[Cwgrad-announcements] vanessa hua's san francisco chronicle book review

[Ching-In Chen]

Congrats to Vanessa who just published a review of Ha Jin's new book, Writer
As Migrant, in the SF Chronicle!
Notes can be sent to vanessa.hua at gmail.com

Ching-In

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/07/RVM013NCAO.DTL&type=books

 'The Writer as Migrant,' by Ha Jin

Vanessa Hua

Sunday, November 9, 2008

In the preface to "Between Silences," his first book of poetry, published in
1990, Ha Jin proclaimed that he spoke for those who suffered and endured,
those fooled or ruined by history - a Chinese writer who wrote in English on
behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.

Nearly two decades later, Jin says that he has come to see the "silliness of
that ambition."

"[T]oo much sincerity is a dangerous thing. It can overheat one's brain," he
drolly notes in his compelling new collection of essays, "The Writer as
Migrant."

Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting," examines how
writers who leave their homelands grapple with issues of identity and
tradition. To whom they write, as whom, and in whose interest shapes their
artistic vision.

In this slender book, Jin does not share much of his early life, already
well chronicled in interviews and articles. As a teenager, he served as a
soldier during the Cultural Revolution and went on to study English
literature in college. While working on his dissertation at Brandeis
University, he saw televised coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,
an event that helped him decide to stay in the United States.

Rather, Jin draws upon the works and lives of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin
Yutang, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera, among
others - a brotherhood of writers, of exiles, who have nourished Jin. He
writes: "[T]he usefulness and beauty of literature lies in its capacity to
illuminate life."

Though the issues are weighty, Jin's prose is straightforward and welcoming.
He employs the "we" - as in we, the reader, we, the writer.

The first of Jin's three essays, "The Spokesman and the Tribe," is the most
personal, charting his early struggles as a writer, woven in with examples
from other migrant authors. Such writers may regard themselves as
spokespeople of their native countries, bearing witness and preserving
memories. Their critics say that these writers appropriate homeland miseries
for personal gain - or worse, are out of touch with the reality of the
countries they left.

Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" - a book that changed Jin's life, he says -
sustained him when he searched for a job for two years. As he walked to yet
another interview, Jin began to doubt his role as spokesman and came to
realize that he had to learn to stand alone as a writer.

"Just as a creative writer should aspire to be not a broker but a creator of
culture, a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes
culture; such a work does not only bring news of the world but also evokes
the reader's empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition."

In "The Language of Betrayal," Jin examines the ultimate betrayal by the
migrant writer: the choice to write in another language, alienating him from
his mother tongue and directing his creativity to another language. He
considers how Conrad and Nabokov each dealt with this struggle - Nabokov
playful and wisecracking, Conrad developing an elaborate syntax. Jin
concludes that migrant writers must imagine ways for their art to transcend
any language.

In "An Individual's Homeland," Jin unpacks the notion of return, tracing the
journey of Odysseus and how his story was told in poetry and novels. Even
with the advent of airplanes and the Internet, which make physical return
possible, the struggle remains in how migrant writers view their past and
accept it, Jin argues:

"[N]o matter where we go, we cannot shed our past completely - so we must
strive to use parts of our past to facilitate our journeys. As we travel
along, we should also imagine how to rearrange the landscapes of our
envisioned homelands."

In this poignant and provocative book, Jin takes us on this journey,
revealing the paths laid by migrant writers before him and perhaps by those
who will follow.

Vanessa Hua is a writer in Southern California. E-mail her at books at sf
chronicle.com



-- 
~~~~~
Ching-In Chen
THE HEART'S TRAFFIC (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press forthcoming 2009)
www.redhen.org/arktoi.asp
www.chinginchen.com
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