Award-Winning Author Rebuked in Chinese Essay

Seven months after immigrant Ha Jin’s novel “Waiting” won the National Book Award in the United States, the official press here has broken its relative silence about the book by issuing a commentary so scathing that a local publisher has scrapped plans to translate the work into Chinese.

Until now, scholars and China watchers have been puzzled by the lack of press here for “Waiting,” a love story set in China during the 1960s and ‘70s. This nation usually is quick to seize on the achievements by overseas ethnic Chinese as a source of national pride.

Last week, however, the influential Guangming Daily’s book review section carried an essay blasting Jin for supposedly selling out his native land by portraying China under Communist rule as backward and repressive.

“The price Ha Jin paid to win this prize was too great,” Liu Yiqing, a Beijing University professor, wrote in the weekly section. “He was forced to disown his Manchurian parents, curse his compatriots and serve as a tool for the American media to ‘uglify’ China.”

A day after Liu’s June 14 commentary appeared, the Beijing Publishing House dropped efforts to have the work translated.

“The change in plan has a lot to do with that article, but it’s not convenient for me to say more,” said editor Ma Li, who previously told The Times that she considered Jin’s novel “a masterpiece.”

“To change course like this isn’t decided just by an editor but by the people in charge of a publishing house,” Ma added. “We editors have to obey.”

Until Liu’s commentary appeared, what was practically the only publicity in China about “Waiting” had appeared in a newspaper in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Jin emigrated from Jinan to the U.S. in 1985.

Last week’s attack on the novel makes it less likely that there will be an officially sanctioned translation and publication in Jin’s homeland. The work has, in effect, “been banned,” the author lamented this week. Now a U.S. citizen, he teaches at Atlanta’s Emory University.

The novel could still be translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan or elsewhere, however, and then slipped into the mainland through a thriving underground business in black-market books.

In compact but often elegant prose, “Waiting” tells the story of a Chinese army doctor’s 18-year attempt to divorce his peasant wife from an arranged marriage and wed the woman he loves. The story takes place in part during China’s repressive 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which even the Communist regime has officially recognized as a colossal mistake. The period remains a sensitive issue in China.

Although Jin has said he did not set out to write a political work, the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution and the author’s outspoken criticism of the Chinese government over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre have turned him and his novel into a “no-go” area for media here, observers say.

Liu’s essay lambastes “Waiting” partly for having a woman with bound feet as one of its chief characters. It also criticizes one of the female characters for urging a man to have sex with her.