His characters struggle to know how to behave and even how to think in order to meet the constantly changing demands of communist orthodoxy. Open resistance could lead to immediate danger, and yet adopting obedient silence in the face of a stifling and dehumanizing ideology only leads to a slow obliteration of self. In his review of
Ocean of Words in
World Literature Today (Autumn 1997), Timothy Wong noted that Jin "challenge[s] Marxist (or Maoist) political ideology not by declaring allegiance to some other ideology but by demonstrating again and again the complexity of human emotion which defies simplistic dogma." In returning to the scenes of his youth, Jin seeks to recover and memorialize the many voices and lives that were sacrificed in the name of class struggle.
Ha Jin is the pen name of Xuefei (pronounced shu-FAY) Jin, born on 21 February 1956 in the city of Jinzhou in Liaoning province to Danlin Jin, an officer in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and Yuanfen (Zhao) Jin. The arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 ended Jin's formal education when schools were closed.
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