Ha Jin was six years old when his father, a career officer in the People’s Liberation Army, was labeled “politically suspect” by the Chinese Communist Party and sent away for re-education. Jin was forced to leave the boarding school he’d attended since kindergarten and endure the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. At thirteen, he joined the People’s Liberation Army, because, he says, his other option was farm labor, and the military’s food was better. 

After five years in the military, the Chinese authorities directed Jin to study English. He was in graduate school at Brandeis University when soldiers in the army killed unarmed student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Jin has said the Tiananmen Square massacre was the reason he became a writer. Since then, he has written nine novels and four collections of poetry and short stories. He has won many honors, including the National Book Award, two Pen/Faulkner Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In his arresting new novel, Looking for Tank Man, Ha Jin revisits the Tiananmen Square massacre through the eyes of Lulu, a Chinese student studying history at Harvard in 2008. Prior to her time at Harvard, Lulu believed the official version of Chinese history, which omitted accounts of student deaths at the hands of the military, and depicted the protestors as revolutionaries. Despite growing danger from the Chinese authorities, Lulu persists in uncovering facts suppressed by the government, as well as personal experiences of the protest and massacre in her own family’s history. The book’s title is a reference to the unidentified “Tank Man”—a single, white-shirted protestor who, for an extraordinary length of time, blocked a line of eighteen tanks, and whose image has become an international symbol of peaceful protest.

I sat down with Ha Jin, my former professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Boston University, to discuss his new novel, life under an authoritarian regime, and reasons for hope in a darkening political climate.

Heather Thompson-Brenner: I’ve been telling people about your book, and if they’re a certain age, they know who the Tank Man was immediately, but they don’t know what event he was protesting. Why do you think that is? 

Ha Jin: People tend to forget, and a lot of people are eager to forget such a historical event. The Chinese government also urged people to look forward. 

I don’t think that the Chinese government expected this, but somehow once the image appeared, it really became iconic, and people celebrated him as a hero. Really it became very public, to the shame of the Chinese government. So there was kind of a popular consumption of this image. But also, it evolved. Over time, it became something different. 

HTB: How would you describe that evolution? 

HJ: People would think this guy was really crazy, or just like a superhero, but in fact he was an average person. A very common person. 

HTB: I remember watching the American coverage on the television, of the protests and the massacre in Tiananmen Square. We’re all aware that visual media, photographic or video, breaks through our resistance to facing the horrors of violence. How do you do that in writing? 

HJ: You know, I have to write patiently, because I provide a lot of details and make them connected. That’s the biggest problem. You have to find a way to link all these episodes and details together. Even the publishers don’t like it too bloody. I want people to remember this moment, and also to think about the implications. 

HTB: You’ve said that your reaction to watching the protest on television was an important event in your life. Can you tell me about that?

HJ: I didn’t expect that the Chinese government could be so brutal. I had served in the Chinese army, and our first principle was to serve the people. Now, everything was reversed; I felt everything was upside down. For weeks afterward, I lived in a trance. I was in shock, a bit. It was very traumatic. That’s why I decided to stay living in the U.S., to immigrate. 

HTB: In the book, Lulu is writing a dissertation about the Tank Man. She encounters a number of witnesses at Harvard who tell their stories about the Tiananmen Square massacre at the beginning of the book, and then there’s a later section of accounts from witnesses when she goes back to China.

HJ: Yes, because she was not aware that both her parents were participants. This was unexpected. So in a way, this is another way of encountering the violence first-hand. It becomes more personal. In the beginning, she was not as invested in it, but as she continues, she gets more involved. 

HTB: Were any of these stories based on actual people’s stories? 

HJ: Yes, there are a lot of books, such as the Tiananmen Square Papers. There are a lot of details, but they’re scattered. I prepared to write it for a long time. The question is, how to organize them, to make them connect? A lot of the details I couldn’t use. This is a narrow, personal perspective. 

HTB: In the novel we also hear the point of view of a veteran, a soldier who was in a tank at Tiananmen Square. He makes a compelling argument that he could not have known what was going to happen, or what was really going on. I felt sympathetic to him. Did you intend that? 

HJ: Yes, that’s the truth. A lot of the soldiers were basically confined in barracks and given a different kind of material. They didn’t understand what was going on. In a way, [the veteran character] adds nuance. There are [also] people who don’t regret what they did, and given the same situation, they might do it again. 

HTB: Lulu is a student, and her friends are students, and the people who organized the protest and were killed were students. I was wondering, what are the qualities of being a student that are so compelling? 

HJ: Students don’t have the baggage, so they are free to act. Also, they are more liberal. I have watched the video a lot with younger people, currently the millennials. They say, “It’s our turn now, we have to protest, we have to take over the life of our parents’ generation.” In other words, the younger ones, they are eager to participate. I was very encouraged. 

HTB: One of the things I thought made Lulu’s situation so compelling is the gathering sense of threat. You also mentioned that some editors thought you could be in danger from writing such a book. What’s the danger? 

HJ: This is in a way writing against the Chinese government. This book is a story about something they want people to forget. So that’s why absolutely this book won’t be printed in China. Some Americans thought it would be self-destructive [to write it]. But I have a lot of emotional investment in this.

HTB: Have any of your books been printed in China? 

HJ: A few of them. They were published then, but at a book event, I spoke against Xi Jinping. So all my books got banned. All the books were pulled from the shelf. 

HTB: I was really struck by how present surveillance was for the Chinese students in the book, even the ones who were here [in the U.S.], that anything that they were doing or writing was immediately noted. People whom Lulu knows, in 2012, are anticipating that technology will change the way people are watched, that everything will be watched in a cashless society, where your ID could be canceled and your bank account taken away. Has that come true? 

HJ: Something like that. You can’t use cash to buy food, it’s just really impossible. Everybody uses digital. If you are labeled as some bad element by the government, you can’t buy a plane ticket, you can’t buy a train ticket, you can’t stay in a hotel. So it’s very hard, they make your life impossible.

HTB: Lulu is also afraid of being detained, and the result of being detained can be imprisonment. 

HJ: The kind of imprisonment that would be for students, they put you among common prisoners, inmates. So basically, you suffer. They might also have a kind of special status for students; they call them political prisoners. I think the worst part is once you have become a different category, your life is basically over. You will always be treated as an unacceptable person. 

HTB: Reading your book now, I naturally drew parallels between the events depicted, the encroaching authoritarian presence, and the current U.S. government and climate. Do you see the United States headed in the direction of totalitarianism? 

HJ: Not exactly. We are still a society ruled by law. I can see there is oppression, especially the hostility to new immigrants, that’s more intensified. But it’s different—this society is different from China.

In the U.S. we have democratic structures and a humanitarian society. But there are people in power who are willing, [who] are eager, whose minds are open to the possibility [of authoritarianism]. Honestly, some people, I think they have a kind of complex for dictators. As a dictator, there’s no limit. Your power is boundless. Some political figures in the West admire that. They want that kind of power, and the durability of the power, and they study how dictators have accumulated it. And a life-long term. That makes them admirable to some politicians. 

HTB: There’s a way dictators start to be worshipped, like a religious figure would be. I think you said somewhere that patriotism had taken the place of religion in China. 

HJ: That’s true. It’s dangerous. Patriotism becomes the very religion of the state, it becomes the common denominator. Once you say, “I did this out of love for my country,” that is totally justified. But it’s wrong. We know that, right? Because there are a lot of values bigger and greater than patriotism. 

HTB: When I was in your class, you often talked about what makes a great novel. Do you have a few things to say about that? 

HJ: First, tell [a] good story. There also should be some emotional intensity. It’s important to have something to say. That people feel really enriched by the experience. 

HTB: You also told us that when we were writing novels—and maybe any fiction—that we should read great examples. Were you reading anything in that vein when you wrote this book? 

HJ: I mentioned often in class the book called Silence [by Shūsaku Endō]. That book really showed me all the technical possibilities, like how to make use of a diary, records, official documents.

HTB: I can think of related stories that are tragedies, like 1984, or other stories where students become disillusioned and the story ends sadly. But this one ends kind of hopefully. 

HJ: Yes, I do want to have a hopeful note. People survive and life continues. We shouldn’t make a book too sad, too hopeless. Then, why go on a book tour? [laughs]