Excerpt from The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

According to the Post, Haili had already started promoting her book in China—she'd made several public appearances in Beijing and Shanghai the month before. The article described her as a beautiful, enigmatic young lady from New York, who had "elegant manners," "a lithe figure," "a lovely velvety voice," and "dreaming eyes full of memories." She wore a jade heart necklace (her love charm), which dangled above her fair-skinned cleavage. She emanated grace and culture. "Her whole person, her body language, enunciates the profoundest theme of life: Love! No wonder it's universally agreed that style is the person. In Yan Haili's case, the writer's personal beauty and her gorgeous prose dovetail—I venture to say they enhance and deepen each other." It was reported that Haili had captivated her young audience the moment she began to speak about writing her book, a process that had been so painful and so personal that, talking about it in front of the crowd, she'd had to pause now and again to collect herself. The audience, especially the college students among them, fixed their admiring eyes on her the whole time. Without question, her words had struck a chord in their hearts. Many girls couldn't stop brushing away their
tears.

I knew better than anyone else how pretty and charming Haili was. She was a beauty who could make people break off midconversation when she entered a room. But she was certainly not a gifted writer, despite her excellent taste as a reader—she loved magical realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras, and D. H. Lawrence. ("If I could write a book like Lady Chatterley's Lover, I would die happy," she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.) When we were a young married couple in China, I helped her revise and edit her stories and prose poems, and she submitted them to magazines and contests. Even with my help, she'd seldom succeeded in placing her pieces, much less seeing them in print. Lacking in confidence but ebullient with creative ambition, she adopted a pair of pen names, Quill from Heaven and Azure Dragonfly, as most Chinese writers do, both for self-protection and to show their modesty. Since our divorce, seven years ago, I'd been following her publications, which mostly seemed to be small write-ups, the size of a block of tofu, in community newspapers. She also posted linked stories on her blog, which, I realized now, must have been chapters from her novel. They were embarrassingly amateurish. Her passages were marred with double and triple exclamation marks. She dropped pretentious expressions right and left, calling mung-bean noodles "dragon's beard" and aniseeds "octagonal stars." I used to try to curb this "poetic" impulse of hers, but it had only gotten worse after we parted ways. I couldn't see how she could possibly have developed into a published novelist overnight.

I often wondered what had happened to her youthful wanderlust. Was she still longing to see the world? I doubted it. She was so comfortably ensconced in New York—"the capital of the world," she loved to brag. Back in college in Changchun City, she used to dream of serving as a diplomat, traveling the globe and hopping from country to country. "Every morning you would wake to find a new foreign sun," she'd say. She'd even aspired to become a sort of female Odysseus—a woman who existed only in her interminable wanderings and who wouldn't fear meeting her death in a distant land or even at the bottom of an uncharted sea. When she confided her secret thoughts to me in the aspen grove behind her ceramic-tiled classroom building, I was blown away, never having even thought of stepping foot out of our native Jilin province. Her wild spirit fascinated me and opened a vista in my mind's eye. Yes, yes, I told her, human beings must go anywhere their hearts lead them—our experiences must live up to the passions we are capable of sustaining. So I urged her to pursue her vision, to, in her own words, "build a home in the sky and eventually glitter like a star on a cloudless night."

Excerpted from The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin. Copyright © 2016 by Ha Jin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.