The Boat Rocker

by Ha Jin

  “Then you’ll only make a fool of yourself.”

  “You think the idea of the country is sacred, then?” I demanded.

  “Not the idea,” Niya admitted, “but China, the actual land, is holy to me. It has a pull on me that I can’t explain.”

  I was speechless for a moment. Then I said calmly, “I can weigh a country only on how it serves the common person. I reserve my right to have contempt for any country. For me, a country is no more than a dog, a people’s guard dog, so it would be unreasonable for a dog to demand that its owners love and worship it. It ought to be grateful that people care for it and don’t let it starve.”

  “You’re outrageous!” Niya sputtered.

  A silence followed. I was about to remind her that her father had once said China was a country that devoured its people and that he’d urged her to flee, but I refrained. With my finger I wiped away the remaining salt from the rim of my glass and took a swig of the tequila. I realized that she had projected too much religious feeling onto our native land—the longer and the farther she lived away, the more attachment and love she developed toward it. She would have done better to join a church or temple.

  “Anyway,” Niya said finally, without looking at me, “think about grad school.”

  I half-joked, “Tell me, if I go to some remote town to do graduate work, will you come with me?”

  “Out of the question,” she responded promptly. “Unless you come to your senses and change your attitude toward our motherland.”

  “That may not happen.” I went on, joking, “I’ve been trying to become a Buddhist who achieves enlightenment and deliverance by abandoning his origins. I can develop no attachment to any place.”

  “You’ll never become a Buddhist,” Niya scoffed. “You’re full of material desires, and your sense of self is too strong.”

  “I can see China lying between us like a third party. In fact, even if I succeed in getting you into bed, I can’t get hard with a cold country stretching out between us. For the life of me I can’t handle that—it’s so difficult to fuck a country, impossible unless you’re its president or premier.”

  She stared at me in astonishment, then broke into laughter. “You have a perverse imagination. You’re crazier than me.”

  I too laughed, nervously. I added, “I can’t comprehend why a country can fuck a citizen whenever it feels the need, while the citizen can never fuck it back. Why? This question really boggles the mind.”

  “You’ve got one hell of a mouth. Don’t ever talk like that in front of others or you’ll get into big trouble.”

  I shrugged, undaunted. “I’m already in big trouble.”

  We parted, still friends, though a hot lump in my throat made me light-headed and caused me to breathe hard. Stepping out of the bar and heading in a different direction than Niya, I tried to buoy myself up by humming an old movie theme song, “Not Afraid to Go Solo”:

  Sweetheart, do you still dream of the wild?

  How often I asked you when we could go away,

  Go far, far away.

  You always shook your head and smiled,

  Saying till I had a truck to my name…

  I wasn’t particularly fond of the tune, yet it churned in me and poured out of my mouth. In my mind’s eye I saw the heartbroken young man loading his pickup, about to start out for the wilderness and leave his girlfriend for good. Ahead of me, the street was almost deserted, only a flock of grackles roosted in a leafless treetop, as motionless as if they were napping. A crosswind blew up and set a Styrofoam take-out container tumbling away. It flew past an overturned shopping cart on the curb. I crooned the song over and over on my walk home, though I garbled some lines and was never quite in tune.

  I couldn’t see the point in doing graduate studies. For now I needed a job so I could pay the bills. Kaiming’s two thousand dollars wouldn’t last long.

  That evening I mentioned grad school to Katie, who surprised me by saying it wasn’t a bad idea. In America, she assured me, most PhD students in the humanities and social sciences received financial aid—they were paid to specialize in the impractical fields. The scholarships could be meager but were enough to live on. That’s why there were so many perpetual grad students. “I can write an excellent recommendation for you,” Katie told me. “But you must make me happy tonight.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  The next day I ran into Lucheng in front of Citibank, and I talked with him about the prospect of graduate studies. He had always been resourceful and wise in a worldly way; for that I respected him. To my surprise, he urged me to apply to grad school, saying he wished he could have done that when he arrived in the States eleven years before. He mentioned some dissidents in North America and said they all had been offered admission to graduate school in the early days of their exile, but they forfeited the opportunities, believing it would be more comfortable and glamorous to be political activists and public figures. They even foolishly thought China would reopen its door to them soon, so there was no need to study hard here. “Look how they’re doing now,” Lucheng said and snubbed out his cigarette in the dirt in a flowerpot. “They’ve all become spongers of a sort and depend on the charity of political organizations. You mustn’t live like that. Don’t ever become a hanger-on. Try to be self-sufficient.”

  Lucheng’s words impressed me deeply, but I still couldn’t make up my mind.

  —

  FOR DAYS I BROODED about what to do. The thought of going to grad school saddened me, because I was already thirty-six and would have to take the GRE, for which I’d need two or three months to prepare. In addition, I would have to spend hundreds of dollars on application fees. Then I came across an article about a recent controversy over Calvin Elliot, a professor at a state university in California. The man had spoken publicly against the Iraq War, condemning it as an imperial invasion of the Mideast, and declared that it was waged only for control of oil resources, that the United States had never supported human rights in the Arab world, and that the export of democracy in this case was a hoax, a travesty. Despite torrents of condemnations against him, despite several congressmen urging that he be fired from his job, his university refused to let him go, defending its decision on the grounds of preserving academic freedom. I was greatly impressed and moved by the school’s position. It made me realize that it was not coincidental that public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said held professorships at universities, which must be the last sanctuaries for freedom of speech. So I decided that I would apply.

  Katie helped me gather a list of schools. For my applications I needed three recommendations. Katie agreed to write one, and I thought about asking Rudolph, but she said that might be inappropriate because he had never taught me and was unfamiliar with my work. Not knowing another academic, I turned to Niya and Kaiming; both of them were glad to write on my behalf. My former boss wrote his letter in Chinese and asked Wenna to translate it. For days I worked on my personal statement. I wrote that I wished to study the role the state played in the English and the Chinese media—how governments used the media for propaganda and educational purposes, to provoke or divert public anger and foster patriotism, and how the media contributed to preserving and distorting collective memories. (Katie said there was considerable scholarship already on the English media, and my project would be more viable if I made it a comparative study.) In my applications I was candid about my poor qualifications, since I hadn’t been a political science major and would have to start from scratch in some coursework. More problematic, without GRE scores, I’d have to apply with incomplete forms, but I couldn’t bear to wait. Not having any published writing samples in English, I attached my unpublished article on the scandal of Haili’s novel as proof that I could write in this language. Every one of my applications felt like a long shot.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Katie left for China two weeks ago. We were in email contact; she seemed to be settling down at Henan University and was pleased a
bout the arrangements with the sociology department there. She was excited about her field research, ready to head for the countryside to interview AIDS victims, many of whom had been blood sellers and had contracted the virus from contaminated needles. I urged her not to rush, given that she had plenty of time. She mustn’t eat at street food stands too often, not because the foods might be unclean but because it would take months for her to get used to them. Also, she had to be careful not to endanger herself and those who helped her. Even if the police didn’t shadow her, they might harass her helpers.

  As I had predicted, soon she began to complain about the obstacles she encountered. It was clear that the authorities would do anything to frustrate her. She wasn’t sure she could get access to the AIDS victims at all and was beginning to feel she had been deceived about the fellowship. All the same, she didn’t say anything about returning to New York anytime soon—I gathered that if she couldn’t conduct the interviews in the countryside, she might go to Beijing and spend the spring semester as a research fellow at China’s Academy of Social Sciences. It would be a rare opportunity nonetheless. Besides, there was plenty of her beloved nightlife there.

  Her messages often discomfited me, and I could tell that she was becoming obsessed with her scholarship and career. But I didn’t complain, not wanting to put more pressure on her. Before long, men were sure to hit on her, an attractive young woman full of brains and energy. Probably not a small number of people there considered her a knockout, her beauty amplified by the fact that she was American.

  Soon after the New Year, I got a phone call from a Professor Gambrell at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He explained gently, “According to our guidelines, we cannot admit you into our program if you haven’t taken the GRE. I am calling to let you know we are very impressed with you as a candidate, but we haven’t received your scores yet. Can you have them sent right away?”

  I said, “To be honest, I haven’t taken the test yet. I would have to spend at least a couple of months brushing up.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. Without the GRE, even if we accepted you, you wouldn’t get approved by the graduate school that has the final say. But we hope you will apply again next year.”

  “I will do that,” I said.

  He went on, “We were very moved by your application, particularly by one of your recommenders, a Chinese woman. She confirmed the story you mentioned in your statement: your news agency had just been purchased by China and you had lost your job. You could do carpentry and make a decent living by working for a construction company, but you want to become a public intellectual, because you still have a sizable readership in Chinese and you aspire to remain an honest voice. That said, rules are rules—we cannot admit you without a complete application.”

  “I understand,” I said, rather let down.

  After the phone call, I stood at my window for a long time, amazed that they had taken Niya’s recommendation seriously, even though she was not an academic. To my mind, she was a patriotic hothead, but why hadn’t I just ignored her? Why had I kept her as a friend and even cherished our friendship? Was this because subconsciously I wanted to persuade her to agree with me? Or because I was attracted to her passionate love for the country that dominated her? I was not sure. Probably both.

  It was snowing, fat flakes floating slantwise, accumulating on the trees, on the arms of the streetlamps, filling the air and muffling the sound of traffic. A scrawny fellow bundled in an overcoat trudged along the sidewalk. It was the homeless man who had a cauliflower ear like a small mushroom and spoke Mandarin with a Shandong accent, and who often sat down at my table when I ate in a dumpling joint or pizzeria. Sometimes I stopped halfway and let him have the rest of the food.

  Suddenly he slipped and fell. He picked himself up and stamped the snow vengefully, then waddled away, his dark blue overcoat dappled. In weather like this, he would probably have to spend the night at the shelter at St. George’s Church.

  Perhaps in essence, my loneliness was no different from his, but this didn’t bother me anymore; perhaps because to be alone is a precondition of independence. (“How can you feel lonesome? There’re more than six billion people out there,” Niya once reproached me.) I thought of calling Niya in the evening to tell her that I’d heard from a university. Professor Gambrell’s call had given me a glimmer of hope, though I couldn’t yet envision myself as a scholar. My future was unclear, but I knew I would continue to speak out. Whenever a boat emerged loaded with lies and hypocrisy, whatever flag it flew, I would report it to the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank LuAnn Walther, Catherine Tung, and Lane Zachary for their support, patience, and enthusiasm. At different stages, some friends of mine read the manuscript in progress and gave me invaluable advice. To them I am grateful: Askold Melnyczuk, Ulrike Ostermeyer, Sigrid Nunez, Chitra Divakaruni, and Perry Link.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of seven previous novels, four story collections, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is director of the creative writing program at Boston University.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.