Ha Jin and the Migrant Experience
Poet and novelist Ha Jin is the author most recently of a book of short essays, The Writer as Migrant, focusing on authors who left their home countries and their native tongues, like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. Jin’s own journey would fit into the book, though he only briefly discusses it: the Chinese-born Jin served in the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, moved to the U.S. for graduate study in literature at Brandeis, and decided to stay in the country after watching the Tiananmen Square …
