Orientalist Depiction of China in Ha Jin's Under the Red Flag

Abstract

Well-acclaimed short stories of Ha Jin manifest the concern of orientalism as barbaric, uncivilised, inhuman, backward and panic. He reflected in his works being dominated with the issues of sexuality, and masculinity crisis of various forms. The male protagonists are emasculated, and are featured as sexually impotent, castrated, childless, passive, and with mental disorders make them unsocial and uncivilized. It is only the hegemony of West over East to make them inferior. Jin's Under the Red Flag is fraught with depiction of sex scenes: a middle-aged prostitute is bullied and beaten before the public; an old man arranges for the gang rape of his young wife as revenge for her infidelity. Displaying distorted and violated image of Chinese people, Ha Jin advocates for the orientalist discourse. Jin in one or other way, becomes orientalist in this text. So, this thesis assumes the latent voices, desires and perspectives of Ha Jin, that makes him orientalist though he opposes the idea that he is accused of. Orientalism is the product of circumstances that are fundamentally, indeed radically, fractious. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles which become Ha Jin's methodology for the collection of stories to make him an orientalist.