day after my arrival in America? Didn’t she force me to share the legal cost of our divorce even though I hadn’t yet found my first job here? Didn’t she hide away her savings so the court could not award me a penny? Didn’t she malign me, saying I was incapable in bed but still behaved like a male chauvinist pig? Didn’t she lie in a personal essay that I had once given her a black eye in a bakery because she did not agree to buy two pounds of mung-bean cakes? Didn’t she say that Chinese men were good only as bookkeepers, cooks, waiters, gardeners, caregivers, masseurs, and hooligans? The more those memories swirled in my head, the more furious I got. If Niya weren’t there, I might have blown up. It was smart of Haili to have brought that woman along. I breathed in and out. I stood and picked up my umbrella. “Let’s be rational about the position we are in,” I told my ex-wife. “I can’t gloss over all the fraudulence, nor can I lie on your behalf. You owe the public an explanation and an apology. Don’t procrastinate—the longer you remain in denial, the more denunciations you’ll face. Better scramble out of the hole you dug for yourself as soon as you can.” I turned and headed out to the bar to settle the bill.

  “Fuck you!” Haili yelled. “You only have the balls to bully a woman in distress.”

  Turning my head halfway back, I cried, “Yes, I’m a male groupie crazy about a celebrity like you. That’s your price for fame.”

  “Let me alone, you jerk! I know you’re a Taiwanese agent. Damn you!”

  “Louder, louder, scream the house down if you can!” I flipped her off over my shoulder.

  Some people, mostly from mainland China, called me a Taiwanese agent, believing that I was paid to write in support of Taiwan’s interests. But that accusation was groundless; I wrote only of my own volition. True, a businessman based in Taipei but acting as an official agent here had once approached me with a check for eighty thousand dollars and asked me to publish an article in defense of the Taiwanese government’s policies every month, but I declined the offer. I’ve heard that some exiled Chinese writers in North America do accept that kind of money, but I would never do that. I wanted to remain independent.

  SEVEN

  I filed my second column on the scandal. In it, I quoted from the original press release announcing that Love and Death in September was being translated into thirty languages and threw that claim against my own conversation with Silverwood, where he had denied even having heard of the novel. “Yan Haili is calling this a misunderstanding and now claims to be doing the translation herself,” I wrote. “How many different stories will she fabricate before she finally admits the truth?” I also mentioned that the Nobel Prize Nomination Committee in New Jersey was busy composing their Nobel nomination letter to be sent certified to Stockholm—the letter wasn’t difficult to write, I noted drily, but they couldn’t yet find a person among them capable of rendering it into formal English. I threw in the movie deal as well. “Jiao Fanping claimed that Panorama Pictures in Hollywood had just purchased the script adapted from the novel for 1.3 million,” I wrote, but I did not elaborate, willing to leave Haili a little room to salvage her reputation. Everyone could still see that this was the latest installment in their ongoing charade.

  My boss liked my piece, though he mused with a grin, “You didn’t put enough of your usual fire into it, Danlin. You shouldn’t let your personal relationship with that heartless woman hold you back. The power of your pen comes from your lack of reverence for propriety and relations. Don’t lose your nerve.”

  I said, “Let’s hope this will bring the whole thing to a conclusion.”

  “It might not be so easy.”

  The column was posted and began circulating with a vengeance. More uproar broke out, ranging from condemnation to ridicule. Some people called Haili “a cheap whore” and those involved in the scheme “scumbags of China” and “human dregs.” People were greedy. The moment a huge sum of money was mentioned, they got fired up. Inevitably, a raft of trolls began to emerge, all posting under noms de web, all attempting to outdo one another with more and more outrageous comments. Most of them seemed to be women who had a lot of free time on their hands and took pleasure in another woman’s downfall (though some disguised themselves as men). One claimed that she had known Haili for more than a decade and never believed a word of what she said. “With her around, you always feel as if there is a time bomb ticking close by,” she wrote. “Worse, when Yan Haili and I were roommates in Shanghai, she told others that she had been born and raised in Beijing. In truth, her mother had given birth to her on a straw mat in some hick town in Liaoning province.” That was a far cry from anything you can call plausible. I knew for a fact that Haili had never lived in overcrowded, smog-swathed Shanghai. She was born in Changchun, which, though not a metropolis, had been the capital of Manchukuo during the Japanese occupation. Another commenter, who I was pretty sure was also a woman, declared that Haili was childless and could afford to be promiscuous because she had had a hysterectomy many years before. She wrote, “Yan Haili is not a woman anymore and has to take hormones every day. What a dead pussy!” That amounted to libel. I was certain that Haili’s uterus was still intact. Someone else went so far as to claim that Haili had married an American billionaire, an oilman, who was older than her father. A few inquisitive ones volunteered to contact Random House and Panorama Pictures and then share online what they heard from those companies.

  Yet two commenters raised the bizarre question of whether it had been wise and appropriate to expose this scandal right around the fourth anniversary of 9/11. If the scandal made the English-language media, wouldn’t the story of Haili’s shameless exploitation put all our compatriots to shame? Wouldn’t some Chinese immigrants be singled out just like some Arabs in the United States who suffered abuse and intimidation (receiving hate-filled letters and bloody pigs’ feet in the mail)? Wouldn’t we be monitored by the FBI? We could draw brickbats to ourselves. So it would have been better to wait a while and, after all the commemorations of the tragedy had faded in the mainstream media, then bring up this case. “I am of the opinion that Feng Danlin could use more caution,” one person wrote. Another chimed in, “We ought to avoid scandalizing too many people and keep this from lapsing into a feeding frenzy.” Their misgivings irritated me. There are always worriers who’d give up eating, if they could, for fear of choking.

  We dismissed their opinions as irrelevant, for in fact we wanted the English-language media, ideally some TV stations, to pick up the story. GNA had someone in charge of translating our stories into English—Wenna, a twig of a woman with thick eyebrows and a pointed chin, had written a summary of the case of Haili’s novel and put it online—but, unfortun
ately, the U.S. media paid little attention to our reports. Wenna was an accurate translator, but she simply couldn’t write like a professional journalist in English, even though she had earned a master’s in journalism from Southern Illinois University and had lived in America for nearly twenty years. I knew how hard it was to write newspaper copy and to master the recalcitrant nuances of English, which the more you learn, the more slippery it gets. Deep down, I hoped that Haili would shut up about her stupid book, that Jiao Fanping would downscale his ambition to promoting it within China only, and that Gu Bing would give up on his plan for owning a German car and a modern apartment in Beijing. Although I believed that exposing Haili’s scheme was the right thing to do, the last thing I wanted was for a Chinese author—even a hack like my ex-wife—to become an international joke, a perverse version of the American dream concocted by a bunch of crooks.

  Three days later an article by Niya appeared in The North American Tribune and online. To her credit, unlike many others in the Chinese media, she always wrote under her real name. She said Haili was a debut author and unfamiliar with the business side of publishing. As a matter of course, Haili was ignorant of most of the details and arrangements that should not be her concern to begin with. Evidently her publisher loved her novel so much that he was beside himself with exuberance and couldn’t wait to share it with readers. It was a fact that many translators were busy rendering the book into all the major foreign languages and that Haili had written a movie script based on the novel. As for the Nobel nomination, it was her fans’ doing, beyond her control. She was more dazzled than anyone else—who in her right mind would object to such an honor?

  Niya went on to say she knew that this author was a good, humble woman motivated by art, not ambition. In this, her first book, all Haili had done was let her pen follow her heart to verbalize her innermost feelings and thoughts, so readers should allow her time to grow—a novelist could master her art only by trial and error. Ultimately, Haili would be evaluated by her whole body of work, so no one should jump to conclusions too soon. Besides, there were many more urgent issues in the world, such as the invasion of Iraq—an imperial war waged in the name of democracy but actually in the interests of the rich and the powerful. And then there were the millions of Muslims being treated as dangerous militants, the Chinese government’s suppression of resistance groups among the minorities in western China, the recent genocides in Africa, and the corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom that had wiped out the lifetime savings of tens of thousands of people. “It was unconscionable, as well as remiss, for Feng Danlin to wield his pen like a sword over a weak woman’s head,” Niya moaned. “It will be better if he invests his time and energy in more consequential matters, engaging some bigwigs and fat cats and exposing them for sacrificing others’ blood and lives for their personal gains. That will make Mr. Feng more like a responsible, fair-minded journalist.”

  I had not expected that Haili would use Niya to defend her so openly. This was a smart move in a way—to the casual reader, the article appeared objective and rational, absolving Haili of blame while placing more responsibility on her editor and publisher. I wasn’t bothered that much by Niya’s self-righteous rant, but there was an interview attached to the article, and it was in this brief conversation that Haili lashed out at me. She disclosed that Feng Danlin, the notorious essayist, was her ex-husband, and she insisted that pettiness was the only reason I was so determined to drag her name through the mud. She understood that our divorce had been hurtful to me, but I ought to have considered her feelings too. During our marriage, I’d been the worst kind of man a woman could inflict on herself, she stressed. She blamed me for spending more time with my friends than with her and claimed that I’d been such a wasteful spender that midway through the month we’d always be out of money. “He cared only about himself. He loved parties, bars, ball games. With him I felt lonely, miserable, and hopeless. How I yearned to escape, to get out of the disastrous marriage, but it was a long, long night that seemed to have no end. Naturally bit by bit the gap between us widened into a gulf, and finally we went our separate ways,” she told Niya. In short, I was a selfish man “with a serious attitude problem.” She then added that our “sexual incompatibility” was the primary reason for our divorce. “How could you satisfy your wife in just three or four minutes?” she asked Niya. “I’d wanted to love and be loved and to live a full, passionate life,” Haili went on. “It’s every woman’s right to enjoy sex so as to stay beautiful.”

  I was galled by the personal attack, with which she must have intended to evoke sympathy from women readers while humiliating and cowing me into silence. It would feel so good to strike back. I thought about revealing how she had started an affair with Larry Clements and was even living with him long before I came to the States; how on my arrival in New York, she had lied about having found me a job in a restaurant so as to dump me at a seedy inn in Chinatown; how she had presented me with a full folder of divorce papers the following day. But I couldn’t say any of that in a factual article about her novel. I considered writing something just as her ex-husband, a personal essay of sorts, yet I didn’t know how to emotionally separate it from my reporting on the scandal. There was no way to make such a piece entirely detached from the case at hand. To tell the truth, I feared that if I revealed too much of how she had mistreated me, some readers might view me as laughably weak.

  Maybe I shouldn’t write such a personal essay at all. When fighting with a pig, you’ll have to roll in mud. I would not debase myself that way. Perhaps just a brief statement would serve the purpose. I wrote:

  Indeed, I used to be very gregarious and spend four or five evenings a week in restaurants, teahouses, and karaoke bars. But that was back in China, where without a network of friends, you could not survive. I allow that even though I was Yan Haili’s husband in those days, I was still a young boy at heart, rough around the edges. But compared to most men around me, I wasn’t that bad. I never betrayed my wife, never broke a promise, never gambled, never went on a bender, never smoked or splurged, and I was always willing to change—to become a better man. At home I let Yan Haili wear the pants, aside from the matter of money; that was because she would slip our hard-earned cash into her parents’ hands. You all know it takes many years for a boy to grow into a man, so it is unreasonable to assume that the groom must know a whole lot about life and must be much more experienced than his bride when they marry. Men are human beings too and need time and room to grow. It was true that I was not a considerate husband to Yan Haili in the beginning and even ducked the role of our small household’s mainstay. But gradually I grew into a different man, and now I even can enjoy being alone. I do not live beyond my means anymore, because I have learned how hard it is to make a dollar. Anybody who knows me can tell you that I am not cavalier about money, though I am not a tightwad either. Admittedly, I often take a critical attitude, but it has never bothered me, because I cannot abide a person devoid of their own thoughts and opinions. Without an attitude, how am I different from a robot? To be honest, I aspire to become a man with a forceful character full of strong opinions—in other words, a variant instead of a solid model. I won’t mind being singled out as a party pooper. As for my sexual problem that Yan Haili referred to, it was an entirely different issue. Before knowing my current girlfriend, sometimes I did have difficulties with women like my ex-wife, who simply turned me off and made me feel not only henpecked but also emasculated. I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her on the mouth, as though she were ill, her body fluids contagious (including her tears). Now I am proud to say that I am all right between the sheets. You may ask my girlfriend, Katie Torney, a professor of sociology at NYU, how I do in bed if you are not convinced.

  I showed the piece to my colleague Lucheng, who was the man at GNA who approved my columns for publication. He shook his head and said, “This is too much. Boy, you must have been rattled by Haili’s attack. This essay lacks focus and just rambles on and on. Besides,
you shouldn’t be so forthcoming about your private life.”

  “How else should I counter a personal attack?” I asked Lucheng, a lanky man with close-set eyes and a thatch of bushy hair graying at the temples. He held some shares of GNA, amounting to approximately six percent of the company. I thought about bringing up my writing credo, “honesty is strength,” but I thought better of it. (My experience has taught me that if you mince words, or skirt an issue, or grab at truth only halfway, then you will stifle your own voice, which can’t help but sound hesitant and weak. Vague language reflects a feeble mind or fearful spirit, so any equivocating must be cast out.)

  “This is too personal,” Lucheng explained. “You make yourself more vulnerable by exposing the details of your life in this way. If we posted this piece as it is, it would throw off your reporting of the scandal, and might play right into their hands.”

  “So I should just let this affront go?”

  “You should first figure out who is behind Yan Haili. She must have strong supporters, otherwise she would’ve backed down long ago.” Lucheng twirled a sharp pencil between his thumb and forefinger.

  “It could take ages to find that out. Meanwhile, Haili is slinging mud at me in public.”

  “Still, your account of your private life will put you on the defensive. You must never appear apologetic in a situation like this. You’re combating a brazen liar.”

  I thought about that and realized that my column could be somewhat feckless. Indeed, it revealed more of myself than of Haili. Also, I realized I ought to speak with Katie before mentioning her name in my column, so I told Lucheng I appreciated his opinion and would come up with something else.

  EIGHT

  I broached the matter with Katie when I went to see her that weekend. She said, “I won’t mind if you mention my name. I’ll tell them you’re a hoot.” She gave a short laugh, narrowing her green eyes.