In the beginning of Ha Jin’s new novel, “Looking for Tank Man,” a sophomore at Harvard seems to be on the verge of throwing her life away. Pei Lulu is the pride of her divorced parents. Her life in Boston is supported by her mother’s salary from a job at Tsinghua University and her father’s business of sculpting Buddhas and dragons for overseas clients. That Lulu has managed to study abroad—at Harvard, no less—is already an achievement. But she’s also particularly dedicated, even among her extraordinary peers. When her wealthy friend Rachel vacations in Newport or goes skiing in Vermont, Lulu is content to stay on campus, reading books in the library. There’s just one problem: she is a history major. All governments have their preferred versions of the past, but some are more totalizing than others. For a young Chinese person, interest in the wrong subject can seriously screw things up.
The year is 2008. Many Chinese people, including those pursuing an education abroad, still carry the self-image of an earnest underdog with much to learn and much to prove. (Lulu couldn’t have conceived that a Presidential decree might one day threaten her spot at Harvard, or question her eligibility for a student visa.) But has there ever been a simple time to be Chinese? A pivotal moment for Lulu arrives when she decides to join a crowd welcoming the visiting Chinese Premier. She feels an obligation to do so “because the delegates, even though we disliked them as officials, were from our motherland.” The mood is jubilant, with hundreds of miniature red flags and smiling young faces, except for one slender middle-aged woman. She is unaccompanied, but she holds a sign suggesting that she isn’t alone: “We Won’t Forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre!” The crowd is repulsed by her presence. A group of students disavow her message (“Nobody believes you!”), question her motive (“Why help Americans demonize our country like this?”), and call her names (“Bitch!” “Cunt!” “Loser!”). Lulu doesn’t participate and worries for the woman’s safety. Still, she uses the first-person plural in describing the crowd’s reaction. We intervene, she narrates, in the same way that we feel obligated to welcome the delegates from the motherland. The little flags, at first a sign of confidence in national identity, now seem to have turned into something else.
I caught myself flinching at this scene, not only for the naked, charged confrontation, but also for Ha Jin’s choice to present it as a focal point. Jin left China in 1985 for a graduate program at Brandeis University. The brutal crackdown against student protesters in Tiananmen Square came four years later. In the aftermath, Jin’s decision to publicly support the students’ democratic values apparently cost him the ability to visit his home country. It’s impossible not to see him in the figure of the lonesome protester; he’s likely faced some of the same insults, the same accusations that he’s dredging up the past. “The massacre, if there’d been one,” Lulu thinks to herself, “had taken place almost two decades before, and I was amazed that the woman was still bent on making a protest about it today.” For the author to choose this history as a subject is to insist on examining a long-festering wound of his generation.
Before “Looking for Tank Man,” Jin had published twenty titles in America. Some were poetry, some were essays, but most were works of fiction that dealt with well-educated Chinese who were unhappy with their lives. At first, these characters were situated in the China that Jin had grown up in. Then, starting with Nan Wu in “A Free Life” (2007), they began to migrate to the United States. Nan—like Jin, a graduate student in America who’s shocked by the news from Tiananmen—was followed by a series of characters, in the story collection “A Good Fall” (2009), who are caught between two worlds, navigating hope and disillusionment. And the protagonists in “The Boat Rocker” (2016) and “A Song Everlasting” (2021) are thriving professionals—an expat journalist known for exposés of the Chinese government, a popular opera singer—whose failures to obey the state obstruct their path to an undisturbed, conventionally successful life.
The drama of these stories, in which insiders become outsiders, is evident; displacement promises profound confusion, conflict, discovery, and entanglement. So it goes with Lulu, who, after her encounter with the protester, becomes obsessed with the Tiananmen Square massacre, and enrolls in a course on the subject. It isn’t an easy class. Seeing photos and documents of crushed people, and visiting blood-drenched objects retrieved from the site and preserved in the basement of a Harvard library, Lulu is no longer in doubt of the facts. She turns her investigation toward the students’ intentions. She finds that they were peaceful and law-abiding, advocating for dialogue instead of subverting the political system. (After a portrait of Mao Zedong was vandalized, some even turned in the culprits to the authorities.) Lulu is especially drawn to the famous photograph of the “Tank Man,” who is seen from behind as he impedes a column of armored cars from advancing. Something about this image thrusts her feelings into contradiction. To her staunch nationalist friends, she fiercely defends its place as a global symbol of resistance; at the same time, she can’t stomach a mullet-sporting white guy who displays the photo prominently on his cabinet, as if it’s a poster of a rock star.
A decisive turn arrives when Lulu travels back to China to visit her ailing grandfather, who tells her a secret that’s been withheld for decades: her parents were involved in the protests during the spring of 1989. Her father had worked on the famous “Goddess of Democracy” statue, and her mother was among the first hunger strikers. Once Lulu starts asking questions, her parents don’t put up much of a fight. They still believe in the ideals of freedom and democracy, they say, but they’ve grown deeply skeptical of the reform they once demanded, and of their own sense of agency at the time. Her father feels he was maddened by rage. Her mother feels that she and her peers were “meant to be sacrificed.” Upon learning that Lulu is writing a thesis on what happened, though, she hands over her diary. “I hope it will be useful for your studies,” she says. Lulu’s father’s face twitches, but he encourages her: “You’ve got to do what you have to do. To be controlled by fear is not a way to live.”
As graduation approaches, Lulu ponders her future. On the one hand, she sees the appeal of finding a job in Beijing to be close to her mother, who raised her alone. On the other, she feels she has unfinished business in America, where, ironically, she’s best able to understand the particular history of her home. She is surrounded by adults who counsel her to be pragmatic, but there is little consensus on what that entails. Her dad feels obligated to make money for his new family—an Audi-driving young wife and twin boys preparing to eventually study in America—but wishes he had more integrity as an artist. Lulu’s mom regrets not pursuing a graduate education. She gives her daughter mixed instructions: Lulu ought to secure a good man as soon as possible, but should also stay self-sufficient, never beholden to money, power, or love.
