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Title: overrated
Review: What's unforgivable in Ha Jin's novel is not its historical inaccuracies obviously catered to the tastes and beliefs of a foreign audience. What's truly unfortunate is its depiction of Chinese people and society as being without some understandable passion or recognizable human emotion. Who are these aliens depicted in this novel? Real humans don't act like this. People in China during the cultural revolution certainly could not have acted like this. While reading this novel, all I could think about is how incredibly cold and uninteresting the characters are. Where is the pain and the suffering these characters supposedly endured during the cultural revolution? Yes they are Chinese, and yes they are therefore subdued, but that does not excuse the characters from their competely lack of inner struggle and psychological depth. Why should I care whether the divorce comes through or not? It's hard to give a damn when the characters don't seem to give a damn themselves.
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