World of Books
The Fifth Annual Texas Book Festival
By Lissa Richardson, Fri., Nov. 10, 2000
Ha Jin
Since Ha Jin's novel Waiting won the National Book Award last year, he finds himself in high demand. He sometimes wishes he weren't. Although Waiting has been published for over a year, Jin still juggles a number of requests for interviews and readings. The success is exciting, but also overwhelming, especially since Jin still teaches full time at Emory University and has a son who is about to enter college. "I have so many requests and I have to turn down many," he says. "I worry that sometimes people may get hurt. On the other hand, it's too demanding. ... I can't depend on Waiting [for continued success]. I don't have time for my work."He has, however, had the time to finish and polish a collection of stories, The Bridegroom, a beautiful, unflinching look at people when they behave badly. Jin loves short stories, which he takes "very seriously." "In a way, short stories are more literary than a novel," he says. "You have to be more careful when writing a story. Every sentence, you have to add something ... the pace is very fast." He has been working on these 12 stories for many years, and after his novel's publication, he immediately took time to edit and polish them. Because English is his second language, Jin says, "I have to really work on revising and editing again and again and again."
While they reveal the same graceful prose that brings Jin praise for Waiting and take place in the same town in which that novel is set, Jin downplays any other similarities between The Bridegroom and Waiting. About Lin Kong, the novel's protagonist, Jin says, "he's a problematic man, but he's a decent man on the whole." In contrast, The Bridegroom is more deliberately ironic, even "tragicomic." The characters face a number of conflicts that reveal the dark side of human nature. For example, "Saboteur," the first story in The Bridegroom, tells of a man who is not decent at all; he deliberately infects a town with hepatitis. Jin says that by the end of the story, the man is a "criminal." When asked if it disturbed him to write about such an unlikable person, Jin says, "There was a kind of disgust in my heart, but it's true. There are people who are like that. I was bothered by the story, but after I finished it, I felt better. I was emotionally balanced."
Jin emphasizes the importance of writing about uncomfortable topics "because they are telling the truth." In the title story, a man shuns his son-in-law because he is gay. The father-in-law is humiliated to learn that this is not a disease that can be "cured." In "A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find," perhaps Jin's favorite story, a "hero" goes insane when he has to fight a tiger for a movie. The real irony is that the people around him ignore his lack of stability because they still need someone who can play the hero. "Although he's a victim," Jin says, "he's his own victim."
Jin's stories are reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's in their cold and ironic humor; like O'Connor, Jin reveals the idiosyncrasies of his characters and his regional culture. Jin agrees with this comparison with O'Connor, in part, he says, because she learned a lot from Gogol, one of his favorite writers. "I loved him, too," Jin says. "He is necessary for a writer." O'Connor once wrote that "the writer should never be ashamed of staring." It's apparent that Jin, with his honest, insightful voice, knows O'Connor's advice by heart.
Ha Jin will be a panelist on "The Craft of Fiction" panel on Saturday, Nov. 11, at 11:45am in the House Chamber.