The Writer as Migrant

As a teenager during China's Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting", completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature.Ha Jin's journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world - questions that take center stage in "The Writer as Migrant", his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov - who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing