The Boat Rocker - A Novel - Hardcover

Jin, Ha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307911624 ISBN 13: 9780307911629

Verlag: Random House LCC US, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist’s dogged quest for truth in the Internet age.

New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by the Chinese diaspora around the world. Danlin’s explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers—and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom.

Haili’s scheme infuriates Danlin both morally and personally—he will do whatever it takes to expose her as a fraud. But in outing Haili, he is also provoking her powerful political allies, and he will need to draw on all of his journalistic cunning to emerge from this investigation with his career—and his life—still intact. A brilliant, darkly funny story of corruption, integrity, and the power of the pen, The Boat Rocker is a tour de force of modern fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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ONE
 
A week before the fourth anniversary of 9/11, my boss, Kaiming, barged into my office, rattling a three-page printout in his hands. “Look at this, Danlin,” he said, dropping the papers on my desk. “This is outrageous! How could they claim that George W. Bush had agreed to endorse a book by Yan Haili? Everyone can tell it’s a lie the size of heaven.”
 
I picked up the printout, an article from The Yangtze Morning Post. It raved about “a landmark novel,” not yet released. I had recently signed a book contract myself and was used to the hyperbole of the book business, but it was the novelist’s name, Yan Haili, that took my breath away. She was my ex-wife. That brassy bitch—she never stopped vying for attention.
 
The article, printed in the newspaper’s literary and art supplement, gushed that her novel, Love and Death in September, was an exotic, whirlwind love story, set by turns in North America, China, Australia, England, Russia, and France. Haili had been working on a potboiler for as long as I’d known her. She’d called it “a fabulous transnational romance.” It was yet another project that she hadn’t been able to finish. She had never succeeded in finding the center of the story, nor could she connect the various episodes into a plot with a satisfying ending. She had shelved the book again and again, and I’d thought the project was long abandoned. But now—I scanned the article in disbelief—her publisher was claiming the Administrative Office of the Chinese Communist Party had been contacted by the White House, and that President Bush would endorse the English translation of Haili’s novel! Why? Because the book “embodied the cooperative spirit between the United States and China in the global war on terrorism.” Shoot me if that was true.
 
The bitch will never change, I realized. I wouldn’t let her get away with it this time. I’d figure out a way to expose all her chicaneries and vanity. Even if she begged me on her knees, I wouldn’t relent.
 
“This is nonsense,” I said to my boss. “The White House must be more interested in the author than in the book—I mean, in Yan Haili, to find out if she was secretly acting as a Chinese agent.”
 
“That’s giving her too much credit,” Kaiming said. “She’s not smart enough to conduct espionage.” He knew how much I hated my ex-wife—that our marriage had lasted only three years before she’d found someone else, and that I couldn’t wait to get even with her. He sometimes called Haili “the heartless woman” in front of me.
 
I said, “So what do you want me to do? This is an arts and culture story—I never write about this kind of thing in my column.”
 
“This time you will. This goes beyond books—I believe it’s only one piece of a larger scam.”
 
I was pleased but didn’t show it. I said cautiously, “Won’t this be a conflict of interest?”
 
“Conflict of interest? We’re dealing with a bunch of scumbags who never do anything by the rules. You can’t handle them by acting like a gentleman. I want you to throw all your fire into this case.”
 
“If you want me to expose this scam, you’d better have some idea how it got started.”
 
“I met Jiao Fanping, her publisher, in Beijing last month. Only he’s not a true publisher—he’s nothing but a profiteer. I want you to write something to expose their scheme before they embarrass lots of us Chinese here in America. We must nip this in the bud.”
 
“I’m afraid it’s already blooming into an evil flower.”
 
“We can still pluck it off.”
 
“This will become personal.” I tried to smile but felt my face tight.
 
“I only want you to do the job.” My boss smiled.
 
“I’ll see what I can do.”
 
Pleased, Kaiming rose and headed back out to his office, the tail of his pale blue shirt swaying a little. His shoulders were so thick that he appeared to be slightly stooping.
 
Outside the window, two toddlers were playing noisily in a canary kiddie pool on the neighbors’ lawn. It was early September, and still warm. Beyond the lawn were the boxwood hedges, and then a length of flimsy pier that dipped into the edge of Little Neck Bay. In the distance flocks of seabirds sailed through the sky like shattered clouds. A rust-colored tanker lay at anchor, silhouetted against the pale shoreline and the curving belt of the Cross Island Parkway. As I gazed out, I began to think about Kaiming’s reasons for assigning me Haili’s story, despite my personal involvement. Of the fourteen reporters in our company, GNA (Global News Agency), I was the one known for my exposés, shining a light onto the towering corruption of Chinese politics and media in my regular column. My acid tongue was legendary, my comments heart-stabbing, my views uncompromising, and my predictions sometimes even oracular. Naturally I was hated by officials and celebrities, and cursed by those I’d exposed. Yet when everyday people of the Chinese diaspora discovered my writing, it was, in their own words, “like discovering a new continent.” Most of GNA’s readership consisted of Chinese living abroad, but some of my columns made it past the partly erected Great Firewall into the mainland. Here in New York’s Chinese community, dignitaries steered clear of me, regarding me as an annoyance best avoided. My boss had probably put me on the case of Haili’s “landmark novel” for another, more pragmatic reason: unlike most of the other reporters for our Chinese-language website, I was fluent in English and wouldn’t swallow my a’s and the’s. That would facilitate my investigation of the Americans’ involvement in this whole affair. (He knew that the White House’s endorsement was a boast.)
 
I reread the Yangtze Morning Post article. When I got to the end, I felt incensed. This was unmistakably the book Haili had been working on all those years, but it had never occurred to me that she would have the temerity to exploit the tragedy of 9/11. According to the article, the book follows a young couple, a princely American man and a bewitching Chinese woman, whose coming honeymoon to Bali is annulled by the groom’s disappearance in the collapsed World Trade Center. He’d been in the North Tower. They had just been married the weekend before. The bride, wrecked by her husband’s death, almost dies, herself, of grief. For months, wherever she goes, she thinks she can see glimpses of his strapping figure in crowds or at street corners. Sometimes when she picks up the phone, the voice she hears is his. His laughter echoes in her mind and makes her eyes brim with tears. The man had dreamed of becoming a watercolor painter with a studio in Paris, on the willow-lined Seine. How remorseful she is for not having persuaded him to follow his passions! For almost half a year after his death she can’t go to work, fearful even of crossing streets and riding elevators. But now, she’s finally found the courage to write this book, which is said to be “utterly autobiographical,” because she wants to share both her joy and her pain with others.
 
I knew Haili’s current husband, Larry Clements. He was American, but that was about all he had in common with the tragic lover in Haili’s book. Just two weeks back I had run into...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307911624
• ISBN 13: 9780307911629
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: PANTHEON; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar