“Superfluous man” in a Chinese American version

Over the last decades in American literature a significant role has been played by Chinese immigrants’ works in English. Wide recognition of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs “The Woman Warrior” in 1976 marked the period of Chinese-American literature joining the mainstream. Then Amy Tan’s and Gish Jen’s novels as well as Frank Chin’s and David Henry Hwang’s plays became popular. All these authors were born in the United States and English has always been their native language. Over recent years there has been an unusual situation when the first generation immigrants who had moved to the United States as adults started to write in English and have gained recognition. Two authors, who received numerous literary awards, are especially remarkable: Ha Jin (born in 1956) and Yiyun Li (born in 1972). Since both of them rode out the Cultural Revolution and persistent “Sovetization” of Chinese culture, a dialogue with Russian literature, both pre-Soviet and Soviet, is quite significant in their novels. This dialogue is quite significant in Ha Jin’s novel “Waiting” (1999), the winner of the National Book Awards and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The novel’s character calls himself a “superfluous man” at the moment of gaining insight in sense of his life. The paper discusses how the protagonist’s character has led him to this revelation and to what extent it is possible to compare this Chinese character with the Russian concept of “superfluous man”, an important concept in the 19th century Russian literature. In his response to life and love matters Lin Kong does seem to share some features of the character with Oblomov, the protagonist of the eponymous 1859 novel by the famous Russian author Ivan Goncharov. Though the two life stories have nothing in common as for cultural and historic contexts, they share some universal similarities.