with the personal life of Thomas Jefferson in the
years before he became president, especially when
he went to Paris as a U.S. ambassador.
Besides screenplays, Jhabvala wrote numerous
novels and short stories. Jhabvala moved to New
York from India nearly 35 years ago, and her plots
reflect this geographic movement. For example, in
Travelers (1972), Jhabvala examines the odd con-
vergence in India of four people with different
psychological and cultural backgrounds: an Indian
widow, an Englishman, an American woman and
a young Indian student. Similarly, her collection
of short stories, How I Became a Holy Mother and
other stories (1976), includes stories about Parsees,
a minority community in India, and other Western
characters in search of spiritual enlightenment.
Following that, her novel In Search of Love and
Beauty (1983) explores the lives of three genera-
tions of people, their hopes and quest for idealism.
In 1984, she received the MacArthur Foundation
Award. Jhabvala continued her exploration across
cultures in her novel Three Continents (1987), set
in New York, London, and India. The plot circles
around a fabulously wealthy young woman whose
life of material privilege drives her to seek some-
thing higher. She finds her emotional peace in a
fanatic religious sect, which in reality is a pious fa-
çade to raise money illegally.
In 1994 she won the Writers Guild of America’s
Screen Laurel Award. Two years later in Shards of
Memory (1996), Jhabvala once again recreates an
intercontinental family saga, which begins in a
Manhattan townhouse and goes back in time to
span four generations whose lives are knit together
by an unconventional spiritual movement. Jhabva-
la’s collection of 13 short stories, entitled East into
Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New
Delhi (1998), explores the nature of love across
two continents. Jhabvala worked on this collection
for 20 years, and five of the stories appeared in The
New Yorker.
In 2004 her nine fictional stories collected in
My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past reflect an
autobiographical tone, as the stories move between
New York, London, and India. Jhabvala imagines
alternative paths her life might have taken and
ponders on how she never fully assimilated in any
culture. Now nearly 80, Jhabvala recently wrote the
novel Refuge in London (2003), depicting an artis-
tic struggle in postwar London nearly half a cen-
tury ago. It won the O. Henry Award in 2005.
In addition to her novels, screenplays, and short
stories, Jhabvala frequently contributes to The New
Yo r k e r. Whether set in India, London, or New York,
her works reflect her ability to experiment, adapt,
challenge, provoke, and entertain.
Akhila NaikJin, Ha (1956– )
Born Jin Xuefei in the city of Jinzhou, Liaoning
Province, China, Ha Jin had quite an eventful life
in his native country. The son of a military officer,
he joined the Chinese Army when he was still 13
years old. Although he took part in the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, he was branded
a counterrevolutionary and persecuted during that
volatile period, since his grandfather had been a
landowner. Jin left the army after five and a half
years and became a telegraph operator at a railroad
station, where he started to teach himself English.
Following that, with the Cultural Revolution over,
he earned a B.A. in English at Heilongjiang Uni-
versity and then an M.A. in American literature at
Shangdong University.
In 1985 Jin moved to Boston to pursue a Ph.D.
in English at Brandeis University. In 1990 he pub-
lished his first book, Between Silences: A Voice from
China, a volume of poetry that encapsulates many
of what would become his dominant themes.
In the preface, Jin declares that his main objec-
tive as a writer is to “speak for those unfortunate
people who suffered, endured or perished at the
bottom of life and who created the history and at
the same time were fooled or ruined by it.” This
is something that he has continued to do in his
subsequent works. In 1996, three years after earn-
ing his Ph.D., he published his second collection
of poems, Facing Shadows, in which he relates his
experience as an immigrant in the United States
as well as his response to the Tiananmen Square
uprising of 1989, the epochal event that barred his
return to his native land. In 2001 Jin finished his138 Jin, Ha