Category: Ha Jin

Ha Jin wrote a dull novel about an atrocity, but the unsettling thing about Nanjing Requiem is that it almost seems engineered to be dull. Negative reviews of the book (and there are plenty) have tended to point out that Jin is a nonnative writer in English, and critics have cited plenty of examples of awkward phrasing in the novel. But that’s not really the book’s problem—accepting his style is a pact you make with Jin whenever you read him, and Nanjing Requiem‘s flaws aren’t a matter of an ungainly phrase or two. The flatness of his prose, when it works, acquires force over time. A Free Life, for instance, was richer for being so plainspoken; it echoed its hero’s simple, stubborn effort to establish a home with his family in America.

But A Free Life was a straightforward novel about assimilation in peaceful suburbia. Nanjing Requiem is a novel about the slaughter of thousands of Chinese by Japanese soldiers, which makes a bit of dialogue like this harder to process:

“What happened?” I asked.

“Some Japs broke into the deserted building where we stayed last night, and they cut down my dad and brothers. Then they stripped my mom and me and started torturing us. I screamed, so they punched me again and again until I lost my voice and blacked out. When I came to, I saw my mom’s body in the room. She couldn’t take it anymore and hit her head on the doorjamb and killed herself.”

Nanjing Requiem is full of tell-don’t-show writing like this, in which events that expose humanity at its most pitiless and cruel is presented in a flat register. The teenage girl describing her horrors isn’t suffering from shellshock, or at least the trauma isn’t signaled as such; this is just how Jin’s characters speak. And because these events are conveyed through dialogue, they’re stripped of more precise detail. Cut down—in what way? Started torturing us—well, how?

But that’s the issue. If I demand such details in the fiction I read, that’s my problem, not Jin’s, right? Nanjing Requiem, as the title suggests, is meant to be more of a tribute than a dramatization, a book designed to honor the dead instead of giving adjectival, metaphorical, novelistic shape to them. That approach is understandable, because stories about the Rape of Nanking have a ways of attracting melodrama. Iris Chang‘s 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking, did much to bring word about the massacre to U.S. readers, but her suicide seven years later has made her into something beyond a mere journalist or historian—I hesitate to use the word “martyr,” but it’s not entirely off. There’s a statue in her honor, and I can’t think of another journalist who’s been paid tribute with a soggy ballad:

That soggy ballad exists in part because there’s a dispute about the facts as Chang reported them—the tune reflects an urge to elevate her (and thus her reporting) above criticism. (I claim no expertise on the fine points on the matter, but it’s not hard to find people intemperately arguing over the details.) There’s similar melodrama in the 2009 film John Rabe, about the so-called “good Nazi,” the head of Siemens’ Nanking outpost who helped protect thousands of Chinese in the aftermath of the attacks. It’s formally well-made, but leaves you cold—the string swells, explosions, and cliched secondary roles (loose-cannon doctor, dutiful wife, romantic subplot) make it seem like a story we’ve seen before, Schindler lite:

Nanjing Requiem reads like a retort to such squabbling—to be neither a researched work that attempts to settle the facts once and for all, nor a novel with the usual comforts of fictional narrative. The novel’s arc, to the extent it has one, focuses on Minnie Vautrin, the dean of the Nanking women’s college that took in thousands of refugees. She’s the filter for the tragedy, but the story is doubly filtered through the novel’s narrator, Anling, an assistant at the school.

That’s where the book’s problem lies, I think—fair as it is to avoid a blood-soaked narrative about the attacks, or to put Rabe or Vautrin on pedestals, Anling herself never becomes a compelling character in her own right. Her personal drama involves her son marrying a Japanese woman, but this hardly registers as drama at all—that relationship takes place offstage, and when Anling learns they have a child, her response is prim and nonplussed. “The hostility between the two countries would cast a long shadow on their marriage,” Anling thinks. Jin has claimed a place and a moment for his novel, and established how it shouldn’t be written about—he writes with solemn respect for the dead, as it should be with requiems. But a studious avoidance of melodrama seems to have stripped a sense of life among those he’s imagined to tell the story.

New York magazine’s profile of Ha Jin closes with this comment from him:

I don’t want to write standard American-English idioms. I want something that sounds slightly foreign and absolutely accessible. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Try harder, seemed to be the message from many of the major review outlets following the publication of his 2007 novel, A Free Life; the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker all delivered polite but firmly negative reviews. That last review, written by John Updike, makes a particular point of Jin’s foreign-but-accessible language, suggesting that its squareness is a detriment. “Some expressions feel translated from the Mandarin,” Updike writes, then adds that “the novel rarely gathers the kind of momentum that lets us overlook its language.”

I’ve defended A Free Life a few times before, and my basic argument is that a) the book’s momentum is in the small, sometime pyrrhic victories that come along with succeeding as an immigrant family in the United States, not in explosive dramas that the critics seemed to expect (perhaps thanks to weaker assimilation novels), and b) Jin’s language bolsters this momentum. His new collection, A Good Fall, will likely meet the same criticism as the novel, since its focus again is on the lives of Chinese immigrants in the United States. But it’s just as strong in many ways. A lot of that, I think, has to do with exclamation points.

Most writers are trained to avoid exclamations—it suggests that you’re an adolescent, or that you’re using an easy way to emphasize the drama of a particular scene without thinking it through. It’s generally bad form in journalism—even in opinion pieces it looks like over-editorializing, like you’ve lost your grip—and as an editor I was trained to strike it out unless it’s absolutely necessary. (It rarely is.) But for Jin, exclamations are ways to stress the awkwardness that his characters feel with the culture they navigate. “Heavens, they would never stop fighting!” thinks the narrator of “In the Crossfire,” who is referreeing a squabble between his wife and his mother, who’s visiting from China. The exclamation mirrors the dialogue of many of Jin’s characters, who often strain to make their voices heard, so they’re prone to blurting things: “Baloney!” “Nuts!” “I don’t want to live anymore!” “How worried I was!”

Unquestionably, the style can be a little square. But they also serve Jin’s conflicts well, because they stress how clear-cut the conflicts are in the eyes of his characters, and how irrational that perspective can be sometimes. In “An English Professor,” a Chinese-born English teacher, Rusheng, sends off materials for his tenure evaluation, then realizes his cover letter ends with a typo: “Respectly.” “Oh, how silly the error looked on paper!” he thinks, and no sentence could better encompass his panic over being mocked as a dumb foreigner who has no right to teach English; it’s a retreat into the stiff language of school-primer stories in which kids learn how to talk to each other over minor problems. Except in this case, in the mind of the story’s protagonist, the potential for embarrassment is enormous.

At the end of the story, it turns out there’s nothing to worry about, and Rusheng’s tenure application is approved. Realistically, it was ridiculous for him to think a typo could ruin his entire academic career. (Oh, how silly!) But the panic Jin describes is genuine, and so is the release Rusheng feels afterward. He celebrates with his wife by bowderizing the words to “Born to Be Wild”: “Born to be happy! Born to succeed!” he sings. “Born to be tenured! Born to stand out!” It’s cringe-worthy behavior, but it neatly exposes at once his discomfort with language and his joy at having proof he’s mastered it. It is, as Jin intended, slightly foreign and absolutely accessible. It’s a feeling of exultation, something to shout about, and any feat of writerly indirection in that moment would be a lie.