Bich Minh Nguyen | Cheeni Rao | Ha Jin | Local Lit
Stranger in a Strange LanguageHa Jin on what it means for an immigrant to write in the tongue of his adopted country.
By Julia Thiel April 30, 2009
“The ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language,” declares Ha Jin, a Chinese expat, in his latest book, The Writer as Migrant—which he wrote in English.
A 53-year-old professor at Boston University, Jin’s also written five novels, three books of poetry, and three collections of short stories, all in English. He’s won two PEN/Faulkner awards and a National Book Award and in 2004 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
But as Jin sees it, he never chose to write in English. He’s a victim of history.
Jin was ten when China’s Cultural Revolution began, in 1966. Schools were closed, and at age 14 he entered the People’s Liberation Army, where he served for five years. He worked a two-year stint as a telegrapher for a railroad company, and then in 1977, when the schools reopened, enrolled at Heilongjiang University in Harbin. There he was assigned to study English—his last choice for a major.
Jin went on to earn a master’s in American literature from Shandong University in 1984, then came to the U.S. for a PhD, conferred by Brandeis in 1993. By then he’d decided to settle in the States—a resolution made after watching the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on television. He looked for work teaching Chinese or doing translations, only to find that he couldn’t compete against the applicants with degrees in Chinese. Instead, he was hired to teach English and creative writing at Emory.
The essays in The Writer as Migrant—Jin’s first nonfiction book, published in November by the University of Chicago Press—were initially written for a literary-studies lecture series at Rice University. The opening piece, “The Spokesman and the Tribe,” explores the idea of the migrant writer as a representative of his country. When he started writing, Jin says, “I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.” But how could he write on behalf of a people if he couldn’t also address them? Since his books often deal with the politics of modern China—his first volume of poems, Between Silences: A Voice From China, is based on his experiences in the Chinese army—most of them haven’t been published there. One exception is Waiting, his best-known and least political novel—and even that’s been condemned by some as anti-China.
Of course, had he returned to China he could have written in Chinese. Then again, he might not be writing at all. Jin thinks he’d have become a translator or critic or maybe a professor, but wouldn’t have written much. When he was starting out in the U.S., he says, writing was a matter of survival: he was on the tenure track at Emory and had to publish to keep his job. But writing in English offers another sort of survival as well. It’s “a way for me to do meaningful work in a language that’s not controlled by authorities. In that way it’s a matter of artistic survival.”
So he writes in English, even though he argues in the book’s second essay, “The Language of Betrayal,” that “no matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative energy to another language.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Jin points out, viewed writing in English as a “private tragedy,” although he did it voluntarily even before he left Russia. “The tragedy is not that he might have written better in his mother tongue,” writes Jin, “but that he had to give the prime years of his creative life to English, a language in which he never felt at home.” Jin says he doesn’t feel at home writing in English either, even after two decades. And yet he sees English as his “first language,” defined as “the language you rely on, that’s most expressive, most vital for you. You feel that your existence as a writer is in that language. You want to give all your energy to that language.”
In the essay that closes the book, “An Individual’s Homeland,” Jin discusses two characters in Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance, expats who discover the power of their mother tongue to arouse strong emotions when they speak it together. “They find that their real homeland actually exists within their own beings,” Jin writes. But without regular use a language is lost, and the connection to home weakens as the mother tongue fades. If he wanted to write in Chinese now, Jin says, he’d have to immerse himself in the language for a while. “And then what if I want to write my next book in English? Life is too short.”
Jin’s first books are set in contemporary China, but even that couldn’t last. His 2007 novel, A Free Life, is the story of a Chinese immigrant who comes to the U.S. to study and stays. His next book, to be published in November, is a series of short stories about Chinese and Korean immigrants in Queens. He could go back to writing about China if he wanted to, he says, “but I’m not interested in that anymore because my heart is here in many ways.” Betrayal is unavoidable; might as well get on with it. Not writing about China, he says, is “a way to negate the role of the spokesmanship I used to envision for myself. I must learn to stand alone, as a writer.” Send a letter to the editor.
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