Chinese author Ha Jin reflects on nationalism, Tiananmen Square and his latest novel The Boat Rocker

Ha Jin was a student in Boston when the Tiananmen crackdown happened, and knew almost immediately that he couldn’t return. Instead he made a life for himself as a writer and academic in the US

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Author Ha Jin. It’s foolish to imagine the country as a mystical figure, a generous mother that has raised all the Chinese,” says a character in his new book, The Boat Rocker

Published: 8:00am, 19 Dec 2016Updated: 8:00am, 19 Dec 2016

Feng Danlin, the embattled journalist at the heart of Ha Jin’s latest novel, The Boat Rocker, is deeply suspicious of nationalism. A Chinese expatriate writing for a Chinese-language online news organisation in New York, he finds purpose writing about abuses of power in his native land. He’s like an idealistic island: “To be alone,” he reflects near the end of the book, “is a precondition of independence.”

Ha Jin, a National Book Award winner for 1999’s Waiting, isn’t really alone. He runs the creative writing programme at Boston University and has lived in the area with his family since coming to America in the ’80s. In China, however, he remains persona non grata. His novels, often critical of the Chinese government, are not published in his homeland. He hasn’t been back since he arrived in the States. “They wouldn’t give me a visa,” he explains over coffee at the Texas Book Festival in Austin.

Ha Jin has been in the States long enough to feel at home there. Not so Danlin, his creation in The Boat Rocker.

He’s a wounded cynic whose wife left him for a wealthy American. Now she’s working on a romantic potboiler of a novel hyped by both the Chinese and American governments as a symbol of warm relations between the countries in the wake of 9/11. Danlin sets out to expose what he sees as a royal scam perpetuated by the woman – and the country – that broke his heart and now seek to smear him if he digs too deep.

In a sense, Danlin is a man without a country. He has learned to live with his beliefs. As he says in the book, “Patriotism is a pejorative word in my dictionary; it connotes spiritual paucity, intellectual blindness and laziness, and moral cowardice. Isn’t it terrible to let only a country form the underpinning of one’s being?”