A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Book 353)

Ha Jin’s short story “A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find” appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of the Oxford American backed by an interview with Jin about his writing life. Jin, perhaps unsurprisingly, cites Flannery O’Connor as an influence. More specifically, he uses her as an example of the gap between the life one has lived and the writing one does: O’Connor was a Southern Catholic often confined to her home, and Jin is a Chinese immigrant raised during the Cultural Revolution. On becoming a writer, Jin states: “It’s a mixture: it’s luck and it’s also misfortune.” This statement rings true to the oft-contradictory themes of O’Connor’s work, and of Jin’s.Oxford American is a magazine devoted to publishing the best in Southern writing while also documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Jin, who was living in Atlanta at the time this story was published, enters into conversation with the Southern literary tradition of O’Connor’s work in more ways than one. While the title of the story, “A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find,” clearly invokes O’Connor, the story itself also conjures her absurdity, that specific quality of humor with a discomfiting edge. The story of an ill-fated Chinese propaganda film crew in search of a man who can fight a real tiger in real time while the cameras roll reveals universalities of the human condition: the desires for recognition, success, belonging. But it’s Jin’s devotion to writing about a specific, fraught place, as he deconstructs the prevailing cultural ideologies inherent in it, that is familiar in particular to all who have loved and lived in the South.Kirkus Review said of Jin’s collection Under the Red Flag (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction) that Jin “has managed to make an utterly alien world seem as familiar as an old friend.” This familiarity is as present in 2019 as it was in 1998, and, as we all know, good friends are hard to find. Jin’s story is a friend worth keeping.