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

She worked hard on her English, a subject in which she came out number one of the seventy-eight students of the year 1994 in the music department of her normal university. She said to me, "English means freedom to me. It will give me a pair of strong wings." I agreed, nodding like an idiot.

What had happened to her dreams of liberation, which, to her, could only be expressed in the English language? Where were her wings? As far as I knew, she had stopped writing in English long ago, seeing more opportunities and a larger readership in China. She claimed that she was now already "free and happy." How true the caveat is: contentment shackles your soul.

Our two editorial assistants, both interns, were unfamiliar with the art and literary scene in China, so I preferred to do the research by myself. I began looking for more press coverage of the novel on China News Service and SINA News. I found that her publisher, Jiao Fanping, had granted an interview to The Readers' Guide Weekly a few days before. In it, he claimed that Random House had just purchased the novel for an undisclosed large figure, and that negotiations with major European, Japanese, Latin American, and Taiwanese publishers were all under way. "There's every indication that this extraordinary book will become an international best seller," Jiao avowed. "Just last Friday I heard from Hollywood that they were interested in acquiring the movie rights to this novel. How about that! This is absolutely phenomenal and fantastic, a breakthrough in our country's effort to export our cultural products."

I knew of Jiao Fanping, the only son of a high official in the State Council. Jiao had made his fortune on the Chinese stock market and then started building his own empire, which began with a small publishing house and a few cafés and dumpling joints near college campuses, all in Beijing. In recent years he'd been branching out into the music and movie industries. His statements about Haili's book had to be bald-faced lies. I doubted she had completed the novel yet, let alone shopped it around to foreign publishers. Until the book's actual appearance, she would still belong to the vast army of unpublished novelists.

I went down the hallway to my boss's office. "Kaiming," I said, "the scheme surrounding my ex-wife's novel might be bigger and uglier than we thought."

"That's why I want you to look into it—nobody but you can uncover the whole thing."

"Believe me, no reputable publisher will consider the book seriously. It's just a shallow romance."

"Well, you know in China there's no distinction between a literary novel and a romance novel. All the genres are just lumped together. Most readers can't tell the difference anyway."

"That's true. The Japanese don't make such a distinction either. But still, quality is quality—I don't think any decent publisher here will give Haili's book the time of day."

"You never know. It can be brought out as a romance novel here and then advertised as a literary novel back in China, where they're planning to make most of their money anyway. I want you to expose those frauds."

"You know that I can't help but be biased."

"That's all right—you can use it to your advantage."

Kaiming grinned, baring his square teeth. I had known him long enough to see that he'd wanted to harness my personal feelings for this job all along. He often stressed that we report every major piece of news from a unique perspective. By his definition, "Genius is originality" (which I doubt, because the world is overpopulated with original asses). If GNA kept doing news in a peerless fashion, Kaiming believed, we would become an indispensable source for the Chinese-language media around the globe. He also stressed, "Truthfulness is our only way to survive in this news business and to make money in the long run." He himself specialized in political commentary and most times could predict the developments of current events; his opinions were highly valued, even by some experienced China hands in the States. He was regarded as a walking encyclopedia of Beijing's top political circles, where he had secret sources. He knew how to get things done. In the case of Love and Death in September, he seemed to see my feelings about Haili as the most powerful fuel for our investigation.

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.