Language Matters

Ha Jin's stories are riddled with themes and examples that deal with communism and oppressive government, relating to his life spent in China. For this reason he was forced to make the decision to write in English as he points out in his article. He is correct that if he wrote in Chinese these stories would have never made it past the censorship to be read by the people.

In his first story, Saboteur, Ha Jin takes on the theme of oppressive government and the abuse of power with the Chinese Police. The story covers the police provoking Mr. Chiu and his wife to give them reason to arrest him. They then abuse their power further by fabricating a whole file of evidence and other problems that they accuse Mr. Chiu of having in the past. The police then proceed to tie up Fenjin out in the scorching heat as punishment for no reason other than speaking his mind to them. Stories like this as well as his others that deal with communism vs. capitalism could never make it past Chinese censorship. The government officials in the Chinese Communist Party get to take their power and essentially mold the people into the perfect citizens that they want, by choosing exactly what the public has access to and how they should behave.

Ha Jin mentions Conrad in his article, and he brings up a good point that Conrad made a tough decision to write in English versus Polish. To write about colonialism to a Polish audience wouldn't make much sense. Poland was not a colonialist nation, so many of the readers there would not have understood the depth of the story and many of the themes of Heart of Darkness. By moving to England and writing the story in English he was able to establish himself as the go-to writer for post-colonialism, a position he never would have imagined if he wrote in Polish. Without Conrad as a base for post-colonial writing, the genre would have drastically changed, and authors like Achebe wouldn't have likely written anything.