What are Ha Jin's Contributions?

Answer 1

Ha Jin is a novelist born in China and now living in USA. His major contribution is to show the development of political situation in China especially related to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Tianamen Square massacre.

Ha Jin's new book, The Crazed, addresses a wide range of philosophical, moral, political, and historical issues, while maintaining a tight plot, lyrical style, and convincing, engaging characters.

The Crazed is the story of Jian, a graduate student in literature at a provincial Chinese university. His mentor and future father-in-law, Mr. Yang, has a sudden stroke, and Jian is assigned to care for him. In another passage, Mr. Yang, persecuted by Communism and academia alike, says, "I'm only afraid I'm not worthy of my own suffering," and Jian remarks, "His assertion made my gums itch;" Jian's anxious responses to Mr. Yang range from the trivial to the coldly academic. Jin masterfully illustrates how Jian, like Mr. Yang before him, hides behind intellectualism, political fervor, and cynicism to avoid confronting the irreconcilable conflicts between desire and duty in 1989 China. Jian's perplexed and increasingly tormented response to the dilemmas presented by Mr. Yang leaves him with no option but to make a desperate attempt to flea China and abandon the system that has given him such disturbing non-choices.

Jin partially loses control of his narrative toward the end, when the sudden burst of action, and Jian's new found political involvement, make the book feel too much like a documentary. A vigil at the bedside of a beloved teacher and mentor challenges, then changes the course of, a young graduate student's life: the deeply felt "new" novel by Chinese-born American author Ha Jin (Waiting , 1999, etc.). exams when his department "assigns" him to help care for eminent Professor Yang (also the father of Jian's fiancee, Meimei), who has suffered a debilitating stroke. Professor Yang's bitterness and despair gradually induce Jian to forsake his own studies, in favor of a "useful" life of activism (an ambition sharpened during a brief trip to the country, a development that seems to belong to another novel altogether). And Ha Jin contrives several subtle foreshadowing indicating that Jian will not succeed in living a life "outside politics".

Ha Jin's powerful new novel is at once an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist Chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. When the venerable professor Yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. Just how much delicacy becomes clear when Yang begins to rave. Are these just the outpourings of a broken mind, or is Yang speaking the truth-about his family, his colleagues, and his life's work? As it is told through the first person we as the reader discover shocking moments which leads Jian to question his future from details of Mr Yang's past.

Meimei, Mr Yang's daughter, doesn't largely feature in the novel but letters are passed between herself and Jian keeping everyone updated on the political situation in Beijing. As Jian tells the story we only find out pieces of a story and Jian tries to fit them together. The novel began in more of a political way but gradually seemed to wear down to a much more personal tale continually alternating between visiting Mr Yang in hospital and Jian's life away from him. Ha Jin has done extremely well with this novel and I was disappointed that it had to end. Jian Wan had hoped to follow in Mr. Yang's footsteps, and is even engaged to his daughter, Meimei.

Ha Jin's first book, Waiting appeared several years ago. If you are really interested in some fine writing out of the New China School, we recommend -- while Waiting about for Ha Jin's next thriller on love and politics among the workers in a North Chinese pickled soybean factory -- that you give Da Chen's Colors of the Mountain a try.

Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, in The Craze revisits connection between insanity and sagacity in his new novel, The Craze. Jian Wan is the protagonist of Yang, an ailing professor of literature.

Jian is also engaged to marry Yang's ambitious daughter, Meimei, who expects Jian to follow in her father's academic footsteps. Yang persuades Jian to abandon years of study, and Jian resolves to become an actual, rather than a glorified, clerk a knife rather than meat. Even though it was her father who led Jian astray, Meimei calls Jian a coward and gives him the slip. As Jian plummets into apostasy, pro-democracy demonstrators are massing in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The dying professor offers lengthy orations in praise of Canada and the United States, and Ha Jin himself, a professor of English at Boston University, praised America as a land of generosity and abundance in his National Book Award acceptance speech. But Ha Jin's new novel proves him a laudable exception to this rule. In some ways The Craze is one long thank-you note to Ha Jin's new home, and a Dear John letter to the China he left behind.

According to Ha Jin, the BBC reported 5,000 deaths; official China, not surprisingly, reported zero.