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    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur"
    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur"
    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur"
    Ebook40 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535832489
    A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ha Jin's "Saboteur" - Gale

      11

      Saboteur

      Ha Jin

      2000

      Introduction

      Chinese Americanémigré Ha Jin is a poetry and fiction writer who has accomplished a transition executed masterfully by very few authors: that of writing not in his native language but in English as an adopted language. Jin lived in China for the first twenty-nine years of his life. His father was an army officer, so the family moved frequently in his youth, leaving him with a diminished sense of home. He enlisted in the Chinese army at the age of fourteen and served for five years, and he later pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature. He came to the United States to seek a doctoral degree with the expectation that he would return to China, but the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 led him to reconsider. He has lived in the United States ever since.

      Much of Jin's early work is striking in that incidents taking place in China were originally written in English, not translated from Chinese. The short story Saboteur, which appears in the collection The Bridegroom (2000), takes place in the fictional Muji City in northeast China. A university lecturer and Communist Party member named Mr. Chiu is framed by two police officers, for unclear reasons, for causing a public disturbance. His detention and manipulation by the police while experiencing an attack of hepatitis stir great resentment in him, with tragic results.

      Author Biography

      Xuefei Jin, who writes as Ha Jin, was born on February 21, 1956, in Jinzhou, China, where his father, a People's Liberation Army officer, was stationed at the time. The name Xuefei means Snow Flying, as Jin was born at the time of a great snowstorm. He attended boarding school at age seven, but two years later he returned home because of the mass closure of schools during Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution. This political program was intended to reinvigorate the nation's Communist ideology, and it which ultimately entailed the persecution of the bourgeoisie (the materialist middle class) and intellectuals. Jin's family was targeted because his grandfather had been a landowner, and most of his father's books were burned in a bonfire on the street. Jin joined the Little Red Guard, the youth faction of the student-led nationalist group, and spent several years wearing red armbands, waving flags and singing revolutionary songs, as he told Dwight Garner of the New York Times Magazine.

      Jin lied about his age to enlist

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