Ha Jin

I certainly think that Ha Jin is one of the finest writers of our time. His stories are so humourous and serious at the same time. He is often making fun of Communists though, and this seems to be the appropriate dry laughter of an individual toward the Communist system.

I was thinking of his critique of traditions in relation to what Milan Kundera once said about the future... to paraphrase, that to the traditionialist, the future does not matter... we don't care about the future for the future is a void, nothingness, a temporal form of death while the past is where all our anxieties, feelings, devotions lay. Milan Kundera also writes about Immortality...that we create traditions to mark a set of repeated experiences as immortal, as something that should happen in a certain manner to strengthen a collective identity, bind us as human beings. This book is an answer to the modernist approach toward experience in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."

Ha Jin seems to be asking the same question about Immortality and tradition from the other side. What do we do with traditions that are perverse, our secret traditions that are set up to punish people who do not follow our traditions. And if people decide not to follow a certain tradition, should they be punished by another tradition? The tradition that insures the immortality of a tradition?

I sometimes wonder what we can do about "traditions" of terrorism or suicide bombings, endorsed by the Arab clergy or politicians as a form of immortality.

We do have bombings of adoption clinics in the US but the fundamentalists who support it should certainly know that they are killing adult lives in order to save what they consider to be infant lives, therefore, they are sinning... creating a greater evil to stop a lesser evil.