The Writer As Migrant Av Ha Jin

Novelist Ha Jin raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world. Consisting of three interconnected essays, The Writer as Migrant 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 Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of their birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov¿who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing¿are enlisted to explore a migrant author¿s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V.¿S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W.¿G. Sebald, C.¿P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie¿refracting and refining the very idea of