‘The Boat Rocker’ Deftly Explores Media and the Chinese Diaspora

Ha Jin has made a career on crafting skillful histories of particular moments in the history of 20th-century China. His most iconic work, “Waiting,” explores the shifts brought on by the Cultural Revolution through the eyes of an army doctor, while “War Trash” explores the brutality of the Korean War from the perspective of a Chinese POW. In recent years, however, Jin has turned away from insular studies of China to focus explicitly on the relationship between the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the United States.

While his first book-length exploration of Sino-U.S. interplay, the 2014 spy tale “A Map of Betrayal,” hovered in Jin’s mid-century sweet spot, this month’s journalistic thriller, “The Boat Rocker,” zooms forward to 2005 New York City, giving Jin the nearly impossible task of historicizing a just-barely-bygone era. While Jin occasionally lets the confusing ethical positions of his megalomaniacal-muckraker protagonist Feng Danlin cloud the author’s critique of the Bush years, Jin’s vision of the relationship between Chinese-American media, the War on Terror, and the rise of Internet-reputation provides a fascinating origin story for the turbulent East-West dynamics of the social media age.

“The Boat Rocker” opens with a jolt: Danlin, a reporter for the America-based, anti-censorship Chinese media outlet GNA, discovers that his ex-wife, Yan Haili, has finally followed through on her desire to publish—exclusively in China, and thus outside of the fact-checking gaze of most American journalists—a pseudo-memoir about her second marriage to a successful Wall Street banker. In a bizarre turn, however, she has fabricated the banker’s death in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11, leveraging the made-up tragedy to help the book be taken more seriously in the Chinese press. Despite the conflict of interest, Danlin’s bosses at GNA convince their columnist to investigate the memoir’s potential links to the Chinese government, which they believe may be bankrolling the project to curry favor with the Bush administration. Sure enough, Danlin discovers that the “lightweight romance novel” is receiving ridiculous accolades in Party publications, which suggest that the book may receive a Nobel Prize (a lifetime achievement award, Danlin incredulously carps!) consideration.

Jin frenetically introduces the players in the conspiracy: Danlin’s suspicious boss, the real-life second husband Larry (still alive), and several corrupt Chinese publishers. Danlin wades through the muck with as much bias as possible, writing columns that highlight the toxicity he feels towards his wife, who abandoned him seven years earlier a day after Danlin’s arrival in the U.S. Jin, whose first-person narration as Danlin offers little space for other perspectives, seems to be setting up an intriguing mystery around his narrator’s unreliability: Can we trust Danlin, or is he out for revenge? Jin’s ambiguous treatment of Danlin, which he complicates with revelations of his protagonist’s impotence and misogyny (he refers to Chinese women as having “cringed faces” and usually describes women by their appearance rather than by their intellectual attributes) directs the book’s focus towards his bruised psyche.

For the first half of the book, then, the morality play around Danlin obscures the comparatively quaint political historicizing in which Jin is engaged. Yes, there is the 9/11 lie—to which Danlin takes special offense given his opposition to the Iraq War—but otherwise it just seems surreal that nobody has smart phones. The Internet flame wars between Haili and Danlin never reach a fever pitch, and Danlin’s wonder at the Web’s ability to “give every individual a voice” seems blasé compared to his anger at his wife. Geopolitical and technological issues initially take a backseat to Danlin’s self-righteousness and the forcefulness of Haili’s defenses.The battle is intriguing, but the potential to delve into 2005 remains mostly unrealized until later in the novel.

Initially, the larger importance of the U.S.-China relations of 2005 are further buried—sometimes frustratingly so—by the satellite setting; besides a brief interlude in Berlin, the book takes place entirely in New York, while the hubbub generated by Danlin and Haili’s press war happens in an unseen China that the reader only hears about second-hand from publishers, businessmen, and diplomats who fly in to tell Danlin how much trouble he’s in. Danlin’s distance, however, becomes the very point of Jin’s 2005, particularly as it becomes clear that no deus ex machina or shoot-out will decide a victor. At one point, Danlin learns he has been selected by an online Chinese poll as one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, despite the fact that he lives abroad, makes no money, and hasn’t been to China since his arrival in the U.S. The incomplete Internet connectivity of the mid-aughts gives the fight a certain dullness and unknowability that allows Jin to start favoring the philosophical over the pot-boiler as the plot progresses. By the book’s end, the frenetic set-up has given way to dialogue-heavy debates between Danlin, Haili, and their friends and colleagues over what exactly they believe to be the purpose of the Internet, censorship, and their own personal roles in revealing the all-powerful ability of the U.S. to encourage greed.

The book’s kernels of truth concern the arguments that consume our society: between net neutrality and hypnotic propaganda, American cynicism and Chinese sensationalism, and the increasingly obvious reality to both sides that posting the wrong thing online can end you. Jin is astonishingly disciplined in his crafting of character and prose, even if “The Boat Rocker” takes an unexpected yet exhilarating left turn away from thriller territory towards a philosophical reckoning with the recent past.

—Staff writer David J. Kurlander can be reached at david.kurlander@thecrimson.com.