Representation of China in Ha Jin's Works and the Controversy over Orientalism

하진의 중국재현과 오리엔탈리즘 논쟁

Chinese American Writer, Ha Jin has been writing exclusively about the life in his native Communist China. His stories and poems are almost all about the Chinese people so far. In addition, the distinctive Chinese flavour and the inexorably repressive image of China in his works present an 'Other' to the American culture. Such kind of Chineseness can also be found in Ha Jin's works and his career as a writer. The continued demand for knowledge of China, which is created by China's increasingly important role in the globalized economy, sustains the country's position as an Other for America. In his early four novels, Ha Jin portrays a totally repressive image of Communist China, an image of which functions perfectly as a form of otherness for his American readers. In Ha Jin's portrayal, the Chinese masses are subjected to the Communist authority through its bureaucracy and state-economy mechanism, as well as through the godlike image of Mao Zedong. They are to follow the Communist conscience and subscribe to unity-in-difference. Deviation from the one-party rule is intolerable. In each of the novels, Ha Jin presents a specific system of repression. In In the Pond, confrontation against Party authority is contained by a process of complicity. In Waiting, the Party's power is upheld through a system of surveillance in which people act as agents, resulting in a web of power which paralyses love. The Crazed illustrates a play of power by Party officials which, against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, is full of craze itself, driving people either out of sanity or out of the country. War Trash exposes the Communist power's repression to the extreme by presenting a case of dishonour in those whose life is debased as trash by the Party. The repressive image of China produced in these stories, which span over half a century, makes Ha Jin's China a perfect Other for the West. To sum up, Ha Jin's novels construct a repressive image of China. In his novels, Ha Jin exposes the working of repression in particular systems. Through these systems, he problematizes the notion of personal autonomy for Chinese people and proposes for his western/American readers a solution which eventually turns into a re-presentation of American hegemony.