December 7–14, 2000

book quarterly

Author vs. Authority

Taking on the man: Anti-authoritarian Ha Jin.

Ha Jin talks about being a dissident writer without politics.

by Andrew Ervin

The characters in Ha Jin’s stories, including his National Book Award-winning novel Waiting and his new story collection The Bridegroom (Pantheon, 225 p., $22), share a common theme: man vs. The Man. Behind each story lurks a hidden force, an authority that can at will step in to dictate the fate of the characters. Usually, it’s the faceless state of communist China, represented by the original Chairman of the Bored, Mao Tse-tung. Other times, it’s the corrupting presence of capitalism spreading like social diseases and poisoning the minds of the befuddled masses. Either way, it’s always a powerful agent just outside of the characters’ reach.

Make no mistake. As in the stories of Thomas Pynchon, another celebrated champion of all things paranoid and pedantic, Jin’s characters have legitimate cause for concern. In The Bridegroom, The Man is real. Innocent people are routinely dragged before the law for interrogation or reeducation. Factory workers are denied advancement on the basis of arbitrary political whims.

But The Bridegroom is not overtly political in nature. There’s no specific agenda other than storytelling. In China, truly subversive writing has typically been the material that doesn’t touch upon politics at all. (See the works of Duo Duo or Ai Bei, both of whom have also emigrated.) Political writing, even in opposition, fuels the government; writing art for the sake of art undermines it. Jin concerns himself with the intricacies of human suffering and long in the atmosphere of fear, and in doing so he transcends the debate entirely.

Jin’s stories are told in a spare language you might otherwise associate with fairy tales, lending them a truly timeless quality. Think of Kafka on Prozac, or Alice Munro off it. Jin’s writing is masterful, his stories taut like fishing line hooked in the mouth of the largest tuna you’ve ever seen. He is without question one of America’s greatest living authors, and The Bridegroom only begins to demonstrate his limitless potential.

City Paper caught up with Ha Jin in early November, just before his reading at the Free Library. The interview took place in his hotel room, with the sound of a Friday rush hour rising up to meet us. Although Jin was born in China, he moved to the United States in 1985 to obtain his Ph.D. All have his books have been written in English, and he became an American citizen a few years ago. As attendees of his reading will surely attest, Jin exudes a genuine warmth and hospitality even with strangers.

Do you consider yourself a dissident writer?

No. I’m an American citizen now. Before I came to the States I had not published anything. So I’m not like a writer that was banished. If you call me an exile writer, mostly I’m self-exiled. [Laughs] Let’s be fair about it!

There are more and more Chinese authors in the States. Is this because of a different climate for artistic expression?

I think yes. Politically, they’re still very rigid, the [Chinese] government. But you know I’m in a different situation because I’m more like an immigrant than like an exile. Exile is part of me, but I think I’m more of an immigrant writer.

And you’re not tempted to write in Chinese?

I have been tempted, but actually that’s not something I should do. It took me a year to decide to write in English. Once that decision was made, I really shouldn’t return. To return would be insane. Suicidal. Honestly, I have reached the point that if I wrote in Chinese I could get a book published, but my heart is not in it at all. I used to hunger for being published in Chinese, but not now. Once I decided to write in English I had to identify myself as a different kind of writer. There is a kind of alienation from Chinese, definitely.

Any thoughts on the awarding of the Nobel Prize to [Chinese author] Gao Xingjian?

I think it’s a good thing, really. I’m very happy for him. To be honest, he was not that well known as a fiction writer. I knew him only as a playwright. He was also a critic, a kind of practical critic. So I was kind of surprised, but I’m happy for him. I read the novel, and I can see that it’s a remarkable piece of work. The Nobel Prize is not for the champion of literature; it’s just given to an outstanding writer. It’s a good thing. It demonstrates that literature is made by individuals, not by groups. In that sense, it really is a good thing.

Did you get out to see any of Philadelphia?

I had a tour. We went to the Liberty Bell and some other places. They have to preserve [the bell] as it is, I think. The craftsmen who made the bell, they were not good at this. This was the only bell they ever cast. That’s why the bell only lasted a short time. And then they couldn’t use it anymore and couldn’t fix it. But I was also kind of surprised because they have it preserved. That means a lot. In China a lot of things get destroyed. Many, many things. Old things, ancient antiques have been destroyed.

With the Three Gorges Dam it looks like we’ll lose a lot more.

Yes, a lot. Cities will be submerged. It’s crazy and very few Chinese even challenge it. That’s the problem with Chinese people. They don’t question the legitimacy of the rules or laws. Often the authorities or some leaders announced something very easily that gets adopted by the masses and eventually some of them from the masses become leaders who do the same. It’s probably fear. I think once you have been ruled by a king — by an emperor — for centuries and centuries, for millennia, I think you get used to it. It gets into your genes somehow. [Laughs] But I hope that’s not true.