Beautiful and Heartbreaking


I have just now literally completed this remarkable piece. It has left me in a state where I need to take a moment to gather my thoughts and put them into words. However, one thing is certain - I absolutely loved it. The story was a captivating blend of beauty and heartbreak. The vivid descriptions painted a picture that was both enchanting and deeply moving. It took me on an emotional rollercoaster, making me laugh, cry, and everything in between. The characters were so well-developed that I felt as if I knew them personally. Their joys and sorrows became my own, and I couldn't help but be invested in their lives. I can't wait to share my thoughts about this amazing work with others and see what they think. It truly is a masterpiece that will stay with me for a long time.

This book truly demands patience from the reader.

One follows the story of a graduate student named Jin, who finds himself in the position of having to nurse his professor. The professor, unfortunately, has been disabled by a stroke and has lost all inhibitions. Over the weeks of caring for him, Jin hears many painful and shocking things.

The way he interprets these and their basis in truth creates a complex web of questions that becomes increasingly dense as time passes. Gradually, as Jin learns and pieces things together, these experiences change his outlook on life and his own plans.

While some other readers might complain that this is tedious, it is indeed worth persevering. This is precisely the magic of the book. Jin, formerly a passive and accepting member of the Chinese Communist Party, eventually decides that he must rebel against a system that constricts every aspect of his life.

He loses his fiance, discovers a great deal of intrigue at his university, decides to give up his academic career and become a Communist party official only to be rejected. He visits Beijing and witnesses the Tiananmen Square student uprising. Eventually, he flees with the goal of escaping to Hong Kong.

It is a story that takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery and transformation, filled with both heartbreak and hope.

This book, at times, was truly frustrating.

Ha Jin indeed has an excellent command of the language, which is quite remarkable. However, it's also worth noting that he has no plans to return and live in China, perhaps due to the content of this very book.

The Crazed tells the story of Jian, a master's graduate student who is gearing up for his PhD tests that could qualify him to transfer to the highly esteemed Beijing University. Just as he is preparing, his advisor suffers a stroke. His advisor is also the father of his fiancee, who resides in Beijing and is preparing for medical tests to become a pediatrician. (It should be noted that in China, there isn't really a distinct medical school in the way it's often described, and aside from the broad classifications of doctor and surgeon, there isn't a more detailed breakdown. So, it's highly unlikely that this would have been a possibility in the late 1980s and 1990s.)

While I firmly believe that the subject of Tiananmen Square is of great importance and that the understanding and knowledge of this topic are relatively low, for a book that exceeds 300 pages, I felt that it took an inordinately long time to truly reach its point. Although he did touch upon the subject matter of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, I felt that the exploration of the People's Liberation Army and the impact people had on each other was much more effectively approached in Li's book, The Vagrants (a different book that I had read back in December), compared to Jin's The Crazed. I found that the last 60 pages or so of the book were the essence and the driving force, but it's a pity that one has to struggle through the earlier parts to get there.

Camaradas, enmeshed with the life of the Monkey and the Donkey, the life of Man can only be alienated from himself. In his first twenty years, Man lives the life of a monkey. He jumps, runs, climbs trees and walls, and does whatever he wants. This period, the happiest of his life, passes quickly. Then come the twenty years when Man leads the life of a donkey. He works hard every day to feed and clothe his family. It is common to feel as exhausted as a donkey after a long and arduous journey, but he has to remain firm because the burden of the family rests on his shoulders, and he has to continue. After this period, Man reaches the age of forty, and the human life begins. By this time, his body is worn out, his shoulders are weak and heavy, and he has to rely on his brain, which has also begun to deteriorate and is no longer as fast and capable as he imagined. Sometimes he feels like crying, but the brain stops him: 'Don't do that! You need to control yourself. You still have many years ahead.' Every day, he pushes more thoughts and emotions into the brain, in which many things are already stored, but he doesn't let any of them out to accommodate new ones. Thus, day after day, he stuffs more things inside until one day the brain is so full that it can only explode. It is like a pressure cooker whose safety valve is blocked because it is too full, with the aggravating factor that the fire continues to heat it from below. As a result, the only way out is to explode.

This is the end of the first "class" that Jian attends, which Professor Yang gives in the hospital. At this moment, it is still difficult for Jian to decipher what his debilitated professor means by this narrative that he says is the true story of Genesis. Perhaps, something that could occur to Jian, an aspiring doctoral candidate in the Department of Literature at Peking University - apart from the initial confusion and embarrassment with such a banal and simplistic narrative to explain the meaning and course of things - is that if there is any truth in it and the life of human beings in general really happens in this way, he himself could consider himself privileged. After all, according to these terms, the life of an academic could be the ideal life: the first forty years would be lived, effectively, with the primary use of the brain for all his main activities, including supporting himself and his family. However, what Jian begins to understand throughout the narrative leads him to a rather different conception. As he attends other classes of Yang in the hospital, Jian is increasingly convinced that the life of an intellectual in China does not differ from any other bureaucratic function, since there is no possibility of exercising a truly independent and original thought. According to the professor himself, being a human sciences intellectual in China is nothing more than being a clerk.

If this criticism of excessive bureaucracy and lack of autonomy in China is not new, nor an original argument, the great question raised by Ha Jin's book could be the very antithesis that tends to arise in the mind of any Westerner at the end of the book: is being an academic in the West really so different from how it is in China? This question, in a way, can also arise in the mind of any Chinese who idealizes an academic life in the West. Professor Yang shows a great idealization of Canadian and American universities, but also great frustration for never having been able to teach or even participate in a conference in any of them. The most he can achieve is a quick, clumsy visit, without really understanding the functioning of a Western university. Are the control of the party secretary and the intrigues between the department directors, the woes about the granting of positions and acceptance of publications in university journals that we see in the book, really so different from the frictions in the graduate departments of human sciences in Western universities?
This is a question that Jian simply could not ask himself, because his reasoning is pushed to the opposite side: not having the possibility of studying abroad, the best thing to do would be to enter an explicitly bureaucratic position, to be literally a clerk in some department of the Party. The central reason for this decision - and this is a crucial point in the book's argument - was not only this fear of not having autonomy and only acting as an intellectual, but rather the will to do something with concrete implications in society, especially for society in a state of misery. After visiting a village in deplorable conditions, Jian takes on the will to try to help those people, and obviously, the academic work he could do in a literature department would never give him the possibility to change the reality of those people.
The will to want to do something "useful" for society, as well as not considering academic work as something useful, especially when thinking about a society without any access to culture, let alone academic works, puts into question much more than the remnants of anti-intellectualism present in China, symptoms of the years of the Cultural Revolution. The Banal reflects also the very mentality of the academic, who, whether due to professional frictions, existential frustration or idealism, will always be subject, in any society, to raising these questions himself, which could be summarized in a "is it worth it?". For Professor Yang, and later for Jian himself, it is not worth it. When reaching the end of life, when he could finally enjoy the human life, the academic not only continues to be frustrated professionally, but already has too many things overloading his pressure cooker. The tendency for it to explode earlier, in an even more implacable way, and remain disturbing to its owner until the end of life, is even greater.

I thought that the plot where the protagonist listens to his future father-in-law's ramblings after the old man has a stroke lasts for far too long. It seems extremely unbelievable that so much of what the old man says is lucid and reliable. Moreover, the denouement is not entirely unexpected and rather anticlimactic.

I might give a try to one of the novels that has received a higher rating. However, since this is my first book by Ha Jin, I am not yet overly impressed.

The one positive aspect and the reason for awarding three stars is the profound insight into China, the way average citizens lead their lives, and the political climate. It provides a unique perspective that is quite interesting and valuable.

Overall, while the book has its flaws, it also has some redeeming qualities that make it worth reading to a certain extent.

Good read - lots of good insight about Chinese society in the late 1980s. It is truly fascinating to observe how the behaviors of the characters are molded by the social, economic, and political circumstances in China during that era. Ha Jin masterfully weaves a complex web that encompasses deception, trickery, selfishness, greed, and yet, at the same time, redemption and personal growth. Through some excellent storytelling, various philosophical questions are deftly addressed.

I would have awarded the book a 3.5 if possible, but unfortunately, Goodreads doesn't offer that option. The negatives, however, cannot be ignored. The first part of the book drags on for an overly long time. Mr. Yang continuously rambles about all kinds of things, and to be frank, I lost interest after a certain point. It is only in the second half that the story begins to gain more momentum and become more interesting.

Moreover, all the Tiananmen Square-related content that was inserted seemed to detract from the rest of the narrative and, in my opinion, didn't serve much purpose. As a result, the conclusion was somewhat underwhelming.

There is no doubt that Ha Jin is a truly remarkable and stunning writer.

However, when it comes to this particular book, it doesn't really gain momentum and pick up until the last quarter.

The first three-quarters of the book lack a certain depth.

Pages and pages are dedicated to Jian's relationship with Mr. Yang, yet very little of real significance seems to come out of it.

In fact, this part could easily have been trimmed down without losing much of the essence.

I would have preferred if more of the ending had been able to seep through and be hinted at in the beginning of the book.

Personally, I was far more interested in what took place during the end of the book, but unfortunately, it wasn't foreshadowed enough in the beginning.

If I were to rate this book, I would give it four stars solely based on the strength of the ending.

However, it has to be said that it simply took an overly long time to reach that satisfying conclusion.

Overall, while the ending is good, the pacing and structure of the book could have been improved to make the reading experience more engaging from start to finish.

I picked up this book because, quite frankly, I was excited to discover a beautiful hardcover book in one of the local Little Free Libraries.

To my surprise, I enjoyed it more than I initially anticipated and found myself wondering if I had been unconsciously attracted to the subject matter.

The story centers around a young graduate student, Jian Wan, who takes on the responsibility of caring for his professor, Yang, who has had a stroke.

As the professor rants in his delirium, Jian not only learns more about his professor but also starts to question his own life.

Meanwhile, the student uprisings in Tiananmen Square are reaching a boiling point.

I was drawn to this book because it made me think of my own grandmother, who recently endured a series of strokes.

I appreciate the way the author unfolds the personal lives of the characters.

The personal, professional, and political aspects are all intertwined in complex and unexpected ways.

The reason I gave this book four stars instead of five is that I'm a bit uncertain about how I feel regarding the ending.

It seems a bit abrupt, but perhaps that's for the best. I need to reflect on it further.

In any case, I'm glad to have "discovered" Ha Jin and found this book to be well worth the read.

This book was truly on the verge of receiving a 4 out of 5 stars rating from me. However, the ending left something to be desired. The last 100 pages, as a whole, were truly incredible. If we were to subtract the last 3 to 4 pages, there were some moments within that span that were truly remarkable.

Nevertheless, I feel that Ha Jin did not focus on the right aspects in this work. The poetry that he incorporated into the book seemed to overshadow the story. It was like someone shaking a bunch of car keys in your face while you were engrossed in watching a classic movie like "Citizen Kane" or "Dr. Strangelove".

Despite this, I do believe that the book is good overall. Ha Jin is undeniably a great author. However, in my opinion, this particular book did not quite reach the level of greatness that "Waiting" achieved.

I would personally recommend this book only after you have read and liked "Waiting". If, on the other hand, you did not enjoy "Waiting", then I suppose you could skip this one.

All in all, I am giving this book a 3.5 out of 5 stars rating.

The main plot of the sick Mr. Yang seemed rather insignificant and failed to make a significant contribution to the overall story. In the end, it didn't amount to much at all.

Moreover, the exciting plot twist revealing Weiya as Mr. Yang's secret affair came too late in the narrative. As a result, it didn't really add much substance or depth to the story.

Overall, the story had a tendency to drag on for too long. The ending, in particular, left readers with a sense of dissatisfaction and wanting more. It lacked the impact and resolution that could have made the story truly engaging and memorable.

Perhaps with some revisions and a more focused approach, the story could have been improved to better capture the readers' attention and leave a more lasting impression.

Pazzia o libera espressione?

A professor is stricken by a stroke.
A student and his future son-in-law witness it.
The speech becomes muddled and the words come out in a jumble.
But in certain situations, it's better to think that one is facing madness.
Throughout the entire book, it makes us think that the madman is the old professor.
He rambles, recalls his past, and questions his life.
The women, the career, and the choice of being a scholar.
The poor Jian can only follow his delusions and ask himself if he wants the same bitter life for himself.
However, then he goes to Tiananmen Square the night before the armored vehicles enter to mark the end of the Chinese student revolution.
And we discover that the madman has never been so lucid.
China has nothing to offer the young.
In fact, it has betrayed them.
The People's Liberation Army has turned its guns on the people.
And this can only mean one thing: the madmen are them.
The Chinese deserve more.
And only the sight of the innocent students,
killed by those who should have protected them, can wake up the sleeping souls.
And from that moment on, nothing else will matter.
This story delves deep into the complex themes of madness, truth, and the state of a nation. It makes us question our own perceptions and forces us to confront the harsh realities that lie beneath the surface.
The characters' experiences and the events that unfold paint a vivid picture of a society in turmoil, where the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred.
As we read, we are drawn into their world, sharing their joys and sorrows, and ultimately, coming to a new understanding of the human condition.

Ehh. The last two chapters are really good.

There were some interesting insights into Chinese culture as well. It was quite fascinating to learn about certain aspects that I wasn't previously aware of.

However, I was never really able to connect with the main character or any other character for that matter. They just seemed a bit flat and one-dimensional to me.

Moreover, there were several unnecessary descriptions of female anatomy. While nothing was too blatant, it just didn't seem necessary to advance the plot or establish the character. It was rather disappointing to find such details included.

I'd give this one a pass if you're considering it. Unless, of course, you're locked in a room and your only other choices are the Hunger Games or Twilight. In that case, you might as well give it a try, but otherwise, there are probably better books out there.