Citation:
Ha Jin. "Saboteur." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 2nd Compact ed. New York: Longman, 2000. 169-176.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2008. Wikipedia.
Biography:
Ha Jin was born Jin Xuefei in Liaoning, a province in northeast China on February 21, 1956. Growing up, he expected to follow a military career like his father. Because education was considered dangerous to Communist ideology, schools were closed, leaving Jin to piece his education together from whatever few written materials he could obtain. In 1974, he left the army and worked as a telegraph operator for the Harbin Railroad Company. Listening to English radio broadcasts, he taught himself the English language. In 1996, he published his first book of short stories, Oceans of Words: Army Stories. That year his second short story collection, Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction. Waiting was the first book ever to win both the prestigious National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, which is the largest annual juried fiction award given in the United States. Most of his work so far has been based on his experiences in China, but he foresees that this is likely to change the longer he lives in America.
Objective Summary:
As the story opens, Chiu and his new bride are having lunch on the last day of their honeymoon in the city of Muji, China. Chiu is looking forward to returning to his job in Harbin, especially because he is worried about having a relapse of hepatitis, a disease that left him debilitated several months earlier. As he and his bride finish their lunch, a police officer at a nearby table tosses tea on the couple. Instead of apologizing, the police officer arrests Chiu for disturbing the peace and takes him to the jail. Like the officer in the restaurant, the officers at the police station ignore Chiu's...