Ha Jin – författare

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in his traditional home village lives the humble, loyal wife his family chose for him years ago. Every summer, he returns to ask her for a divorce and every summer his compliant wife agrees but then backs out. This time, after eighteen years' waiting, Lin promises it will be different.

"Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this book is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's Cathay. This is a profound book, an event."—Frank Bidart"In these poems Ha Jin gives voice to the millions whose lives were altered and whose tongues were silenced by the Cultural Revolution. . . .If Ha Jin speaks in tongues in these poems, we feel him behind those voices—the hidden director behind the scenes—never as a presence filled with stridency and self-congratulation; he brings a great empathy and compassion to his depiction of the fallible men and women whose acts and attitudes together make up history."—Roger Gilbert, Hungry Mind Review

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 - 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 a literature of migration.Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, "The Writer as Migrant" is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

National Book Award winner 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 a literature of migration.Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom inacclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different