Ha Jin

Waiting

Ha Jin

• 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.5

This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin’s passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.

Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom.

War Trash: A novel

Ha Jin

• 2005 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2005 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
• 2005 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• Score: 22.55

War Trash, the extraordinary new novel by the National Book Award–winning author of Waiting, is Ha Jin’s most ambitious work to date: a powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war—the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict—and paints an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation.

Set in 1951–53, War Trash takes the form of the memoir of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, one of a corps of “volunteers” sent by Mao to help shore up the Communist side in Korea. When Yu is captured, his command of English thrusts him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that defines the POW camp.

Taking us behind the barbed wire, Ha Jin draws on true historical accounts to render the complex world the prisoners inhabit—a world of strict surveillance and complete allegiance to authority. Under the rules of war and the constraints of captivity, every human instinct is called into question, to the point that what it means…

Under the Red Flag: Stories

Ha Jin

• 1998 Kiriyama finalist
• Score: 6.48

Set in the northern Chinese provincial town of Dismount Fort, these twelve stories offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of peasants, soldiers, workers, and party officials during the Great Cultural Revolution. This was a time of social upheaval reaching into every home, when the Red Guard could drag a woman accused of prostitution through the streets; when a man trying to honor his mother’s dying wish runs up against party orthodoxy.

Ha Jin has been compared to the late Isaac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. He is a writer of stark power, simple beauty, and poignant irony, whose themes of personal honor in the face of political rectitude are unmatched in American literature today.