Ha Jin: The Writer as Migrant

September 11, 2018April 1, 2011 By King-Kok Cheung

Ha Jin has published over ten books of poetry and fiction and won numerous rewards including PEN/Hemingway Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Flannery O’Conner Award, and the American Book Award. The Writer as Migrant is his first work of nonfiction. In this collection of essays he reflects on the handicaps and advantages of a migrant writer, the difficult choice of writing in an adopted language, the elusive concept of homeland, and the responsibility of a writer in today’s globalizing world.

In my lecture I will analyze the book both as a literary critique of writers (e.g. Joseph Conrad, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul) who write in a language that is not their native tongues and as an autobiographical exploration of the author, who traces his own evolution and articulates his own aspirations as a displaced writer.

Author Bio

King-Kok Cheung

King-Kok Cheung is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Cornell,1993); editor of Words Matter (U of Hawaii Press, 2000), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American literature (Cambridge, 1996), "Seventeen Syllables" (Rutgers, 1994), Asian American literature: An Annotated Bibliography (MLA, 1988) and a co-editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, Biography, Bucknell Review, MELUS, Milton Studies, PMLA, Positions and Shakespeare Quarterly. She has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship, a Mellon fellowship, a Fulbright award, and a resident fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. She was Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Beijing from 2007 to 2010.