The status of a creative writer in their own culture is always tenuous, always in flux. Are they best as servants to the status quo, or are they only understood within the context of what they manage to overturn? Think of American authors like James Patterson or Tom Clancy, whose bestsellers over the course of their many decades follow standard formulas of handsome rugged heroes and clearly defined bad guys. Their creativity exists in their ability to define and perfect the formula itself. Now, think of the international creative writer. Consider the writer in exile, the writer without a homeland, the creative artist speaking to their people from the United States. Is their message worth expressing if it’s not heard in that homeland?
Novelist and poet Ha Jin, a 1985 graduate of Brandeis University and a full time professor in the creative writing program at Boston University since 2002, has spent his creative life here in the United States considering the cost of creative freedom and how it often means not being able to be heard in (or even return to) his homeland. The author of four novels, four books of poetry, a biography of Li Bai, and a book of essays, Jin has also won the National Book Award, the Flannery O’Connor award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014. With all that in his biography, the essence of longing for acceptance in, and reconciliation with, his homeland (in Jin’s case China) makes his new novel, A Song Everlasting, especially poignant.
To best understand the context and importance of Jin’s new novel, it’s important to look at his 2008 essay collection The Writer as Migrant, in which he set forth a theme that recurs through his work:
“…a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes culture…[it] evokes the reader’s empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition.”
Later in the book, he evokes the theme of the writer as an itinerant traveler, a searcher, never staying too long in one place: “As we travel along, we should also imagine how to rearrange the landscapes of our envisioned homelands.”
A Song Everlasting builds from the sometimes tired trope of the troubled wandering artist and turns it into something deeper, something more powerful. Yao Tian, a well-known Chinese opera singer, is a passive character when we first meet him. He has no plans to emigrate to the United States, but circumstances lead him to think otherwise. While on a New York tour with his ensemble, Tian takes a lucrative side job performing at a Taiwanese National Day celebration. Tian needs money for his daughter’s school tuition and this extra job for one night will take him much closer to meeting that goal than a year’s salary in China. Upon returning to China, Tian’s political naivete throws him in the middle of a controversy with the government’s Ministry of Culture. Impulsively, and at great financial and personal risk to his life and his wife and child still in China, Tian flees to New York.
The story unfolds very sparingly, in brief chapters with a lean, economic narrative. “The spareness might have something to do with the fact that I also write poetry,” Jin told Boston University’s Bostonia magazine in October 2021. “…the short chapters provide some kind of inner briskness…I also wanted the tone of the novel to remain somewhat neutral, not satirical…”
It’s that last element of Jin’s intentions that might frustrate readers more accustomed to a deeper, more intense narrative. Consider the risks involved for our hero. Yao Tian is a man without a country in his homeland of China, in New York, and eventually in Boston. He is steadfast and determined to live life on his own terms. When the paid singing gigs dry up, Tian cleans offices, works in a Chinese Quincy construction crew, sings in a casino and eventually as a street busker. His mother and sister die but he cannot go home to China with a canceled passport. “I have little interest in politics,” Tian tells us early in the novel. “I just want to be a free artist.” While that may bother the reader looking for a bombastic hero that fights authoritarianism in a purely American way, Ha Jin knows this is a Chinese hero. He knows Yao Tian will take a stand in his own measured, deliberate, focused way.
A Song Everlasting is a brave, unsparing novel that reminds us how a steady approach from a hero like Yao Tian is no match against a force like the government of China. The novel might be careful and measured, but Jin pulled no punches in his Bostonia interview. “China is still medieval in its political system,” he said. “The country has to change. If it cannot change by itself, it is our responsibility to make it change.”
Consider this line from the novel. Tian has been fired from his job as a Chinese opera singer, and the Ministry of Culture gets right to the point: “You are a disgrace to us, to your parents, to our country that raised and nourished you.” Tian spends his time reading poetry. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gently into that Good Night” brings tears to his eyes. While living through an informal exile in the United States, Tian flirts with Falun Gong members and attends a protest marking the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, followed at each step by Chinese Government spies. Tian recalls a line from an unnamed Hong Kong poet: “I protest, I exist.” While Tian may come off as unfortunately passive in his quest for freedom, going from job to job and seeking intimate comfort from various women (with his wife and child still in China), Tian’s ailing mother is unsparing in her views about China:
“She told him not to even think about returning to China. ‘This country devours its people,’ she said. ‘Stay away from it, the farther the better.’…”
Tian moves from New York to Boston in search of a living, and local readers will appreciate Jin’s local references, especially to our very own Sampan newspaper, the only English-Chinese newspaper in New England: “It was bilingual, the same article printed in both languages.” Local news reports on his performance at the Tiananmen Massacre 20th anniversary memorial event, and it’s here where Jin’s empathy towards his hero, grieving the recent loss of his mother, resonates for the reader:
“Nobody could tell how personal his singing was – all took it as a show of his love for the motherland. This was a misinterpretation, but he couldn’t say it was a mistake – it only showed how the personal and historical had converged.”
It’s this last element that will resonate longest with any reader of A Song Everlasting. No matter how Yao Tian may just want to live a peaceful life on his own terms and simply start again in a new land, he has to admit that the personal and historical are inseparable. Ha Jin was at Brandeis in 1985 and still here in 1989, watching as Tiananmen Square unfolded on television. In his essay “On Solitude,” Jin wrote: “Chinese intellectuals were never independent thinkers, they were but ‘court literati.’” Yao Tin is neither man without a country nor intellectual by the end of A Song Everlasting, but he is an independent thinker. Ha Jin’s determination to speak truth to power in this story about a quiet man who has a voice and needs to sing will resonate loudly, clearly, and in beautifully soaring notes long after the final curtain call.
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
