From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Wed 27 Nov 2002 - 23:59:15 GMT
I clicked on this story because of the title, of course. But, while not
about, in any scientific sense, cultural evolution, this is about
cultural change, and posits language as being at the front door of this.
- Wade
******
Cultural evolution
With talent and hard work, Ha Jin has gone from semiliterate Chinese
soldier to award-winning writer of novels in English
By David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 11/27/2002
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/331/living/Cultural_evolutionP.shtml
FOXBOROUGH - Greenish rocks, stately barren trees, and a soft carpet of
brown oak leaves half surround the home of Ha Jin. The elemental forms
near his beige Colonial house put Jin in mind of northeast China, where
he was born.
''It's similar in climate to New England,'' he says of his homeland,
standing at the edge of the yard and gazing into the forest. ''Much like
Vermont.''
The writer, who is 46, is far from China now. And though all his
fiction - including his just-published third novel, ''The Crazed'' - is
set in China, Jin has transformed himself, in a decade's time, into an
award-winning writer of English fiction. ''I think he possesses
genius,'' says novelist Leslie Epstein of Boston University, Jin's first
prose writing teacher.
Since 1996, Jin has published three novels, three collections of short
stories, and three volumes of poetry. His second novel, ''Waiting,'' won
the 1999 National Book Award. After a stint as professor of English at
Emory University in Atlanta, Jin accepted a full professorship at BU
this year, teaching literature and creative writing. He and his wife,
Lisha, moved from Atlanta to their wooded corner of Foxborough in July.
Jin's sunny, gentle manners and high courtesy - he emerged from his
front door and strode across the front yard to greet his interviewer -
give no hint of the fire, imagination, and dogged nature that made
possible this remarkable career in American letters. Even after one
hears his story, delivered in heavily accented English, one can scarcely
believe what he has achieved.
He was born Jin Xuefei (Ha Jin is his pen name) in 1956 in what then was
known as Manchuria. Jin and his family moved around frequently with his
father, an army officer. When the disastrous Cultural Revolution broke
out in 1966, Jin had had just four years of schooling. Those schools
that were not closed were paralyzed.
''There was no teaching,'' Jin recalls. ''We were just copying out
revolutionary slogans.''
In 1969, afraid that his school would be closed and he would be sent to
work in the fields, Jin lied about his age and joined the People's Army.
He was 14. He spent six years in the army; his first post was the tense
Soviet border amid fears of imminent war. Food was scarce and so was
reading matter. One day, Jin was lent a Chinese translation of
Cervantes's ''Don Quixote.'' He had it for only that day.
''I couldn't read it, I was almost illiterate,'' he says. ''I looked at
the pictures. It was important because I realized there are other books.
Not just propaganda stuff - good books.''
In his second year in the army, he was assigned to a telegraphy office,
which gave him space at night to study the schoolbooks his parents had
surreptitiously sent him. ''You would be condemned if you read during
the day,'' he says. ''You could only read revolutionary works.''
Coming to America
As the Cultural Revolution wound down, the colleges reopened, and Jin
passed the entrance exam for Heilongjiang University in Harbin. Though
most students were studying Russian or Japanese, he chose English. At
first, ''The only good books that were available were by Marx and
Engels - the philosophers,'' he said. ''Apart from those, there was only
propaganda. Engels wrote a book in 1844 called `The Condition of the
Working Class in England.' I knew that book was in English, so I thought
someday I could read that book.''
Jin's progress in English was slow. He didn't like it much at first. But
as certain authors - Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner -
came into fashion in the university, he studied harder. He met his
future wife, Lisha, and they were married in 1982. He got his degree and
then went to Shandong University for a master's degree in American
literature. There he met two American professors who were on visiting
lectureships.
At their urging, Jin applied and was accepted to Brandeis University; he
arrived here to begin his studies in 1985. His plan was to get a
doctorate, return to China, and become a professor. To that point, he
had written no prose fiction but had begun to write poetry in English,
which astonished his American professors.
''He brought in a completely amazing poem,'' says poet Frank Bidart, who
taught a poetry workshop at Brandeis. ''I was astonished by it. It was
clear that he was a real writer. I knew the poetry editor of the Paris
Review, and they took it. It was extraordinary and wonderful having him
in my class. He had this eloquence and could make remarkable and
unpredictable poems out of it.'' Jin was reading American writers, and
Bidart and Brandeis professor Allen Grossman encouraged him also to read
such Russian writers as Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Isaac Babel.
He devoured them.
Lisha joined him in 1987, while their 4-year-old son, Wen, stayed behind
with her parents. There was hope then for a new kind of cultural
revolution in China, and Jin expected to be a part of it. But then came
the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, in which hundreds of students
were shot by army troops. Jin was shocked and horrified.
''When I served in the army,'' he says, ''we were taught that the
People's Army's first principle was to serve the people, to protect the
people, and now the whole thing was reversed. For months I was in a
daze. The government was so brutal, and I would not serve a government
like that. All the schools were state-owned, so any job was a state
job.''
`An artist with a first-rate mind'
Jin decided he could not return to his homeland. Like other Chinese
students at the time of the massacre, he was allowed to stay in the
United States. He had completed his Brandeis studies but his doctorate
in comparative poetics was oriented to Chinese academia and was not
marketable in American universities. He could not find an academic job.
With difficulty, he and Lisha brought 6-year-old Wen to America (now 19,
Wen is a history major at Princeton University). To survive, they both
worked, sometimes as many as 80 hours a week. They lived at first in
Waltham and later in Somerville; Lisha cleaned houses and yards and took
in laundry, while Jin worked in factories, as a hospital custodian, and
for a while as a waiter. In one restaurant, he was demoted from waiter
to busboy because he couldn't remember the names of the wines.
In 1992, Jin contacted Epstein and asked to be admitted to the BU
graduate creative writing program as an auditing student - he couldn't
afford the tuition, but wanted to improve his literary skills. Epstein
agreed, and like Bidart, was astounded when he read Jin's first stories.
''Right away I said, `These are not stories for our workshop - these are
literature,''' Epstein recalls, ''I could sense it almost from the
first. He is a conscientious artist with a first-rate mind.
''There is enormous humanity and breadth in his writing. He never
flinches from the ugliness or cruelty in life, and that prepares him for
seeing the beauty,'' Epstein said. ''He also has a real feel for nature:
the dusty leaves on the trees in a town, the birds that flit from tree
to tree, the carp in the stream that people look down at and that look
back up at them. He's a great Chinese painter in a way.''
Jin's stories are personal - all about love, ambition, jealousy,
longing, cruelty - yet they also evoke crushing social pressure and the
suffocating effect of bureaucracy and closed-mindedness. Those who fight
back lose in the end. But those who give in lose in other ways.
Most of the short stories in Jin's first collection, ''Under the Red
Flag,'' were originally written while he studied at BU. That book won
the PEN/Hemingway prize for first fiction. In his second year, BU (with
the strong urging of Epstein) gave Jin a scholarship and a part-time
teaching job, which relieved a little economic pressure. On a strong
recommendation from Epstein, he finally landed an academic position at
Emory in 1993. In 1996, Jin's books began to appear. After ''Under the
Red Flag'' came a second story collection, ''Ocean of Words,'' and a
first novel, ''In the Pond.'' His best-selling novel, ''Waiting,'' was
followed by a third story collection, ''The Bridegroom,'' and now the
newest novel, ''The Crazed.'' His books have been translated into
Chinese and have sold well in Taiwan but have not been published on the
mainland.
The beauty of English
Jin has moved beyond the People's Army as a setting for his fiction. He
explains, ''I started writing about the Chinese experience, but as time
passed, I realized I'm not interested in China as a literary subject any
more.'' His next novel is set in an American prisoner-of-war camp during
the Korean War, with Korean, Chinese, and American characters. After
that, he says, he will write about America.
That he writes entirely in English does not seem strange to Jin.
''In English, we have a tradition of prose writers whose mother tongues
are not English, but who did become meaningful writers. Writers like
Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov,'' he said. ''This is mainstream;
these are not marginal. If you take these writers out, English letters
would seem incomplete. That is the vitality, the beauty of the English
language that makes it different from other languages. It is always able
to take in all kinds of resources and energies.''
Listening to Jin, the deeply Americanized and distinguished man of
letters, it's hard to picture him as the semiliterate, ill-fed,
oppressed adolescent he so recently was, a teenage soldier stuck in the
snows of northern China, only dimly aware of such a thing as literature.
Along with probable genius, what it took for him to accomplish that
metamorphosis was the readiness to accept the cost of changing himself
in order to vault every barrier.
''I will never be a Chinese writer,'' he muses. ''This is a fact of
myself, that I can accept myself as a kind of failure. I never
understood Nabokov's epilogue to `Lolita,' where he said that for him to
write in English was `a personal tragedy'; that he had to stick with
second-rate English.
''I have begun to understand him, because his ambition as a writer had
to be modified as he adopted another language. He never had the
opportunity to write his best work in Russian. His energy was invested
in the English language. This gave me the idea that to write in a
different language, you have to change yourself, your life, your
ambitions and intentions, personally and in every way.''
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 11/27/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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