by Ha Jin
“But don’t make me out to be a weirdo, okay?” I said, suddenly anxious.
“Of course I won’t.”
“I’m not comfortable making this too personal. It could spiral into other areas of our lives.” I said that also as a reminder for myself to be more professional, not to write like an essayist when I was doing journalism.
“You have a point there,” Katie said.
After dinner she went to her bedroom to grade papers while I put on my denim overalls and resumed work on the built-in bookcase I’d been making for her. It was constructed of plywood and poplar wood, four feet high along a wall in her study. I had already assembled all the pieces and now needed to sand it down. After that, I would install the crown molding and paint the whole thing white to match the wall. As I started rubbing the wood with sandpaper, music throbbed from Katie’s room. She was listening to a punk rock band. Katie’s father had been an engineer in the air force. Except for three years in Okinawa in the early 1980s, she had grown up in Georgia and South Carolina. I often teased her, saying she ought to have taken to country or gospel instead of punk music. I did not enjoy that type of music. My love was classical music—Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and especially Brahms’s symphonies, whose beautiful lyricism blended with a measure of pathos would grip my heart every time I listened to them. Whenever I teased Katie about her music, she would tease me right back, calling me a “fake aristocrat.” In fact, I was also fond of some American folk songs, such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Their melodies didn’t impress me much, but I liked the lyrics, which expressed the sentiments of the underprivileged.
For the first round of sanding I used 60-grit sandpaper; later, I would switch to 150-grit. I wasn’t an expert at carpentry, but I could make some basic types of furniture and could use all the hand tools (though I was still unfamiliar with some American power tools). I had learned the skill from my father, who’d been a master carpenter and proud of his way of living, which, even in the famine years and through all the political storms, had been “better than a doctor’s,” as he often bragged. The life he prided himself on was a materially secure one, offering him enough to eat and drink. All kinds of customers—young couples about to marry, newly promoted officials, and people who had finally gotten their own housing—would come with gifts and ask my father to furnish their homes. He never spent a penny on the wine and liquor he drank at dinner every night. Yet I wasn’t crazy about my father’s craft and didn’t care about the creature comforts he relished.
My mother in secret urged me to read more books and study hard so that I could go to college, but my father made me learn carpentry, saying, “With this single skill you’ll be able to make a living anywhere.” I knew he meant to equip me with a meal ticket, but my heart was elsewhere. He enticed me by allowing me to keep all the profits from the sales of the small pieces of furniture I made: chairs, side tables, nightstands, cupboards. For a teenager, those profits were a lot of money. I spent most of it on picture-story books (simplified classics and revolutionary novels for children) and cassette and video tapes, as well as on snacks shared with my pals—rock sugar, peanut brittle, spiced peas, candied dates, dried persimmons. In our neighborhood I was known as an openhanded boy, if not a spendthrift.
Just last week I’d heard from my parents, and again they had urged me to have children with Haili. “She is already thirty-four,” they wrote. “How long do you want to wait? Women older than thirty-six can give birth to retarded babies. You two must not procrastinate anymore. Please tell Haili to stop wasting the excellent genes you both have! Also, she should eat plenty of seaweed from now on to get enough iodine for pregnancy.” I had still not told my parents about our divorce, the knowledge of which would have devastated them. They adored my ex-wife and often said she was far more capable than me and I ought to count my lucky stars for having married her. In their eyes she was still a model daughter-in-law. My sister and I had agreed to keep the truth from our parents, who these days were addled with age. They couldn’t possibly imagine that their beloved daughter-in-law had turned into a different person. They still dreamed of a brood of grandchildren, and thus a lusty bloodline, from my vanished union with Haili.
—
THE NEXT MORNING I went into work and wrote my third column on the case of Haili’s novel. I first responded indirectly to Niya’s article, stating that I was entirely aware of the nature of the Iraq War, the purpose of which was mainly to secure the oil supply for the United States, so I’d been against the conflict from the beginning. No country had infinite resources, and the war would surely run up more debts, for which every one of us might have to pay more taxes. It cost thirty-five dollars to prepare a single hamburger in the U.S. Army deployed in Iraq. Imagine all the other expenses. As for my private life, it should be left out of this discussion, and all I wanted to say was that now I had a girlfriend named Katie Torney and that our sex life had been wonderful and wholesome. From there I proceeded to discuss the novel. I said that I stood by everything I’d written, and I had irrefutable evidence to back up my words. I ended by challenging Haili: “If you haven’t lied to the public, show us the first pages of both the movie contract and the book contracts signed with the foreign publishers. That will stop all the speculation and send us to the bookstore to buy your novel, and I will gladly drink to your smashing success.” I didn’t mention Niya and meant to exclude her, because to my mind she was a bit of a freak. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been betrayed or abused by men in her past. She might be a man-hater I’d better shun.
At noon Kaiming, Lucheng, and I lunched at a nearby eatery. The place, Chef Choi’s House, was owned by a middle-aged Korean couple and offered mainly Chinese food. For five or six dollars you could have a full meal—fried rice or lo mein, plus a bowl of soup and a pair of egg rolls or chicken wings or a crab rangoon. I often wondered how they could make money selling the food so cheaply. I’d once spoken with the couple, who were from Gwangju. They started their day before nine a.m. and closed up after eleven at night; they worked seven days a week and took a day off only on Christmas. The spry woman told me, “We have two grandkids born here and our youngest son is in the U.S. Navy, so like it or not, here’s home.” She had Band-Aids on her fingers; her husband wore a back brace as he cooked. His backache made his shoulders droop when he walked. After that conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking how so many people bragged about getting rich in the restaurant business, while so few let on about the amount of sweat and misery in the work compared with the meager profit.
Lucheng had once served as a junior propaganda officer in the People’s Liberation Army. After he was demobilized, he edited a small magazine of international economics in Guangzhou. He had come to the States eleven years before, and though a workaholic, he didn’t know English and only stayed at GNA editing the news gathered and drafted by others. When Kaiming went out of town, which he often did, Lucheng would run our company in his stead. In some ways he was our second boss—“Kaiming’s understudy,” in his own words. I liked Lucheng but felt he was too cautious and kept to himself a lot. His mind-set belonged to my parents’ generation, though he was only eight years older than me. He had seen my third column about the scandal and didn’t like it but had allowed it to be published anyway. “You shouldn’t have mentioned your sex life,” he told me, biting into an egg roll.
Kaiming agreed. “You might cause trouble for Katie, to be honest.”
I knew I had been vain to mention my girlfriend’s name to show she was American. But I’d also thought that might stop Haili from spreading the slander that I was a failure when it came to relationships with women. Now my superiors’ words made me uneasy. “I was angry,” I said, “but perhaps I should’ve been more restrained. But Kaiming, what kind of trouble could this cause for Katie?”
“Hard to say.” My boss shook his head. “Just two days ago I spoke to someone at the consulate about Katie’s visa situation, and your column
connects her with you. That might do her a disservice.”
Indeed, I had an uneasy relationship with the officials, but the New York Chinese community was so connected that they must already have known about Katie and me. Men like Kaiming and Lucheng had a sixth sense for politics, developed and honed in the revolutionary upheavals and political shifts in our native land, though they couldn’t always articulate their thoughts and suspicions. I regretted having mentioned Katie in the column. “I should’ve been more cautious,” I said.
“No use in worrying about it now,” Kaiming told me, chewing on a hot wing. “I have good news. I just heard from Shanghai that The Readers’ Guide Weekly is going to reprint one of your columns tomorrow.”
“Which one?” I asked in surprise.
“The first one on your ex-wife’s wannabe blockbuster.”
“Men, this will make the scam known all over China,” Lucheng said and burped. Indeed, the Weekly circulated nationwide and was attached to the Party’s newspaper The Guangming Daily.
Kaiming went on, “This will also do us good—they’ll credit us as the source. Congratulations, Danlin!” He raised his soup cup while Lucheng and I lifted ours. We touched cups.
Even as we toasted, I was a little flummoxed—official newspapers and magazines in China had rarely printed anything GNA published. They especially avoided my work because I was known as a troublemaker who wouldn’t hesitate to embarrass celebrities and bureaucrats. There must have been people in China’s media who disliked the hype surrounding Haili’s book as much as we did, and wanted to cool it down. Yet it was too early for us to truly celebrate. In spite of my misgivings, though, I hoped the reprint in that weekly might put an end to the scandal.
After our lunch, I headed toward a construction site on Crufts Street to look at the apartment buildings in the making, while Kaiming and Lucheng, puffing on Marlboros, began to walk leisurely back to our office. They liked to play a round of chess before the noon break was over. My boss’s right foot kicked a little every few steps, and Lucheng waddled a bit on his short legs. They both wore moccasins, Kaiming’s dark brown and Lucheng’s beige. Their relaxed gaits showed they were happy, at ease with their work. I watched them for a while. Oddly, I was moved by the sight of the two receding men, which made me see that happiness could be so simple and so transparent. This realization warmed my heart and, believe it or not, brought me close to tears. Underneath I’m a softie, something of a poet by disposition.
Ever since coming to America, I’d been fascinated by how homes were built here. Whenever I had a chance, I’d go into houses or buildings under construction, observing the insides—the vacant basements, the exposed frames, the scattered ceramic tiles, the dusty carpets, the fillings in the walls, the composite kitchen countertops, the fireplaces laden with craggy gas logs, the uninstalled bathtubs, the travertine floors in the bathrooms. At this site on Crufts Street, the three-story apartment buildings sat about two hundred feet away from the roadside and faced the sparkling bay. The last of the four buildings was still only a structure of pillars, beams, studs, braces, rafters, plywood boards, makeshift stairs at various entrances. Its top floor was being laid, and I could see all the box beams from underneath. I had visited many older homes under renovation and had seen solid wood beams, even steel ones, supporting the floors. Every once in a while a brick building boasted a slate roof. Now these box beams, together with the wires and plastic pipes exposed in places, gave me a feeling of shoddiness and deterioration, as though these apartment houses were not being built to last. I had once asked Randy, the supervisor of the construction team, why solid wood beams were not used. He said, “Matter of fact, box beams are lighter and stronger.” That might be true. All the same, they gave an impression of cheapness and crude pragmatism that somehow let me down, like a devalued currency.
I had also asked Randy how much he paid his carpenters. “About twenty bucks an hour to start with,” he told me. “It’s not easy to find good carpenters and masons nowadays. Even experienced bricklayers are hard to come by.”
“Twenty dollars is a good wage,” I said. “I’m a decent carpenter, you know. I built my own bed.” I thought for a moment. “Would you hire me if you ever had an opening?” I wanted to see if carpentry could be a meal ticket as my father had assured me.
Randy stared at me as if in disbelief, then said, “Why not, buddy, if you can do the work?”
The supervisor wasn’t at the site now. A few workers were drinking coffee and pulling on cigarettes, seated in a patch of shade cast by a dump truck. They knew me, so nobody stopped me. The sight of the building’s interior reminded me of my father, who had furnished so many homes, but our own home had always been shabby and even our dining table wobbly. This memory troubled me. I realized that my dad must have cared about his reputation as a master craftsman more than he did about his family’s comfort. This made me see why I often fantasized about having a comfortable little house of my own.
NINE
My third column on the scandal, short as it was, provoked more outcries. Commenters echoed my challenge and demanded that Haili release her contracts with the movie studio and the foreign publishers. One declared that the IRS should be alerted to ensure that Haili could not evade taxes for all her new earnings—otherwise she might use the money for a boob or nose job. People must have envied her supposed good fortune—for $1.3 million to fall into her lap was beyond their wildest version of the American dream, although there were those in China who’d won lotteries with bigger windfalls and others who’d made much more from illegal business deals. There was also a sea of corrupt officials who had numerous ways of getting rich—kickbacks, hush money, commissions, free shares of stock, no-interest loans. Just last month it had been reported that a son of a retired top general had boasted that he would not consider any business proposal smaller than $5 million, and that he’d recently bought some eighty apartments in New York City as an investment. To protect their ill-gotten wealth, the Communist leaders maintained their hold on state power, suppressing whoever challenged their legitimacy. Despite growing popular demand, the Party dared not order its cadres to declare their personal assets publicly for fear of people’s wrath. At the same time the Party, in the name of the country, had been amassing an enormous amount of cash for the day when it would have to buy international support to survive.
I had thought that Haili might retreat into silence for a while—at least take down her personal website, where her contact information was still listed. It looked as if she didn’t give a damn about Internet outrage at all. She continued to update her site, regularly sharing positive reviews of her book that had just appeared in mainland China. She raised the stakes, granting Niya another interview for another Chinese-language newspaper in New York. In it she emphasized that she’d sold the movie script and that the contract was being drawn up. She said that once she had it in hand, she would release the first page publicly. As for her foreign book deals, people should contact her publisher in Beijing, who could provide the information on them—there were some business details she was not privy to or not in a position to divulge.
Niya asked her: “It’s widely known that your biggest detractor is Feng Danlin, your ex-husband. Do you have something to say in answer to his criticism?”
Haili replied: “I have no words for that clown. All I can say is that I shall see him in court.”
The last sentence unsettled me—was she really going to stoop to legal bullying? A colleague of mine had once been sued for libel, and because Chinese media companies didn’t insure themselves against such things, she’d been forced to handle the case herself. It had dragged on for almost a year. She eventually won it but spent more than $70,000, only a third of which she got back from the plaintiff. She told me that the attorney fees were horrendous, more than $400 an hour. That shocked me, as I remembered that I had once moonlighted in a rug warehouse as a night watchman making $5.25 an hour. My colleague also said that although America was a land ruled
by law, lawsuits were often a rich person’s game—whoever could hire the most powerful lawyers would be likely to win. I feared that Larry might finance Haili’s dragging me into court. If that happened, I would face tremendous difficulties. Like my colleague’s former employer, GNA had no insurance against libel. Kaiming believed that we could handle any litigation by hiring an excellent attorney ad hoc. On average, one suit a year had been brought against GNA, but no plaintiff had ever won. As a result, Kaiming had developed a reputation as someone not to be messed with legally. He used to tell me not to worry about any litigation as long as I reported truth. Now I was unsure whether he would help me if Haili tried to take me to court. She might include GNA in the suit as well. A small part of me even blamed myself for engaging her in the first place. “A little self-doubt will do you some good,” my father used to chide me. If only I’d taken heed of his wisdom.
For days panic had been eating away at me, and I couldn’t stop brooding on what to do about Haili’s threat of a suit. Had Larry been involved in the novel scam from the beginning? Did he also intend to make a fortune from his wife’s book sales? Or was he behind the whole thing? Had he even been fazed by my uncovering the scandal?
I thought about contacting Larry directly to sound him out. Would that be too rash? I asked myself. But what was there to lose? If you don’t get into a tiger’s den, how can you catch its cubs? So I telephoned Larry at work, and to my relief, he agreed to meet at the Starbucks near his office building. I no longer hated him for wrecking my marriage, because in a way he had come out worse, being stuck with Haili. She must have appeared considerate and loving initially, but now that she had a green card, and was perhaps already naturalized, she didn’t need to try to please him. It served him right to have such a devil riding his back.