I’m what I like to call a petty genius: I exhibit the idiosyncrasies of a great mind, without, as of yet, a brilliant body of work to justify the unqualified title. It is said that Einstein functioned on such a different mental level that he had difficulty with simple mathematics. Well, I crank out 2,000 words worth of far ranging posts on this site each week, and spend hours working, revising fiction on top of that, and yet when someone asks me to write a short greeting in a group birthday card, I will stare at it for twenty minutes before picking up the pen.
I know, it’s not quite the same, but it has to mean something, right? How about this: I spent the last two weeks feverishly working to finish my PhD applications before deadline, and I also spent the entire time walking around with broken shoelaces in each of my boots. Why? It didn’t seem that important, until a foot of snow fell, and even then I only bought new laces because I happened to walk past a cobbler on my way home from lunch. Here’s another of my eccentricities that I like to file under too-brilliant-to-function heading: I’m incapable of small talk. When I’m on the elevator with, say, my boss, and he asks me if I have any plans for the holidays, I say no and we ride the rest of the way in silence. It doesn’t occur to me until later that it would’ve been polite to ask the same question of him.
I feel the need to submit to you my credentials as a brilliantist in order to establish my grasp of the characteristics of a genius in the hope that when I say to you that Ha Jin is a bona fide genius you will take me at my word. The most entertaining way I can think of to explain how much respect I have for Ha Jin is this: If the literary world was depicted as a map of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 AD, Ha Jin would be Charlemagne and I would be a feudal Germanic lord with a principality of no more than a few square miles. In other words, I think he’s a terrific writer. But it’s not only his books that make Ha Jin my favorite writer of the previous decade. He was also one of my professor’s in graduate school, and believe me when I say there is no other situation where a writer’s talent is more on display than when he is tasked with evaluating someone else’s writing.
For those who’ve never experienced it, a fiction workshop is a brutal place., Here’s how it works: you write a story, which is typically not very polished because you only had a few weeks to work on it; you make copies of that story for everyone in the workshop (about a dozen people); your classmates take the story home, read it, and write comments and suggestions on what you should do differently; and the next time the workshop meets everyone discusses at length every single thing they didn’t like about your story, while you, forbidden from saying anything, sit there and take it. In almost every workshop I’ve been a part of (and I’ve sat through a lot of them) this modus operandi is really only valuable for the critiquers who are forced to think about thing’s abstract concepts (like what makes a story good or bad) in a concrete way. For the person whose story is being evaluated, however, it’s a complete waste of time. First, there is never a consensus reached in the workshop on the best way to revise the piece at hand. In a group of twelve, the opinions will break down like this: two people will really love it and suggest only minor changes, two people will hate it and ask for such drastic changes that you would be better off throwing the thing out, there will be five people who don’t really care one way or the other about your work and will only offer vague suggestions when called on by the instructor, and then there will be three people who didn’t even bother reading your story. After an hour of listening to these people eviscerate your work, you as a writer, feel so emotionally drained and physically beaten down that you don’t ever want to look at that particular story again.
And then there’s the workshops run by Ha Jin. There was never much back and forth amongst the participants in these workshops about what needed to be done with a story, because Ha Jin would always cut right to the heart of what needed to be fixed, and he was always right. Instead, he would spend a lot of time focusing on the things he liked about a piece and how to make those things even better, and when it came to pointing out problems, he was always quick to remind you that it was only a minor issue, a mistake that would be quickly corrected. I entered his workshop at the end of what had been an arduous experience in graduate school for, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that in one semester he restored my spirit as a writer, and he is one of the biggest reasons I continue to work today with such determination and aplomb.
Oh yes, and he is an eminent author as well. Ha Jin published seven books in the last ten years, all of which come on the heels of his novel Waiting, the National Book Award winner in 1999. His prose is straightforward and lean in a way that is reminiscent of the Russian writers he admires, chronicling the ups and downs of his characters without over dramatizing the perdurable texture of ordinary life. Pick up Waiting or War Trash or A Free Life or The Bridegroom (my four favorites). Any one will be a breath of fresh air the dank backroom that is contemporary fiction.
