The return of the native: "otherness" in Ha Jin's Waiting and its Chinese translation

Abstract

During the past few decades, the emergence of Chinese American Literature has

been a prominent literary and cultural phenomenon, fascinating the reading public

and academia alike. A newcomer to the literary scene, Ha Jin is one of the most

successful Chinese American writers of the contemporary literary world, reaching his

largest audience through his second novel, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Waiting

(1999). Ha Jin is unique among Chinese American writers in that he writes about his

first-hand knowledge in English, his second language, which he began to use

professionally only in his thirties. He unwinds the thread of reminiscence in a story of

love and politics in Waiting, set in Communist China from the 1960s to the 1980s,

specifically during the Cultural Revolution. Despite his insider understanding of

those turbulent years, Ha Jin has not been tempted to write memoirs. Instead he offers,

with the conviction that history is best understood through fiction, his own intimate

portrait of an age. The dominant voice of the novel is “Otherness,” a voice from a

participant observer who sees the sickness of a society calmly yet vividly. The

gloom-laden images of China authenticated by Ha Jin, the authoritative informant,

serve to strengthen the sense of exotic Otherness for his Western readers. His keen

observation of the soul and of our common humanity in turmoil stands for the voice

of victimhood.

Beyond the sense of contextual otherness, the present thesis also examines the

linguistic otherness of Waiting and its translatability. The occurrence of translations

from Chinese, as found in the names of characters and places, Chinese-culturespecific

terms, idioms, and proverbs, produces an interesting language that, perhaps

on an unconscious level, constitutes an aesthetic exoticism for Western readers. This

exoticism is what I term “Chineseness.” Indeed, the presence of “Chineseness” in

Waiting accounts for much of its popularity and critical acclaim. In backtranslating

Waiting to Chinese, the translator seems to have the simple enough job of restoring

what the author would have written in his native language, but with the predictable

result that the aesthetic exoticism richly experienced by the author’s primary intended

readers is lost or, at the very least, weakened. Therefore, the challenge the translator

faces is how to retain the aesthetic exoticism, which is of great importance in the

appeal of Ha Jin’s writing. The central part of my project attempts to explore, through

an examination and analysis of the English original and Jin Liang’s translation, how

differently the texts of Waiting and Deng Dai are presented, read, and made sense of.

The present study aims to arrive at a deeper understanding of how Ha Jin’s text

and its Chinese translation function as a cross-cultural activity.