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Interview: Ha Jin

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

[Laughter]

Jin:
For two! From where?

TFR:
Canada.

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

Jin:
No!

[Laughter]

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

[Laughter]

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

TFR:
Which it was.

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

Jin:

Yes.