Ha Jin, who was born in Liaoning, China, in 1956, served in the People's Liberation Army for six years during the Cultural Revolution. A student of literature since his teens, Jin was studying at Brandeis University in the US during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. In an interview with the Paris Review Jin says that the Chinese government's harsh response in Tiananmen Square convinced him to stay in America. Jin's writing deals extensively with China, and the Chinese mindset, but he writes in English, which he says he feels is a more plastic language. His 1999 novel "Waiting," which earned him a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, tells the story of a Chinese army doctor who longs to leave his loveless arranged marriage but struggles with questions of duty. Today Jin teaches in the English department at Boston University.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
