Conflicting Masculinities in Ha Jin’s Waiting: Talented Scholars and Ruthless Men of Action in China’s Mao and Post-Mao Eras

As a highly acclaimed novel for which Ha Jin won the U.S. National Book Award in 1999, Waiting covers the period from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, encompassing the Cultural Revolution through the early reform era. Its oft-noted central concern is the suppression of emotional life, and by extension humanity, in the totalitarian climate of Mao’s regime. This article offers a new reading, which foregrounds the novel’s use of masculinities as a central theme and driver of the plot. Through the prism of Kam Louie’s wen-wu (literary accomplishment – military prowess) dyad, this study focuses on Ha Jin’s critique of the socialist-era trajectories of two historically prominent Chinese male character types: the intellectually-oriented man of book learning and the physically-driven man of action. It shows how Waiting illuminates the conditions underlying a pervasive social and psychological paralysis of male intellectuals and the contrasting empowerment of a predatory class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs.

Ha Jin’s Ecocritical Irony in the Stylistic Analysis of the Personal Pronouns in “A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find”

This paper aims at showing how stylistics and ecocriticism, both being strongly ‘centripetal’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ fields, can cooperate in the exploration of a literary text. This is the case of a short story written by the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Also thanks to the help of the digital analysis, the paper mainly focuses on the stylistic analysis of the personal pronouns and of the narrator’s point of view to show the stinging and subversive irony which pervades the narration of the vicissitudes of a Chinese TV film crew who is asked to shoot a scene where a muscular hero has to fight bare-handed against a real Siberian tiger. The analysis also aims to show how the story becomes the opportunity for the writer to depict the narrow frame of mind of the blind dictatorship of his homeland and its deplorable consequences on both humans and animals. Thus, the whole exploration, in the end, reveals the ecocritical lens through which Ha Jin narrates the story.

Linguistic and Stylistic Features of Translingual Writers: Comparative analysis

The present research is conducted within the frameworks of language contacts theory, intercultural communication theory, text linguistics and linguacontactology. Creative translingualism is the object of the research. Linguacreative characteristics of translingual fiction are the subject of the research. Fiction written by Russian and Chinese authors in English (Olga Grushin, Irina Reyn, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, Gish Jen, Ha Jin, Amy Tan, Jade Snow Wong, Frank Chin, etc.) has served as the material for the analysis. Within the scope of the present research the similarities and differences of linguacreativity in the fiction written by authors belonging to unrelated linguacultures were determined. The range of native culture description means used by translingual writers is very diverse: loan-words, code switching and code mixing, native literature and songs allusions, contaminated speech, usage of English lexical units to transmit significant for native culture events (by attributing culturally specific meanings).

A Free Life

This chapter examines the novel A Free Life by Ha Jin in terms of (re) construction of Chinese Wen masculinity in a transnational context. The analysis suggests that while the story is mainly about the protagonist Nan’s journey to settle down in the U.S with his wife and son, the plot is parallel with another hidden thread that runs through it, which is his personal transformation from the loss of masculineness to the build-up of a new type of Wen masculinity. The analysis also finds out that the novel seems to use emasculation of the male characters as the signifier of the dark side of Chinese traditional culture and the current political system. Through depicting Nan’s struggle and success in settling down the novel embraces individualism as a remedy to Chinese masculinity, redefining the ideal of Wen Chinese intellectuals in American context.

Queer Bodies, Queer Lives in China English Contact Literature

Ha Jin and his works have contributed significantly to world Englishes knowledge, both through direct scholarly engagement with contact literatures and through the linguistic creativity exhibited in his works of fiction (Jin 2010). His fiction writing also acts as a site of scholarly inquiry (e.g., Zhang 2002). Underexplored, however, are how local varieties of English as used to create queer identities. This paper will seek to address this gap by exploring how Ha Jin created queer spaces in his short story “The Bridegroom.” This investigation will utilize a Kachruvian world Englishes approach to analyzing contact literatures (B. Kachru 1985, 1990, Y. Kachru & Nelson 2006, Thumboo 2006). This analysis will be supported by interfacing it with perspectives from the fields of queer theory and queer linguistics (Jagose 1996, Leap & Motschenbacher 2012), which will allow for a contextually sensitive understanding of queer experiences in China. This approach will enable us to examine how Ha Jin utilized the rhetorical and linguistic markers of China English to explore historical attitudes towards queerness during the post-Cultural Revolution period. These markers include the use of local idioms and culturally-localized rhetorical moves to render a uniquely Chinese queer identity.