One of Ba Jin's books, Ward Four: A Novel of Wartime China, translated in English by Haili Kong and Howard Goldblatt, was published in 1999 (San Francisco, Calif.: China Books and Periodicals). It was reviewed recently by Barbara Cobb in US-China Review (summer 2001). The book was written in a form of dairy of a patient in a hospital. The dairy details the hospital, the staff, the patients and the minutiae. It describes the cruelty of Ward Four, the inept administration, and the depersonalization of people. The book represents a change of Ba Jin's previous attitude and style. As Howard Boldblatt wrote, "Word Four is, like all of Ba Jin's late-war novels, extremely pessimistic. The fighters and revolutionaries we find in his early works have given way to helpless victims of an unjust society and those who obstruct a better future, the heartless bureaucrats, the war profiteers, people completed absorbed in their private interests."
Ba Jin, a literary giant, became a victim in almost every political movement. In the post-Mao era, he regain his passion and courage. He boldly proposed the creation of a virtual museum of the Cultural Revolution in order to let later generation remember the mankind's greatest disaster. Ba Jin's best known works include Jin (Family) published in 1933, Jiliu (Turbulent Stream) published in 1938, and Chun (Spring) published in 1940. Ba Jin received many honors and awards including those from Italy, France and the United States and an honorary doctoral degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
One of the translators, Haili Hong, is professor of comparative literature at Swarthmore College.