Multisource Transwriting Study on the Chinese Female Characters in Ha Jin’s Waiting

Abstract

Multisource Transwriting refers to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural practices involving fragmented sources, where translating and writing are interwoven. Based on his military life on the northeastern border and his deep interaction with a military doctor’s family, Chinese-American writer Ha Jin intricately transwrote Chinese famale’s imagery in Waiting through the story of a military doctor, Kong Lin, struggling in eighteen-year emotional marriage. The misalignment between the signifiers of English symbols and the signifieds of Chinese culture in this text gives rise to translation, laying the foundation for discussions from the perspective of multisource transwriting. This paper takes Waiting as its research object and, relying on the theory of Multisource Transwriting, traces Ha Jin’s fragmented sources for transwriting traditional Chinese women images and analyzes the transwriting relationships within them. The study finds that Ha Jin’s creation was not based on a specific Chinese literary text but on multisource materials; translating and writing are interwoven, mutually interpreting and constructing each other as a gradient continuum of mutual expansion.