As a writer, Ha Jin makes a nice living translating
for English readers the sometimes opaque world of China before it opened to the
world in the 1990s.
He certainly does this to great effect in the
collection of short stories Ocean of
Words: Army Stories, which take place, by and large, during the Sino-Russian
border conflict in 1969. The stories are simply told, in unadorned language,
and give the impression that the author has a detailed and intimate knowledge
of the time, the place, the people.
In other ventures, it seems like Ha Jin uses his
Chinese settings to carry the tales, much to the detriment of the stories
itself. The exotic names and settings
are used to cover the fact that his stories aren’t saying anything particularly
new about the human situation; that his prose is really not very interesting or
exciting to read.
But Ocean of
Words manages to avoid this pitfall.
This strong collection of stories shows Ha Jin at this best. Story and setting are balanced.
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