“'All the Guns Must Have the Same Caliber': A Kachruvian Study of Ha Jin’s Chineseness in 'Winds and Clouds over a Funeral'”

Abstract

This article analyzes Ha Jin’s “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” within a Kachruvian framework. Firstly, it examines Braj B. Kachru’s concepts of “contact literature” and the “bilingual’s creativity” in that both of these undermine the traditional homogeneity of a monolingual conceptualization of the English language. I then offer an overview of Kachru’s taxonomical model as a means of explaining the cultural, grammatical and linguistic alterations in the creativity of bilinguals, especially that of writers who use English as a second language. In this regard, and bearing in mind Haoming Gong’s concept of “translation literature,” I explore Ha Jin’s “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” in terms of the linguistic processes and nativization strategies employed by this Chinese-American author in order to transfer cultural aspects from his native language, Chinese. Through this I aim to reveal and describe the hybrid nature of the work of Ha Jin, a writer who I believe is paving the way for a reassessment of Asian-American fiction in the United States.