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(Im)migrant Writing, Moving Homelands: Ha Jin 哈金

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Abstract

(IM)MIGRANT WRITING analyzes the double-voice in Ha Jin’s The Writer as Migrant (Migrant) and A Free Life (AFL), and uses the former to shed light on the latter. Migrant, a commentary on bilingual English writers, doubles as apologia; AFL, an immigrant tale, doubles as a linguistic voyage, wherein the author turns lexical displacement into creative possibility. Jin’s marshaling of Chinese and American tropes deliberately detaches the literary allusions from their national moorings, a figurative move in keeping with the idea of freedom in the novel, which is as much about transitioning to a second tongue as finding a new home. The themes explored in Migrant—the social role of a writer, writing in a second language, and the shifting contours of homeland—are fleshed out in AFL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    King-Kok Cheung

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Cheung, KK. (2016). (Im)migrant Writing, Moving Homelands: Ha Jin 哈金. In: Chinese American Literature without Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44177-5_8

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