NOVEMBER 29, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 21

Milestones
By HANNAH BEECH

AWARDED. To HA JIN, 43, self-exiled Chinese-born novelist, the U.S. National Book Award; in New York City. A former soldier in the People's Liberation Army who only began writing in English 11 years ago, he captured the prize for his plaintive novel Waiting, an account of an army doctor caught between a traditional arranged marriage and an unattainable modern love affair.

RE-ELECTED. LEONID KUCHMA, 61, free-market-touting President of Ukraine who tamed the nation's inflation rate from 10,000% in 1994 to 20% this year, to a second five-year term. Kuchma's victory was generally viewed more as a resounding rejection of the country's regressive communists than a wholehearted endorsement of the incumbent. Nor does the vote signal the nation's economic resurgence. Privatization measures have stalled, unemployment is rampant and charges of corruption have tainted many members of the government.

DIED. PAUL BOWLES, 88, iconoclastic American expatriate novelist whose searing, nihilistic musings explored the intersection of alienated man with an even bleaker landscape; in his longtime home of Tangier, Morocco. Although the peripatetic Bowles dabbled in orchestral music, operas, poetry and short-stories, he was best known for his revelatory 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, a chronicle of disaffected Americans wandering through, in Bowles' words, "the actual desert and the inner desert of the spirit."

DIED. HORST P. HORST, 93, masterful American photographer whose light-and-shadow images heightened the glamour appeal of celebrities ranging from Coco Chanel and Maria Callas to Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein; in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Horst's dramatic, stylized portraits played on his subjects' unattainable allure, but he also leavened the photos with quirky details, like the Duke of Windsor's leather box marked "the King" or a dirty ashtray in an opulent living room.

EXPELLED. JAMES SOONG, 57, Taiwan's leading presidential candidate, from the ruling Kuomintang party; in Taipei. The KMT had repeatedly called for the island's populist former provincial governor to drop out of the race and support the party's official candidate, Vice President Lien Chan. Despite his expulsion, Soong maintains that he is a proud KMT supporter, even though he will run as an independent candidate in next March's polls.