The Boat Rocker Read online

  I stood and took my leave, glad to have Haili’s pages in my bag.

  THREE

  Although I’d told Haili that I was planning a wedding, there were no such plans, because I was not interested. Once bitten by a snake, you dread even the sight of a piece of rope lying in grass, but traumatized as I might have been, I was not as scarred as my sister believed. She had warned that I would be unable to fall in love with another woman for the rest of my life. I laughed that off as a cliché. I was of the opinion that many marriages just covered deceptions and betrayals with the veneer of respectability. In theory, the marital bond is supposed to guarantee love without derailment, but in reality love rarely becomes an obligation. As fond as Katie and I were of each other, I avoided the topic of engagement. Fortunately, she wasn’t marriage-oriented either, and seemed content with things the way they were.

  Katie Torney, the daughter of an Irish father and a Dutch-Filipina mother, was born in golden California and raised in verdant, luxuriant Georgia and South Carolina. Despite her green eyes and long auburn hair, she called herself Asian American, as if her quarter of Filipina blood was what defined her ethnically. This is something I haven’t been able to figure out about America, where merely a few drops of black blood can make a person black or biracial, whereas in China people don’t care how mixed your blood is or what color your skin is—you are just a Chinese if you’ve lived long enough among Chinese. Of course, if you are an ethnic minority, you are a converted barbarian, cultured now. Secretly, though, despite my dislike of racism, in the back of my mind there lurked a measure of vanity in dating Katie, who, with her creamy skin and Irish last name, could pass for a white American woman. Haili, after all, had dumped me for a white American man.

  An assistant professor of sociology at NYU, Katie specialized in Chinese society and culture. She had been working on a book on the provision of medical services in China’s countryside; it was a project she’d have to complete for her tenure evaluation the next fall. To her, it felt like a matter of life and death—a turning point that could make or kill her career. Before the evaluation, she’d have to get the manuscript accepted by a reputable publisher, ideally a major university press. The pressure of her tenure schedule made her anxious and at times distracted. She would come to see me in Flushing once a week; sometimes I’d go to the Village and stay over at her place, usually on weekends. I had suggested moving in together, so that I could have her sleeping beside me every night, but she said she had to concentrate on her research and writing for now. She promised that once she finished her book, she would seriously consider my suggestion. It was unlikely that she’d give up her four-room apartment subsidized by the university, so at best, she’d ask me to move in with her, which would suit me fine—I would happily live near NYU to attend the lectures and talks there.

  For years after my divorce, I had withdrawn into myself and hadn’t dated anyone. If the tide of lust waxed, I would masturbate over one of Haili’s photos taken when she’d been a chaste sophomore or junior, though every time I’d feel sicker afterward. I was afraid of women, especially those from mainland China. God help me, how those females with clenched faces gave me chills! How tough and heartless they could be! Many of them, especially those over forty, were still Red Guards at heart, in awe of neither heaven nor earth. (I’m sure that some of them would rip out my tongue if they could, for the crack I once made in an editorial, “A pot of tea a day keeps China away.” The notion that I could abandon our motherland at will, as long as I had my daily tea, was enough to make them see red.)

  To subdue my anxieties, I took refuge in work, putting in a lot of overtime. Whether because of that or for other reasons, I soon developed ED. When I woke in the morning, my habitual erection was gone—dead and useless. I began longing for a full-blooded wet dream that might signify something of my manhood regained. But even after I had reduced my work hours, my hard-on refused to return. I tried sea horses, ginseng, deer antler, six-flavor boluses, wolfberries, all bought at an herbal pharmacy in downtown Flushing, but nothing helped. Terrified, I went to an underground brothel, hoping desperately that a paid woman could help me recover. A voluptuous young woman led me into a half-lit room, where a Mongolian folk song, complete with galloping horses’ hooves, rapid drumbeats, and the tinkle of the xylophone, droned on. She was from Sichuan, as her accent showed, and was eager to please, but her eagerness made me all the more anxious and unable to get hard. In a giggly voice she urged me to kick back and just enjoy it. She called me “younger brother,” though my thirtieth birthday had just slipped by—I was at least three or four years older than she. True, I looked younger than my age, but her term of endearment disabled me altogether, because “younger brother” might have been referring to my dick. She said, “Younger brother can’t get up because he’s depressed. It’s no big deal. Lots of men had this problem but fully recovered after a couple visits to me. I’ll take good care of you.” I didn’t know what to make of that and became even more helpless. As a final resort, she gave me a hand job and told me to come see her again, at least twice a month—next time she’d give me a big discount, she promised.

  Afterward the dull pain in my lower back grew deeper, more numbing, and more paralyzing. I feared I might develop a kidney problem. Yet, however restless with stirrings I became, I wouldn’t go to a brothel again.

  As time went on, I ventured to date a few women—a Korean, a Taiwanese, a Singaporean—but they all left me within two or three months, saying they couldn’t figure me out or tolerate the fact that I would never let my guard down. In their eyes, I was an iconoclast who despised his own culture. (To them, the fact that I didn’t love dim sum, kung pao chicken, calligraphy, martial arts, Ping-Pong, acupuncture, or the Monkey King—in spite of his magic, which enables him to morph into seventy-two things and creatures—meant I hated China. In the case of the Korean woman, even though I liked kimchi, she still thought me spiteful. But I love only what touches my heart! Who’s to say that Brahms did not compose his symphonies also for me?) To make matters worse, they all expected me to propose, as if I had knocked them up and was condemned to a shotgun wedding. I told them I was not interested in marriage and that, at any rate, I didn’t have the resources to start a family. One of them insisted that any man dating a woman without the intention of marrying her was a leech, if not a predator. They all accused me of being a “misogynist” (somehow they knew this English word) and of being too calculating—“a big planner,” in the words of the Taiwanese woman, a dance teacher with a lovely figure and velvety eyes. Honest to God, I had never harbored any secret plan or taken advantage of them. Yet the more they complained, the more nervous and incapable I became.

  Katie had come into my life by chance. I often marveled at my luck. Or was this a gift bestowed on me by Providence for some good deeds done by my ancestors? She was an aspiring China scholar and had some connections in mainland China as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Our first encounter was at the local farmers’ market in Flushing, where I used to go shopping. She’d been trying to haggle with a fruit seller but couldn’t understand his Cantonese. I helped a little, and then we fell into conversation in Mandarin. Eager to practice the language more often, she agreed to meet again.

  On our first coffee date, a week later, we conversed about a variety of topics, from the water shortages in Chinese cities to the lives of the Native Americans on reservations, from European leeks and cucumbers to broccoli, which the first President Bush hated but which had nevertheless begun to be grown in China just a decade earlier as the “green cauliflower.” We sat in a café in Washington Square. She was drinking coffee while I had tea, which was too bland for my taste. American teas all tasted artificial and weak to me then. Toward the end of our date, she wanted another coffee and asked if I would like something too. At the time I hadn’t developed a taste for coffee yet, but I said, “Coffee’s okay.” I thought it would be rude not to get anything.

  She asked again, “What
size?”

  “Any size is fine.”

  She brought back two medium coffees. I took a tiny sip but didn’t like it and didn’t touch it again. We chatted for a few more minutes before I had to head back to Flushing. As we left, I dropped my coffee into a trash can. Katie looked puzzled and stared at me, her eyes flashing. We said good-bye, and she strolled away toward Eighth Street, her legs muscular with long calves. That night I got an angry message from her—she said I had been inconsiderate and had wasted her money. She wrote: “If you didn’t want coffee, you should not have let me buy it for you in the first place. You might call me stingy. Yes, I am stingy. It was my money, which no one else was entitled to waste.”

  I was blindsided—why would she be so angry over a cup of coffee? She was a professor and must make a decent salary. On second thought, though, I began to feel ashamed. She was right that I should not have just dumped the coffee. If converted into yuan, $1.75 wasn’t a trifling amount and could buy two large bowls of noodles in China. I apologized to Katie and said I appreciated her candor. Afterward I still felt uneasy and kept pondering what had prompted me to act so thoughtlessly. As a kind of soul-searching, I wrote a column titled “A Cup of Coffee.” In it I asked myself why, poor as I was, I could have been so wasteful, and just as I was trying to make a good impression on a beautiful woman. My answer was that I must still carry some mental residue from my former journalist job in China. Back there, reporters were considered VIPs by the common people and were well treated by the officials at the lower levels, though of course to our bosses we were merely scribes. When I went down to local cities and counties to write about events and people, I almost never paid for food. I always got wined and dined—the local cadres treated me like an official inspector of sorts so that I could put in favorable words about them and their fiefdoms. Even back at my newspaper’s office, we paid a pittance of two yuan for our daily staff lunches, which were always lavish and worth at least twenty times more. Many state-owned companies did this, offering their employees lunch essentially for free. As a result, I had grown careless about food and drinks and often threw leftovers away. Indeed, one can always be generous with others’ money, I realized. My essay ended with this sentence: “From now on I had better treat every cup of coffee or tea as something bought on my own dime.”

  The column was well received and got reprinted in several Chinese-language newspapers and magazines in the States and Canada. Though I’d made no mention of Katie’s name in it, I sent her a copy. She liked it and wrote back, saying I was an honest man and she wanted to meet again.

  We started seeing each other more often. Katie was three years younger than me, but more experienced in dating. At the very beginning she made it clear that she was not considering a permanent relationship because she wasn’t sure how long she could live in New York. That was all the better for me. She said she was attracted to me partly because I was the first man who hadn’t made advances to her at the outset of our dating. It was true that I never got ahead of myself. Later, when we did go to bed together, I was a bundle of nerves and couldn’t make love to her. I flattered her and made excuses, saying that her body dazzled me. (In a way, that was true—she spent serious time at the gym and was in fantastic shape.) She knew I was lying, but she was patient and said I was all right and there was nothing to be anxious about. I wasn’t that bad, she assured me; she’d once dated a guy in his mid-thirties who was already addicted to Viagra (a drug I’d never tried). Feeling less pressure, I began to be able to take it easy.

  Little by little, the coldness in me thawed. With Katie I felt as if I were making love for the first time. With her I learned how to use my body to please a woman, how to enjoy being touched and aroused, and how to take possession of her and be possessed. At long last, I could rise to the climax slowly and could relax even though she got into full swing. She awoke the animal in me. For that—for the fact that I finally could feel at ease with my body—I would always be in her debt, no matter where our relationship led us.

  —

  KATIE CAME to my place soon after seven p.m., wearing a sweaterdress over black tights. Her handbag was filled with a stack of Chinese articles. She knew the language, having studied it at Johns Hopkins as an undergraduate, but she couldn’t read it very fast. Usually she asked me to look through a bunch of articles first and weed out those that wouldn’t be useful for her research. She put her bag on the dining table and hugged me. We kissed long and hard, and I started getting an erection. She patted at my crotch; I smiled but stepped back, nodding toward the sizzling pan on the stove.

  I always did the cooking for both of us. At the beginning of our relationship, I’d told her about how Haili once misinformed Chinese readers in an article, claiming that if an American man cooked for his woman, that meant he was inadequate in bed. Katie laughed and said she’d always dated men who took pride in their culinary skills. It was better for everyone—domesticity was not her strong suit. When there was no man in her life to do the cooking, she picked up sandwiches from delis or ordered takeout or ate in restaurants. By Chinese standards you could say she was a bit extravagant, but what balanced it out was that she wasn’t picky. When we ate out, we could go anywhere: noodle joints, pizzerias, dumpling houses, McDonald’s, Subway, even the dingy provincial-food stalls in the basement of Golden Mall on Main Street.

  I was cooking beef noodles tonight, mixed with diced asparagus and scallions. When the food was ready, we ate unhurriedly. Katie was in a sour mood because the Chinese consulate had again rejected her visa application. She was known as a minor activist among China scholars here, and two years ago she had helped a group of Tibetans organize an international conference at NYU. Afterward, she wrote an article on China’s minority policies for Harper’s Magazine. She was quite critical of the policies and argued that China had made a great step backward in that area (the police often detained or incarcerated activists without charge). The article got Katie in trouble with the Chinese officials here. One of them told her bluntly at a party: “We have been keeping an eye on you. Don’t assume you can get away with your hostility against China. We don’t forget. We can ruin your career or help you make it.” Indeed, they had crippled, if not destroyed, a good number of scholars by isolating them professionally, by barring them from entering China, even by boycotting them at conferences. Seeing such tactics was what had prompted some China hands years ago, in both Europe and the States, to advise their governments not to criticize China for its reprehensible human rights record. Just do business with the Chinese and make as much money as you can, they argued. Once capitalism has taken root in that country, a strong middle class will emerge and democracy will be on its way. Now we all know that China, the wayward dragon, has grown into an anomaly, an unprecedented combination of one-party oligarchy and rapacious capitalism.

  “Did they give you any reason this time?” I asked Katie about her visa application.

  “No, the man in the office just told me, ‘You know why we must turn you down again.’ ” She frowned; thin wrinkles creased her forehead, making her heart-shaped face appear gaunt. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told them I planned to do fieldwork in Henan province.”

  “Do you think that might make them more determined to stop you?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Did you mention you wanted to interview country folks infected with HIV?”

  “No! I’m not that stupid.”

  “I’ll ask Kaiming to put in a word for you,” I said. “He must have connections in the consulate.”

  “Please do.” Her eyes warmed a bit.

  I began to tell her about the new story I was investigating. Katie had already heard about Love and Death in September—the hype had reached the Chinese-language media in the diaspora. She had also seen a short article about it in China Watch, a free tabloid distributed only in Chinese stores and on street corners, but she’d had no idea that my ex-wife was the author. I told her about my meeting with Haili and how she had claime
d that the novel was “a national project.”

  Katie smiled and said, “That woman is outrageous.”

  “To be fair, I don’t think she could come up with such an elaborate scheme by herself. She isn’t that complicated a person and doesn’t have a lot of strategies. So maybe she’s right—maybe she does have a clique behind her. But why are they using 9/11 as a selling point?”

  “To break into the U.S. book market,” Katie said.

  “But why?”

  “Books are expensive here and she wants to make more money.”

  “There might be more to it.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it. Kaiming said the publisher meant to make most of their money in the Chinese market, so the foreign publication of the book might serve as validation.”

  “Validation of what?”

  “Of its quality.”

  “That’s perverse. Now even a Chinese romance novel needs foreign validation?”

  “A lot of fiction readers there don’t believe the domestic hype—they’re so used to it. But if a novel gains an international reputation, that gets more attention.”

  After dinner, Katie put on an album by her favorite punk band, Propagandhi, and began to do the dishes, while I looked through the articles she’d brought along. I found only three that seemed like they would help her with her research. After that, I lounged in a chair and started reading Haili’s manuscript. The narrative voice was breezy and for the most part read quickly, but there were also moments when the writing was clunky and vulgar. The narrator, named Yan Haili, emphasized again and again that what she was telling was absolutely autobiographical. She name-dropped at every opportunity, claiming that she’d met a rather scattered list of celebrities: Saul Bellow, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sandra Bullock, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush. One luminary I was certain Haili had once taken a photo with was the Dalai Lama, but she made no mention of him for fear of the censorship in China. She presented herself as a daughter of two distinguished artists, a sculptor and a landscape painter, who had emigrated from Tianjin to Melbourne in the late 1970s, when she was a toddler. She had grown up abroad, she wrote, and was utterly savvy about the Western way of life. But she had also preserved her roots in Chinese culture, which nourished her life and art. That was why she’d kept writing in our beloved native language. She could easily have written this novel in English, she boasted, but she wanted to share her experiences with Chinese readers first. More fundamentally, she had to retain her allegiance to our beautiful, profound, infinitely intricate mother tongue, in which she could frolic and dance at will. Therefore, wherever she went, the Chinese language was her only valuable luggage, her “inexhaustible cornucopia.”