Word: jin
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...recent paper published in the biology journal Proteomics, which invoked ideas of creationism with little supporting evidence for the claim, has caused controversy within the scientific community. The authors of the study, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, scientists at Inje University in South Korea, used the idea of a “mighty creator” in a paper entitled “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul.” The scientists related creationism to proteomics, the study of the structure and functions of proteins, to explain why different forms of life have similar mitochondria...
...Jin's novel The Crazed ends amid the aftermath of the bloody Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Jian Wan, the longhaired grad student and narrator, has been in Beijing and has seen the monstrous crackdown firsthand. Back in his staid university town, he is tipped off that the police are coming to arrest him as a counterrevolutionary. He flees, hawking his Phoenix bike to a fruit vendor for some apricots and enough change to buy a train ticket to Nanjing. From there, Jian plans to board an express train heading south to Guangzhou, then sneak into Hong Kong and eventually...
...Though not a sequel to The Crazed, 51-year-old Ha Jin's latest novel A Free Life begins, chronologically, where that book left off - a sort of literary diptych. It's July 1989, a month after Tiananmen, with gloom and anxiety still charging the atmosphere. Chinese student and would-be poet Nan Wu and his wife Pingping are living near Boston while Nan finishes his Ph.D. at Brandeis, and they have no desire to return to a paranoid, post-Tiananmen China. Instead, they send for their only child, 6-year-old Taotao, who has been living with his grandparents...
...Jin's 2004 novel War Trash - an exhaustively researched work about the Korean War and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award - was his first to be set outside China. A Free Life is the first to be set in his adopted home, and he deftly conjures an American landscape of rolling, wide-open spaces spangled by brawny, glimmering rivers ("This sight beats the Yangtze," Pingping gushes, while she gazes at the "mighty and vast" Hudson, just outside New York City). There are also decent depictions of bland, sleepy McSuburbs like Lilburn, Ga. - a typical bedroom community of electricians, engineers, stucco churches...
...when so many cultural products compete for the public attention, to bring forth yet another work of this kind - to spend a book pondering, as Nan does, the question, "Do you have to live a literary life to produce literary work?" - is risky indeed. Ha Jin's demotic prose is as smooth as Windexed glass, but A Free Life lacks the dark, propulsive verve of his earlier work. And in the end, Nan Wu is little more than another entry in the world's brimming catalog of literary pretenders...