In recent years, Ha Jin, whose real name is Xuefei Jin, has emerged as a major Chinese-American fiction writer writing in English. While he has won sev eral major awards for his works,1 curiously he has not received due attention from literary critics. With perhaps the exception of his novel Waiting (1999), most of his works, especially his short stories, remain largely neglected. Ha Jin's fiction depicts the experience of ordinary people in modern China and examines both their material and moral lives against the background of the country's hoary cultural tradition as well as the social upheavals in its more recent history. "His characters," as Robert D. Sturr observes, "struggle to know how to behave and even how to think in order to meet the constantly changing demands of communist orthodoxy."2 The theme in many of Ha Jin s fictional works, as Wenxin Li points out, is "the strenuous struggle of a people yet unable to free themselves from the haunting past."3 Most often, that "past" refers to the years of the Cultural Revolution, but it can also point to the more remote bygone times of traditional China. By situating itself on the interface between the past and the present, therefore, Ha Jin's fiction assumes a significant historical dimension. His ambition as a fiction writer is, as he proclaims in an interview, "to translate history into literature."4 If that is true, one of the best of such "translations" is to be seen in his story, "A Tiger-Fighter Is Hard to Find," collected in his anthology of short stories, The Bridegroom (New York: Pantheon, 2000). Set in Muji, a small city in northeast China during the years following the Cultural Revolution, "The Tiger-Fighter Is Hard to Find" tells about the shooting of a television scene based on the celebrated episode of Wu Song's killing of a tiger from the sixteenth-century Chinese novel, Shuihu zhuan. The novel, variously rendered in English as Water Margin, Outlaws of