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Literary Review
Ha Jin's fiction
THE Creative Writing Programme of Boston University boasts a new addition to the permanent faculty, Ha Jin, who writes under the pen name Xuefi Jin (Shu-Fay Jin). Like the Nobel laureate Gao Xinjian, Ha Jin is also an expatriate Chinese writer, living in America since 1985. He has written poetry, short stories and novels in English and has won many prestigious literary laurels. All his works make compelling reading and provide an insight into Chinese Society.
He was born in the Chinese city of Jinzhou in Liaoning province and his parents were military doctors. At the age of seven he was shipped off to boarding school, where he studied for two years until all schools in China were closed at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. With no school, he joined the Little Red Guard, where he spent a few years "wearing red arm bands, waving flags and singing revolutionary songs". From the age of 14 to 19 he served in the Chinese army. After five and a half years of patrolling the frigid border areas between Manjuria and Siberia, he decided to join college. But colleges were closed due to the Cultural Revolution. So he worked as a telegrapher at a railroad company for three years in Jiamusi and during this period he learnt English by listening to a radio programme from 5 to 5.30 a.m., six days a week. In 1977 he joined Heilongjiang University in Harbin (His pen name Ha comes from that!) and was assigned to study English. Later he studied American literature at Shandong University. In 1985 he went to Brandeis University, United States, and did a Ph.D. on modern poetry and in the meanwhile he studied fiction writing at Boston University with novelist Leslie Epstein and Aharon Appelfed.
Jin's original plan was to return to China after obtaining the Ph.D. but as he watched the brutal violence and massacre of young students in 1989 on the Tiananmen Square on TV, he gave up the idea of returning to China. His early years in the U.S. were by no means easy. He had to do menial jobs like cleaning tables at a restaurant and at houses and had to work as a night watchman in a chemical factory; it was then that he began writing in English. He sensed a freedom and flexibility writing in English, which he never experienced in his native Chinese while writing poems.
He took his first pieces of poetry to Frank Bidart who was teaching at Brandeis, who was impressed with its remarkable idiom. He read out the "Dead Soldiers Talk" on telephone to Jonathan Galassi who was then the poetry editor of The Paris Review and it was accepted for publication. A few years later Ha Jin's first book of poetry, Between Silences, was described as "a profound book and an event". From then on he never had to look back.
He published another poetry collection, Facing Shadows. His first collection of stories Ocean of Words bagged the celebrated PEN Hemingway Award and the judges commented, "this debut book is of simple style and understated beauty". The stories source experiences that Ha Jin had in the military. Ha Jin's next collection of stories, Under the Red Flag won the Flannery O'Conner award for Short Fiction. The stories carry an undercurrent of cynicism in the face of authority common to authoritarian societies. They explore the predicament of simple and barely literate men with breathtaking concision and humanity. The third collection of stories, Bridegroom vividly brings out the drama of Chinese men and women feeling the influence of the West. Ha Jin's first novel In the Pond portrays the travails of Shao Bin, an amateur painter and calligrapher who works as a department-store fitter. Disgusted with his frustrations, he draws satirical cartoons against the corruption of local party bosses. One of them gets published in a Beijing newspaper and Shao Bin draws national attention. It is a moving tale about humble lives caught up in the vortex of social forces and a potent reminder of the universality of human folly.
It was the dreamy and beautifully written novel, Waiting that shot Ha Jin to literary fame. The book was the winner of the 1999 National Book Award, the PEN Faulkner Award and several other accolades. It was an instant bestseller. It has the plot of a couple patiently waiting 18 years to get married. The reader is engaged by its narrative structure, wry humour, and the subtle and startling shifts it produces in the understanding of the characters and the situations as well as insights into the Chinese society during and since the Cultural Revolution. It confronts the chasm that divides the new Industrial China from its traditional and ancient agricultural settlements and the values of conventional family system. The book is still banned in China as it is considered a plot to show "China's backwardness and the stupidity of the Chinese people".
Ha Jin's latest novel The Crazed, is a tale of love and betrayal. The novel's historical backdrop is the events leading to and culminating in the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Professor Yang, the Director of the Literature department in a University is hospitalised after a stroke. His devoted student Jian Wan, who is engaged to marry his daughter Meimei, is assigned to take care of him. She is a student in Beijing and is preparing to enter the Medical School and both she and her father have been encouraging Jian to take the test for a doctorate in literature so that he can join her. The stroke has affected the Professor and he, in his sleep and while awake, curses and rambles about many things including his sexual escapades. "Sometimes he talks like an imbecile and sometimes he speaks like a sage". He makes "crazed" and bitter references to his past sufferings.
Ha Jin decries the fraudulence of the academic world and the bickering and power struggles of professors with graphic details and of their extremely dangerous and cruel games of survival. The novelist also directly condemns China as an old hag so decrepit and brainsick that she would devour her children to sustain herself" (p. 315). The book brings out the perennial conflict between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, and loyalty and betrayal.
The narration at times is faulty and since politics directly affects the psyche of the characters, the portrayal is also distorted, unlike in his earlier works of fiction. The creative distance between literature and life is at times lacking and hence it becomes contrived at places. The style of narration, though generally elegant and poetic, is prosaic, formal and often clichéd. Ha Jin's stature as a premier novelist of Chinese diaspora takes a dip in The Crazed. It is heartening that in a lecture he has stated that he would no longer write about heartland China and plans to write about other societies.
K. KUNHIKRISHNAN
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