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Ha Jin Lets It Go Dave Weich, Powells.com
If he'd gone back to China, he says, he wouldn't be writing fiction or poetry - and he had every intention of returning to his native country as he prepared his dissertation at Brandeis University. After watching televised coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, however, Jin and his wife decided to make a life with their son here in the United States, and when Jin couldn't find teaching work, he turned to writing, instead. Taking odd jobs (a night watchman, a busboy) until eventually his publishing success convinced Emory University to hire him to teach and write, Jin was arguably one of the most prolific literary writers of the nineties, producing two books of poetry ("This is a profound book, an event," Frank Bidart said of Jin's 1990 volume, Between Silences, his debut), two collections of short stories, and two novels. In the process, he earned a PEN/Hemingway prize (1996, for Oceans of Words, his first story collection) and The Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction (1997, for Under the Red Flag, his second). Most recently, Waiting won both the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "I think the ultimate goal for a piece of literature is to transcend time to some degree, not to vacate it but to go through it," Jin explained. "To see past it to what is essential to the characters." His latest novel, like the rest of his incredible body of work, does just that. Year after year, Lin Kong returns to his village to divorce his wife, and every year, without the divorce, he returns to the city and his lover, a nurse at the hospital where he has worked all his adult life. The government will not grant him a divorce without his wife's consent until they have been separated for at least eighteen years. Waiting is a perfect antidote to our frantic, gotta-get-it-done-yesterday lives.
Dave: I was wondering where the idea for Waiting came from, where that story was born. Ha Jin: The book is based upon a true story. Not exactly the same, but similar. My wife knew the doctor and the nurse. They both served in the hospital where my parents were Army doctors. It was during a visit to my parents-in-laws, my first visit, that I heard this story. Dave: Waiting is very different from most of what I read - and, to a certain extent, from most of what gets published and read today in the United States. You truly enter that Chinese world, right from the start; it's unimpeachable, vividly alive. Jin: The narrator is very close to things and events. Good writers should observe and tell the story, try to reveal the complexities, the subtleties, to tell what's happening. The narrator shouldn't be intrusive. You have to respect the intelligence of the reader. The reader will always have their own interpretations. For me, my job was just to tell the story. To fulfill the story. Yes, in a way, there are a lot of irrelevant details, culturally bound references, but if they're not essential to the story, I should let them go. Dave: One critic talked about "the personal being political" in your novels. Fundamentally, though, Waiting isn't political. It's about people: Lin, Manna, and Shuyu. Jin: No, politics is only a context. The focus is on the person, the inner life, the life of the soul and how that changes, how the emotional life is affected by time and also by environment. Dave: A lot has been made of the fact that you didn't learn to write in English until eleven or twelve years ago, and yet you've been very productive: two novels, two books of stories, and two books of poems.
Dave: How did you end up at Emory University? Jin: No other places would hire me! Dave: You're taking off from teaching right now, right? Jin: Yes, on the Guggenheim Fellowship. Dave: What are you teaching when you're there? Creative writing? Jin: Most of the time, poetry writing, and occasionally fiction writing. Sometimes literature courses. Dave: Are you still writing a lot of poetry, then? Jin: Yes, I have a book coming out, in fact, this fall. It's called Wreckage. Dave: How do you balance teaching with your own writing? Jin: For me, teaching is a good way to make a living. Also, I think it gives me a kind of freedom that I might not have if I were a full-time writer. I'm willing to take risks. I'm less worried about how a book will sell. That helps. On the other hand, it's the same energy that I put into the students' work, into the preparation for the course. If you teach too much, you don't have the energy left, and energy is your main asset. Dave: Do you work according to a set schedule? How much writing are you able to do? Jin: When I teach a course I can't write as much as I'd like, but I try to write some every day. It doesn't have to be new - I edit, revise, just do something every day. Dave: You studied Literature at Brandeis. Did you have a particular focus? Jin: Poetry and poetics. I wrote my dissertation on modern poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Auden, and Yeats. High modernists. Dave: How did you come to focus on those particular poets? Jin: Those four have poems which are related to Chinese texts and poems that reference the culture. My dissertation was aimed at a Chinese job market. I planned to return to China. Dave: But after the Tiananmen Square massacre, you decided to stay here. Jin: Yes, but it was too late to change my dissertation. I was completing it at the time. Dave: If you'd gone back to China, if things had worked out differently, what do you think you'd be doing now? Jin: Oh, I'd be a translator, I suppose. A critic. Dave: Do you think you'd be writing novels? Jin: No, I don't think so. Perhaps I might write one book or two, a memoir about my life, but not these kinds of books. There would be no pressure to write them. Dave: So, in a way, the pressure is a good thing. Jin: It's a mixed blessing. This is more meaningful for me. And it's something I can do. Dave: Some people would say you do it well. Jin: I don't know, but the page and the paper is something I can handle. Dave: Is working in English becoming more natural for you? Jin: I wouldn't say natural, but it's less difficult than in the beginning. Still now, stories take a long time to get finished, but the anxieties and uncertainties are slightly different than before. Dave: The first story in Under the Red Flag, "In Broad Daylight," won the Pushcart Prize. It's a brutal story. Waiting is so much quieter. Jin: It's very hard to keep that kind of intensity in a novel, if not impossible. You have to depend on the narrative voice, a different kind of rhythm. Dave: And Waiting is very different even from In the Pond [Jin's previous novel, his first]. Did you want to try something different again or was it simply a case where the story demanded that you change the style? Jin: It was just a different story. Tragic. Dave: I really liked In the Pond. It's impressive that you pull off the humor across cultural boundaries. I don't know that I've read anything quite like it. Jin: In the Pond is a comedy. A lot of people tell me it's their favorite. It's the kind of book you either hate it or you love it. I had a really hard time selling it. Nobody would buy it. Comedy is a high order of art, very rare. Life is full of tragedies, but how can you write comedy without vulgarities? That's a huge handicap. Dave: You entered the army at fourteen, right? Was that the standard age? Jin: No. My father was an officer, so we had privileges. We could go into the army early. The standard age at the time, for our group, was sixteen. I lied. I told them I wasn't fourteen. I just wanted to leave home, to go away. There was nothing to do at home. Schools were closed. Also, rumor had it that the Russians were going to attack, so I was scared. It was better to go to the army rather than stay at home waiting for an air raid. Dave: How long were you in the army? Jin: Five and a half years. Dave: What did you imagine yourself doing? What did you see of your life then? Jin: I saw very little. I wanted to read. In the beginning, I was basically illiterate. I couldn't read. Then in the second year the border calmed down. We knew there would be no war, we would live in peace, and I began to think of education. I wanted to go to college, to be a learned person, well-read. Dave: Did that seem likely? Jin: Yes. But my vision was very limited. Even the definition of "well-read" was different at the time. It was possible, as long as you worked hard. There were a lot of books. Bad books, but as long as you knew all of them, you were well-read! Dave: Maybe my perspective is skewed, working on the Internet, but it's so hard now to not to think globally. Every day people in Prague and Auckland and hundreds of other cities in between are surfing our web site, whereas the outside world plays practically no role in Waiting. It's nonexistent to these people. Jin: News is irrelevant to their life, that's true. That's how I perceived it. The book focuses on its framework and references to ground the story in a place and time, but other than that, I don't see the point in bringing up too many temporary references. I think the ultimate goal for a piece of literature is to transcend time to some degree, not to vacate it but to go through it. To see past it to what is essential to the characters. Dave: In Waiting, a character quotes Beethoven: "Character is fate." That seems very appropriate to the novel. Jin: Especially in the case of Lin Kong. Emotionally, he was crippled. He couldn't develop. Dave: What starts the chain of events, to some degree, is the arranged marriage, but to a much greater degree it seems it's his whole life that's been arranged for him. Jin: Yes, and he cooperated, unconsciously, with the arrangements. He internalized these laws into the fabric of his existence, so he's partially responsible as well. Dave: You've mentioned elsewhere that you'll eventually write about the immigrant experience. Jin: I haven't returned to China since I've been here. China is distant. I don't know what contemporary Chinese life is like now. I follow the news, but I don't have the mature sensation - I can't hear the noise, I can't smell the place. I'm not attached to it anymore. What's meaningful to me is the immigrant experience, the American life. Dave: There's a long tradition of outstanding literature about the immigrant experience in America, of course. Are there any particular books or authors that stand out for you? Jin: The best one, for me, is Nabokov's Pnin. I think that's the best. It deals with the question of language, and I think that's at the core of the immigrant experience: how to learn the language - or give up learning the language! - but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency. Dave: A number of foreign books find their way into the hospital where Lin Kong and Manna Wu work. One of the characters in Waiting skips through the beginning of all the Russian novels because there's too much description. And you mention Leaves of Grass in here, too. Jin: It's one of the great books, yes. Still, it's quite a well-respected, popular book among certain groups in China, even in the army. Officers did have access to it because Whitman was regarded as a proletarian poet. Dave: Lin Kong has a personal library, and though he has to hide it, the books don't get taken away from him. Jin: But he didn't use it. Gradually his life changed, and his library didn't function, especially after the marriage. Dave: How common was it for people to have personal libraries stashed away? Jin: Doctors in the army . . . there are all kinds of privileged people in the army. I saw highly literary officers reading Russian novels, the originals, hardcovers, filling bookcase after case. Many of the best writers in China now are from the army. It's not like here. There are a lot of privileges in army life if you can get into the right spot. Dave: Have you taught about China or Chinese literature at all? Is that something you'd like to do? Jin: For years, I looked for jobs related to Chinese literature or translation. But the applicants are very strong, all with degrees from American schools. A person like me, with no degree in Chinese, it's very hard for me to compete with them. Dave: You're working on another novel now, right? What's that like? Jin: Different, again. It's a first-person narrative. The language is slightly different, as well. Dave: You plan to keep writing. Jin: I think I've gone so far along this road that I can't just change. When I made the decision to write in English only, I was determined to travel all the way no matter how tough, how solitary it was. I have to go to the end, see what I can do. Ha Jin visited Powell's City of Books on February 2, 2000 to read from his novel, Waiting. Before the appearance, he stopped by the Annex for this conversation and browsed the City's shelves. |
Xuefei Jin known to readers as 
Jin: I've been lucky in that what I've written has not been wasted. Every book
I've written has gone to print. And, you know, I was driven by a fear, an
instinct of survival. I was hired as a teaching writer; I had to publish enough
to keep my job.
