The Writer As Migrant: Reading Ha Jin's Novels As Metahistorical Fiction

This thesis aims at exploring the representation of contemporary Chinese history in Ha Jin's works. For this study I selected three novels out of Ha Jin's dozen works, namely War Trash, Waiting and The Crazed, and I would put forward my main argument as Reading Ha Jin's Novels as Metahistorical Fiction (to distinguish it from Linda Hutcheon's Historiographical Metafiction, a term derived from her discussion of postmodern fiction). The choices of these three novels are due to my conception that they are not only representatives of Ha Jin's corpus but their historical backgrounds constitute almost the entire landscape of contemporary Chinese history from the early 50s to the early 90s.The thesis started off by discussing the controversy of Ha Jin's role of the spokesmanship which he claimed in the early years of his literary career. Hayden White's theory of metahistory is introduced as a theoretical framework for the thesis, whereas in each chapter I use other specific theories and criticisms to analyze the historical narratives therein. Therefore, the three chapters stand relatively independent as they remain in the metahistorical context. In the Epilogue, I briefly discussed Ha Jin's two recent works of immigrant experience, i.e. A Free Life and A Good Fall, and argue for the values of his works written from the spokesmanship which he later set about to negate so as to take on the American subject matter.By writing this thesis, I not only mean to point out the historical representations in Ha Jin's works but also to demonstrate that Ha Jin sternly believes there is historical verity in his fiction and fiction too is a mode of writing history.