Rereading Ha Jin's Novels in a Transpacific Context: Human Rights and Human Wrongs

Abstract

This essay rereads Ha Jin's two novels, Waiting and A Free Life, in a transpacific context. I designate this transpacific context to include both the movement of US economic and military expansionism in the Asia Pacific and the possibility of deploying an alternative epistemology and ontology from that geopolitical region as both a response and negotiation. Within this context, I argue that Jin's novels do not simply challenge human rights abuse in China as presumed by critics but rather raise broader historical and cultural questions about different perceptions and understandings of these rights in what Gayatri Spivak theorizes as "responsibility-based" ("Righting Wrongs" 549) and "rights-based" (536) societies.