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

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 him in front of Lincoln Center, beside the leaping fountains. Larry was an utterly unremarkable-looking man: in his early forties, wide-framed, with an incipient potbelly and a mop of salt-and-pepper hair. I no longer felt the hatred I'd once had for him. I'd come to realize that Haili had married him not because he was the better man, but because she'd been looking for someone who could give her a green card and an auspicious beginning in America. So Larry, a stock analyst on Wall Street with his own office, must have been her ideal catch, and she must have been the seducer, not the other way around. Larry always dressed in a suit and tie. He had expensive taste and was an opera aficionado. A typical petty bourgeois, in my opinion, probably a philistine.

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.