Waiting for Recognition That China Won’t Give

The silence is almost deafening.

Ever since author Ha Jin won America’s National Book Award in November for his novel “Waiting,” China has been curiously quiet over the remarkable literary success of one of its native sons, who moved to the U.S. from this provincial capital 15 years ago.

Ordinarily quick to trumpet the achievements of ethnic Chinese abroad--from scientists such as Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1997, to musicians such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, both Americans--state media have barely acknowledged Jin or the accolades heaped on his book.

No major news outlets have bothered to report Jin’s National Book Award. Nor have any mentioned the fact that “Waiting” also received the prestigious PEN/ Faulkner prize last month, in an unprecedented double whammy by a single work.

The silence baffles Jin and some scholars of contemporary Chinese literature. After all, Jin’s book, though written in English and published in the U.S., is a love story set in modern China, penned by a Chinese-born author--seemingly perfect for the headlines.

“Why Ha Jin would be cold-shouldered to that degree--I’m befuddled,” said Howard Goldblatt, an expert on modern Chinese writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I would think they would just jump all over this.”

That they haven’t, observers suspect, points up the tricky position that literature occupies under China’s Communist regime, whether it is writing produced domestically or by overseas Chinese such as Jin.

Creative Writing Viewed With Suspicion

Caught in the often fractious intersection of politics and art, creative writing is still viewed with suspicion by China’s gerontocracy of Soviet-trained technocrats.

Censors ban books deemed immoral or critical of Communist rule. Independent authors receive virtually no state support. China’s own writing awards are controlled by the government and tend to go to works and writers carefully vetted for political correctness.

Partly as a result of such heavy-handed treatment, experts say, serious literature is struggling in China--a bitter turnabout for a nation that has long smarted over never having produced a Nobel laureate in literature, despite an illustrious literary past stretching back thousands of years.

Chinese literary magazines, which once enjoyed circulations in the hundreds of thousands, have dwindled in number and influence, their content regularly monitored.

“Ideological controls . . . have eliminated the desire of writers to produce,” said Wang Shuo, whose nihilistic novels about the underside of Chinese society were hugely popular in the 1980s, a period of openness and literary flowering cut short by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Some of those ideological controls, Jin and others say, were probably brought to bear on China’s response--or non-response--to “Waiting.”

The novel tells the tale of the 18-year wait by a Chinese army doctor to divorce the peasant wife he acquired in an arranged marriage and wed the woman he loves. The characters are trapped not just by their emotions but also by the repressive policies of China’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a time of fanatical leftism and persecution.

Although the Communist regime has officially declared that decade a disaster, it remains a sensitive subject--witness the detention last year of Song Yongyi, a U.S.-based scholar whom Chinese authorities put behind bars for six months after accusing him of leaking “state secrets” through his research on the Cultural Revolution.

The Beijing leadership is extremely sensitive to anything it feels reflects poorly on China’s international image, including embarrassing accounts of recent history.

“I don’t think the people who are scientists who are holding the reins of power understand the principle of literature,” said Goldblatt, who has translated into English numerous works of Chinese fiction by such well-known writers as Mo Yan (“Red Sorghum”) and Su Tong (“Rice”).

“The literature that seems to last is that [which] probes more deeply into the human and social psyches, and we as human beings don’t always look good,” he said. “People in government tend to lose sight of that because they want to be praised.”

For his part, Jin says he did not set out to write anything overtly controversial or explicitly critical of the Chinese government.

“I never intended to make ‘Waiting’ into a political book,” the author said from his home near Atlanta, where he teaches at Emory University. “In fact, I have never thought about how the reader would take it. I just wrote a book as well as I could.”

After winning the National Book Award, Jin was contacted by several Chinese reporters for interviews, including someone from Chinese Central Television, the main state network, but abruptly “they all dropped out,” he said.

“A friend wanted to write an article for a mainland paper but was told not to by its editors,” Jin added.

A staff member at the New China News Agency, the official news wire from which many newspapers here take their cue, said the agency had not reported the award and has no plans to do so. He declined to give a reason.

Jin also ascribes his book’s lack of media attention in China to his outspoken condemnation of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were killed.

Until that traumatic event, Jin had expected to return to China after completing his graduate studies at Brandeis University near Boston. The massacre “changed everything.”

“I am honest about this,” said Jin, who is now a U.S. citizen and who openly professes no interest in returning to the land of his birth. “Of course, the [Chinese] government cannot be happy.”

After the massacre, the Beijing regime tightened its control of cultural production. Literature has languished since, critics say.

“Chinese literature reached a climax in the ‘80s,” said Wang, whose own work came in for official criticism as unhealthy. “Now it’s in a period of pause.”

Thus far, mention in China of “Waiting” and its honors has been confined merely to a few publications of specialized interest and limited circulation, such as China Bookseller News.

Ma Li, an editor at a Beijing publishing house, noticed the item, as well as another reference to the novel on the Internet. With Jin’s cooperation, Ma is now spearheading an attempt to get the novel translated into Chinese--by year’s end if possible.

“I think ‘Waiting’ is a masterpiece,” she said.

The book’s biggest splash in the mainstream media occurred last month here in Jinan, the city where Jin lived before emigrating to the U.S. and where his parents and five siblings still reside.

Just One Article in Hometown Paper

In a weekly supplement on April 7, the Qilu Evening News carried an article about Jin’s childhood and his family. “A Son Wins a Big Award in America,” the headline read, over a snapshot of Jin, his wife and their son.

But there has been little else besides, certainly nothing on a national scale.

The neglect puzzles--and pains--Jin’s parents, whose hope for some public recognition of their son’s achievements has left them in the same position as the characters in his book: waiting.

“The state focuses on developing science and technology. But a nation’s prosperity cannot be separated from its literature,” said Zhao Yuanfen, Jin’s mother, who has not seen her eldest child since he left for the U.S. in 1985.

“What my son has done has not brought shame to Chinese people, but glory,” Zhao declared. “The domestic media should report this big news. Shouldn’t they?”