Ha Jin’s The Writer as Migrant was not at all what I expected. I sought this book out after attending a recent lecture given by Ha Jin at Skidmore College. Himself a “migrant” writer, Ha Jin grew up in China during the time of the Cultural Revolution and as a teenager served in the People’s Liberation Army. While attending college on scholarship in the United States, he made the decision not to return to China following the Tiananmen Square incident. Originally a poet, his career as a novelist has flourished in the United States, where he has chosen to write in his non-native language of English.

The Writer as Migrant is a short volume, consisting of three Rice University 2006 Campbell Lectures that present various perspectives on the migrant writer’s identity, audience, choice of language and relationship to country of origin: “The Spokesman and the Tribe”, The Language of Betrayal” and “An Individual’s Homeland”. Despite his first-hand experience as an immigrant and exile, Ha Jin illustrates his viewpoints primarily by referencing the lives and works of other authors who left their native lands, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, V.S. Naipaul, Vladimir Nabakov and Joseph Conrad.

Although Ha Jin does not directly address his own experiences, it is relatively easy to discern his views. As an author who did not return to his country of origin, Ha Jin argues that the writer’s physical return is not necessary in order to gain acceptance of his work, as “Only through literature is a genuine return possible for the exiled writer.” His discussion of choice of language feels very personal. He describes an author’s decision to write in a non-native language as often being seen as the ultimate betrayal of his native country. However, he presents convincing grounds for such a decision, concluding that great literature is universal.

“For the creation of literature, a language of synthesis is necessary to make sure that one’s work is more meaningful and more authentic. One principle of this language is translatability. In other words, if rendered into different languages, especially into the language spoken by the people the author writes about, the work still remains meaningful.”

Ha Jin’s principal theme is that in making crucial decisions, the migrant writer must resist various pressures and be guided only by the goal of staying true to his art.

“The writer should enter history mainly through the avenue of his art…Whatever role he plays, he must keep in mind that his success or failure as a writer will be determined only on the page. That is the space where he should strive to exist.”

This collection of lectures reads like the academic essays that they are and will likely appeal only to a limited audience. I found them interesting mostly for the way in which Ha Jin weaves the lives and works of various authors into his themes, choosing anecdotes that reveal something of their personalities. Although I was highly disappointed that he chose not to include examples from his own experiences and writing, I will bring to his books and those of the authors he discusses, a deeper appreciation of the challenges encountered by the non-native writer. ( )

These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul.

In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can 'speak for' his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new country. I was interested in his initial desire as a young writer to write "on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese". He makes it clear that he later abandoned this position, but I would have liked to know more about how and why.

In fact, throughout the whole book I would have liked to know more about Ha Jin's thoughts on migration. His journey, after all, was an interesting one - from an uneducated teenage soldier in the Chinese army during the Cultural Revolution to a professor at Boston University and author of five novels, a couple of which I've read and greatly enjoyed. I would have liked him to draw on his own experience of migration, but he does so only rarely, in small glimpses like the one mentioned above. Mostly what we have is a survey of other writers and their thoughts on migration - quite interesting, but for me ultimately unsatisfying because there was no clear overall argument or point of view to draw the whole thing together.

In any case, it was interesting to learn about Solzhenitsyn's life in America, how he lived in rural Vermont but never really settled, never took citizenship, was always waiting to go back to Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union he got his chance, but the interesting thing was that after moving back home, he struggled to speak effectively on behalf of the new Russia, as he had spoken on behalf of the old while in exile. His later books Russia in Collapse (1998) and Two Hundred Years Together (2001) were coldly received, and he was seen as out of touch. Even his radio show was cancelled due to low ratings. Ha Jin's point is that he was loved for his earlier masterpieces, but even that did not give him the right to speak on behalf of the people - when his views no longer matched theirs, they rejected him.

The second essay, The Language of Betrayal, deals with the decision to write in another language. Again, Jin does not speak of his own decision to write in English and whether he feels this is a betrayal -- instead we hear about Joseph Conrad being criticised for abandoning the Polish language, and Nabokov's difficulty writing poetry in English even though he was a master of prose.

An Individual's Homeland explores the difficulty of returning home -- the way that Odysseus initially didn't recognise Ithaka when he returned after his twenty years of exile, because both he and the land itself had changed. As Jin says, "One cannot return to the same land as the same person." He talks of using art to survive, as the character Max Ferber does in W.G. Sebald's book The Emigrants. He ends by referring to the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who positions 'Ithaka' as a destination for life's journey, but not necessarily a return to the homeland. The homeland becomes a part of the past that can be used "to facilitate our journeys".

As you'd expect from an English professor, the analysis of writers and books here is astute and interesting. I just got the feeling sometimes that he was talking about other writers to avoid talking about himself. Using literary examples is a good idea, but I'd have preferred them to be used to support a clearer argument from Ha Jin himself, drawing on his own experiences to give us his unique, original perspective instead of a summary of other people's. ( )

In this lecture-turned-essay, Jin speaks to the issues surrounding immigrant/emigre writers. Sections are: the spokesman and his tribe, the language of betrayal, and an individual and his homeland. His numerous examples include Conrad, Nabakov, Solzenitzen, Naipaul, Homer and Cavafy, showing a breadth of global voices and sophisticated literature. The first two sections were the most compelling, dealing with one's relationship with one's country and writing in English. The third section began growing weighty with intellectualism and academic study, especially when the final point made was essentially that home is where the hearth is. Still, the research and Jin's easy, articulate prose made this slim volume interesting. ( )