The Americanization of Ha Jin

Ha Jin's preoccupation with what it means to feel "at home" stretches back to his childhood. His father was an Red Army officer, and the family never settled in one place for long. The eldest of five children, Jin Xuefei (he took the pen name Ha Jin later) was 10 when the Cultural Revolution started. His mother, a petty officer whose father owned a small parcel of land, was persecuted and "sent to pick apples intermittently for two or three years," says Ha Jin. With Ha Jin's father constantly on the road, an older cousin came to take care of them, and Ha Jin learned to cook at an early age. But he stresses that his family's hardship was hardly unique. "There were millions of Chinese in the same situation," he says.

At 14 he joined the army and served as an artilleryman along China's border with Russia and North Korea, then moved on to the more peaceful jobs of telegrapher and calligrapher. He remained in the army for five years before leaving to work for a railroad company. When he finally embarked on his education and traveled to America to earn his doctorate, he fully intended to return to China to teach. But then Chinese soldiers attacked and killed student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. "I was glued to the TV for three days," says Ha Jin. "I was in shock. I had served in the army to protect the people. Suddenly the whole thing was reversed. I just couldn't reconcile it."

He has not been back since. To extend his student visa after Tiananmen, he applied to Boston University's creative-writing program--even though he had already completed his Ph.D. Before he could finish the course, Emory University hired him to teach creative writing. Today Ha Jin teaches at Boston University and lives in the suburbs; he became a U.S. citizen in 1997. For his first seven or eight years in America, he says, he felt painfully alienated from his homeland. Now, although he'd like to visit, he's not sure he could live in China even if he was welcome. "I've changed," he says. "The social fabric is very different from America. To live in China is hard. You have to learn to lie and give bribes. It would be very hard for me to learn to do these things again."

Despite the critical acclaim he's won in his new home, Ha Jin's works cannot be read in China. "Waiting" was published briefly and then withdrawn, he says; his short-story collection "Under the Red Flag" was sent to the censorship committee a year ago and banned. Even if "A Free Life" is approved, he says, it may be difficult to translate into Chinese because so many of the references are distinctly American. For Ha Jin, being coerced to study English has clearly paid off. But Chinese authorities no doubt wish he'd studied library science.

© 2007