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The Writer as Migrant
Novelist 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.
112 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2008
24 people are currently reading
359 people want to read
About the author
Ha Jin
61 books847 followersHa Jin is the pen name of Jin Xuefei, a novelist, poet, short story writer, and Professor of English at Boston University.Ha Jin writes in English about China, a political decision post-Tiananmen Square.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
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February 21, 2018
A slim book in which Ha Jin contemplates on the writer being an immigrant. The book explores what does leaving home do to writer's art, his ideas of home and his being in the world. The book contains three essays, 'The Spokesman and The Tribe', 'The Language of Betrayal' and 'An Individual's Homeland'. In these three essays, the author dwells on varied tropes of writer's life as a migrant.
Almost all the writers, books that are discussed somehow defend, justify the role of a writer as an migrant; its importance, what this can do and what are the challenges involved in such a position; both personal as well as professional– especially in relation to writer's art. Though the book is concise, it does touch upon these key issues and discusses authors such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Nabokov, Conrad, Solzhenitsyn and so forth.
The writer in unfamiliar lands often struggles with language and content– in which language to write and what should be the material. The writer is expected to follow some established patterns– but it is difficult for the migrant writer to do so. It is his very situation that makes his struggle with writing unique. Oftentimes, he has to face some real and imagined accusations on his art.
For example, Conrad is cited as an ideal example. There was no writer before Conrad who was like Conrad, who destroyed the myth that one could not 'really' 'write in a language that one did not grow up in. So Conrad's example is great as it is empowering and non -essentialist. Another important stereotype about immigrant writers is that they cannot be really playful in their adopted language. While this might be true but there are many shiny examples that indicate the opposite. Nabokov has so successfully demonstrated what a serious writer can do. He not only did it but he set an impossible benchmark even for the native writers to reach.
Of course, language does pose a great many challenges for writers writing in other languages. However, writing itself does not become easier when done in one's native language. It still requires discipline and immense struggle; this aspect definitely makes the struggle for immigrant writers even more arduous.
Clearly, such a position of the writer being in exile comes with its very specific challenges but it could also open other doors, other ways of looking at language, home and the self. Something vital gets lost and but something precious can also be gained. The book in some ways celebrates the act that there is a whole tradition of migrant writers at least in Anglophone literature; there is no need for writers who find themselves in such spaces to despair.
Almost all the writers, books that are discussed somehow defend, justify the role of a writer as an migrant; its importance, what this can do and what are the challenges involved in such a position; both personal as well as professional– especially in relation to writer's art. Though the book is concise, it does touch upon these key issues and discusses authors such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Nabokov, Conrad, Solzhenitsyn and so forth.
The writer in unfamiliar lands often struggles with language and content– in which language to write and what should be the material. The writer is expected to follow some established patterns– but it is difficult for the migrant writer to do so. It is his very situation that makes his struggle with writing unique. Oftentimes, he has to face some real and imagined accusations on his art.
For example, Conrad is cited as an ideal example. There was no writer before Conrad who was like Conrad, who destroyed the myth that one could not 'really' 'write in a language that one did not grow up in. So Conrad's example is great as it is empowering and non -essentialist. Another important stereotype about immigrant writers is that they cannot be really playful in their adopted language. While this might be true but there are many shiny examples that indicate the opposite. Nabokov has so successfully demonstrated what a serious writer can do. He not only did it but he set an impossible benchmark even for the native writers to reach.
Of course, language does pose a great many challenges for writers writing in other languages. However, writing itself does not become easier when done in one's native language. It still requires discipline and immense struggle; this aspect definitely makes the struggle for immigrant writers even more arduous.
Clearly, such a position of the writer being in exile comes with its very specific challenges but it could also open other doors, other ways of looking at language, home and the self. Something vital gets lost and but something precious can also be gained. The book in some ways celebrates the act that there is a whole tradition of migrant writers at least in Anglophone literature; there is no need for writers who find themselves in such spaces to despair.
October 25, 2009
These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul.
In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can 'speak for' his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new country. I was interested in his initial desire as a young writer to write "on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese". He makes it clear that he later abandoned this position, but I would have liked to know more about how and why.
In fact, throughout the whole book I would have liked to know more about Ha Jin's thoughts on migration. His journey, after all, was an interesting one - from an uneducated teenage soldier in the Chinese army during the Cultural Revolution to a professor at Boston University and author of five novels, a couple of which I've read and greatly enjoyed. I would have liked him to draw on his own experience of migration, but he does so only rarely, in small glimpses like the one mentioned above. Mostly what we have is a survey of other writers and their thoughts on migration - quite interesting, but for me ultimately unsatisfying because there was no clear overall argument or point of view to draw the whole thing together.
In any case, it was interesting to learn about Solzhenitsyn's life in America, how he lived in rural Vermont but never really settled, never took citizenship, was always waiting to go back to Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union he got his chance, but the interesting thing was that after moving back home, he struggled to speak effectively on behalf of the new Russia, as he had spoken on behalf of the old while in exile. His later books Russia in Collapse (1998) and Two Hundred Years Together (2001) were coldly received, and he was seen as out of touch. Even his radio show was cancelled due to low ratings. Ha Jin's point is that he was loved for his earlier masterpieces, but even that did not give him the right to speak on behalf of the people - when his views no longer matched theirs, they rejected him.
The second essay, The Language of Betrayal, deals with the decision to write in another language. Again, Jin does not speak of his own decision to write in English and whether he feels this is a betrayal -- instead we hear about Joseph Conrad being criticised for abandoning the Polish language, and Nabokov's difficulty writing poetry in English even though he was a master of prose.
An Individual's Homeland explores the difficulty of returning home -- the way that Odysseus initially didn't recognise Ithaka when he returned after his twenty years of exile, because both he and the land itself had changed. As Jin says, "One cannot return to the same land as the same person." He talks of using art to survive, as the character Max Ferber does in W.G. Sebald's book The Emigrants. He ends by referring to the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who positions 'Ithaka' as a destination for life's journey, but not necessarily a return to the homeland. The homeland becomes a part of the past that can be used "to facilitate our journeys".
As you'd expect from an English professor, the analysis of writers and books here is astute and interesting. I just got the feeling sometimes that he was talking about other writers to avoid talking about himself. Using literary examples is a good idea, but I'd have preferred them to be used to support a clearer argument from Ha Jin himself, drawing on his own experiences to give us his unique, original perspective instead of a summary of other people's.
In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can 'speak for' his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new country. I was interested in his initial desire as a young writer to write "on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese". He makes it clear that he later abandoned this position, but I would have liked to know more about how and why.
In fact, throughout the whole book I would have liked to know more about Ha Jin's thoughts on migration. His journey, after all, was an interesting one - from an uneducated teenage soldier in the Chinese army during the Cultural Revolution to a professor at Boston University and author of five novels, a couple of which I've read and greatly enjoyed. I would have liked him to draw on his own experience of migration, but he does so only rarely, in small glimpses like the one mentioned above. Mostly what we have is a survey of other writers and their thoughts on migration - quite interesting, but for me ultimately unsatisfying because there was no clear overall argument or point of view to draw the whole thing together.
In any case, it was interesting to learn about Solzhenitsyn's life in America, how he lived in rural Vermont but never really settled, never took citizenship, was always waiting to go back to Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union he got his chance, but the interesting thing was that after moving back home, he struggled to speak effectively on behalf of the new Russia, as he had spoken on behalf of the old while in exile. His later books Russia in Collapse (1998) and Two Hundred Years Together (2001) were coldly received, and he was seen as out of touch. Even his radio show was cancelled due to low ratings. Ha Jin's point is that he was loved for his earlier masterpieces, but even that did not give him the right to speak on behalf of the people - when his views no longer matched theirs, they rejected him.
The second essay, The Language of Betrayal, deals with the decision to write in another language. Again, Jin does not speak of his own decision to write in English and whether he feels this is a betrayal -- instead we hear about Joseph Conrad being criticised for abandoning the Polish language, and Nabokov's difficulty writing poetry in English even though he was a master of prose.
An Individual's Homeland explores the difficulty of returning home -- the way that Odysseus initially didn't recognise Ithaka when he returned after his twenty years of exile, because both he and the land itself had changed. As Jin says, "One cannot return to the same land as the same person." He talks of using art to survive, as the character Max Ferber does in W.G. Sebald's book The Emigrants. He ends by referring to the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who positions 'Ithaka' as a destination for life's journey, but not necessarily a return to the homeland. The homeland becomes a part of the past that can be used "to facilitate our journeys".
As you'd expect from an English professor, the analysis of writers and books here is astute and interesting. I just got the feeling sometimes that he was talking about other writers to avoid talking about himself. Using literary examples is a good idea, but I'd have preferred them to be used to support a clearer argument from Ha Jin himself, drawing on his own experiences to give us his unique, original perspective instead of a summary of other people's.
October 19, 2017
I must admit that reading this book gave me a somewhat melancholy feeling as someone who has long written and lived with a certain sense of estrangement from my roots [1]. This experience is surely not unique, as the author manages to discuss a great many people who managed to write and write very well despite being cut off from their native roots, from Dante to Nabokov, and from Joseph Conrad to V.S. Naipal, all of which are writers I am familiar with and generally fond of. The experience of being an exile carries with it a certain tension about where we belong and who our audience is, and whether it is best to write in our native language or to accommodate ourselves to the language of where we happen to be. In my own experience, as a native speaker and writer of English and as someone who started learning Spanish very young as well, I am perfectly content to write in both languages, although I greatly prefer to write in English. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have as their native languages major languages, though, and face a deeper problem as they seek to live as writers in the midst of the problems of being cut off from one's homeland.
This short book of less than 100 pages is made up of three essays from the author on the problem of the writer as an exile. After a short preface the author begins his discussion with a thoughtful examination of the spokesman and the tribe, pointing out that the writer as an exile faces a difficult problem in seeking to speak for a people he no longer lives around, for to abandon one's citizenship or one's native language makes it very difficult to maintain credibility as a spokesmen for one's native people, a problem that Joseph Conrad faced being a writer in English despite being a native Pole, but one that was better navigated, for example, by Solzhenitsyn, who despite his mistreatment ended up maintaining his credibility with the Russian people as a spokesman. The second essay takes up the theme of the language of betrayal, again focusing on Joseph Conrad and writers who sought (not entirely successfully) to distinguish themselves from him as people who wrote literature in English as a second language. The third and final essay looks at the nature of an individuals homeland through a discussion of Odysseus' Ithaca and its various meanings and implications in contemporary poetry and literature. Throughout the author manages to strike a delicate balance between the individual and the collective while pointing out that while a writer cannot help but be moral, there are strong limitations as to the sort of moral change that writers can promote through their writings.
What is it that made me sad to read these essays? For one, the author himself is an exile, a native Chinese writer who had been a part of the PLA but who managed to become a professor at Boston University as well as a successful writer of Chinese literature, by no means a popular genre of literature in the mainstream American market. The author's own personal experiences, and my own experiences as an exile, give this book a poignancy that shows the sense of loss that results from having to make one's way among strangers who do not understand us. The author's discussion, for example, of the tragic eponymous hero of Nabokov's Pnin, and the way that he is continually misunderstood by others, is something that strikes a deep chord with me personally. I found myself in reading these essays a sense of kinship with those who wrote of the desire to find home and the tension between doing what is best for oneself and also seeking the support and encouragement of others without which writing is not of any profit and of precious little enjoyment. Perhaps we may not be alone in being alone, though, and if we are far from home and caught between hopes for the future and looking back to the past, certainly there are others we can relate to, and that makes the journey a less lonely one.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...
This short book of less than 100 pages is made up of three essays from the author on the problem of the writer as an exile. After a short preface the author begins his discussion with a thoughtful examination of the spokesman and the tribe, pointing out that the writer as an exile faces a difficult problem in seeking to speak for a people he no longer lives around, for to abandon one's citizenship or one's native language makes it very difficult to maintain credibility as a spokesmen for one's native people, a problem that Joseph Conrad faced being a writer in English despite being a native Pole, but one that was better navigated, for example, by Solzhenitsyn, who despite his mistreatment ended up maintaining his credibility with the Russian people as a spokesman. The second essay takes up the theme of the language of betrayal, again focusing on Joseph Conrad and writers who sought (not entirely successfully) to distinguish themselves from him as people who wrote literature in English as a second language. The third and final essay looks at the nature of an individuals homeland through a discussion of Odysseus' Ithaca and its various meanings and implications in contemporary poetry and literature. Throughout the author manages to strike a delicate balance between the individual and the collective while pointing out that while a writer cannot help but be moral, there are strong limitations as to the sort of moral change that writers can promote through their writings.
What is it that made me sad to read these essays? For one, the author himself is an exile, a native Chinese writer who had been a part of the PLA but who managed to become a professor at Boston University as well as a successful writer of Chinese literature, by no means a popular genre of literature in the mainstream American market. The author's own personal experiences, and my own experiences as an exile, give this book a poignancy that shows the sense of loss that results from having to make one's way among strangers who do not understand us. The author's discussion, for example, of the tragic eponymous hero of Nabokov's Pnin, and the way that he is continually misunderstood by others, is something that strikes a deep chord with me personally. I found myself in reading these essays a sense of kinship with those who wrote of the desire to find home and the tension between doing what is best for oneself and also seeking the support and encouragement of others without which writing is not of any profit and of precious little enjoyment. Perhaps we may not be alone in being alone, though, and if we are far from home and caught between hopes for the future and looking back to the past, certainly there are others we can relate to, and that makes the journey a less lonely one.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...
January 22, 2016
A very interesting book about the writing of writers who left their native countries and in different ways managed to exist in their adopted ones. How much do they want to come back to their home countries? (And what is "home" by the way?) To what extent do they feel they belong to the countries where they were born and to what extent do they feel they belong to the countries where they live? How do they define themselves and their writing between their present and the past that never goes away? What language(s) do they employ for their writing, why, and how does it affect their writing? In less than 100 pages, Ha Jin, who is a "writer in exile" himself, gives his answers to these (and other) questions, unveiling some hidden layers of the lives and writing of some well-know authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Shiva Naipaul, and Milan Kundera. Beautiful and poetic analyses in story-telling style. He makes me want to try reading all of the writers he mentions in this book, and himself as well. An easy-to-read for every average reader without having to know anything about famous writers and the art of writing.
November 7, 2017
Some intriguing ideas. I find the second essay the most interesting and useful, while the first is for me annoyingly judgmental (too many generalized "should" and "must" formulations). The third convinced me to read _The Odyssey_ at long last.
Unfortunately, the book is filled with grammatical issues, infelicitous phrasings, punctuation errors, and other disturbing distractions. Shame on you for your carelessness here, U. of Chicago Press!
Unfortunately, the book is filled with grammatical issues, infelicitous phrasings, punctuation errors, and other disturbing distractions. Shame on you for your carelessness here, U. of Chicago Press!
September 17, 2023
Lo anecdótico está interesante, pero se le enredan las inducciones (de un solo ejemplo establece según él una generalidad) y la argumentación es floja. Errores de edición (p. 44, p. 88 y otros typos aquí y allá).
Y otra cosa es que en sus páginas palpita un anhelo de auto-justificación velada que, como no se hace explícita, se queda en mera sospecha.
Y otra cosa es que en sus páginas palpita un anhelo de auto-justificación velada que, como no se hace explícita, se queda en mera sospecha.
December 2, 2011
Ha Jin has become the Chinese writer Americans look to to Know Stuff About China -- supplanting Chinese American writers like, say, Amy Tan --but he speaks/writes rather convincingly against this notion in this book's first essay. Citing Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lin Yutang, he argues that actually attempts by writers to be socially engaged or to be a spokesman for their people are ultimately useless: "The writer should enter history mainly through the avenue of his art."
In the end, the book manages to be Ha Jin's explanation of his own work without ever claiming to be so. In explicating the authors who inspired him, he gets to the heart of why he does what he does, and what is gained and lost when a writer leaves his homeland and mother tongue. Worth reading even if you are not familiar with his work, though.
In the end, the book manages to be Ha Jin's explanation of his own work without ever claiming to be so. In explicating the authors who inspired him, he gets to the heart of why he does what he does, and what is gained and lost when a writer leaves his homeland and mother tongue. Worth reading even if you are not familiar with his work, though.
April 28, 2016
A bit heavy if you're not a big literature buff. Ha Jin draws on V.S. Naipaul, Nabokov, Joyce, and a number of other names to make observations about writing from abroad and writing in a language that is not your native tongue. My favorite passage has to be when he rebuts the idea that becoming a writer in another language limits you only to being a writer that can be understood, not playful, as he draws on examples that prove otherwise and demonstrate the unique position exile or expat writers hold in regard to language. Not a long , certainly thought provoking when it comes to language, identity, and movement though the title probably tells you that.
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April 10, 2014highly intelligent, nuanced, esp thoughts on humor in your second language.
September 8, 2018
Home is not where your heart is. It's where you is, bro.
May 28, 2024
Although this little volume of essays has its flaws, or rather lacks something—I can’t quite place what yet—it is a very important book for me, one that I have no doubt will be revisiting several times. As a writer writing in the English language but have no “roots” in any Anglo Saxon country, my father being French (his dad being half Vietnamese half French) and my mother being Filipino, who grew up between both countries but has had an English education, this has planted important seeds of thought and placed some important literary works to explore on my horizon. I’be been reading this coincidentally in parallel with “A Feather on the Breath of God” by Sigrid Nunez, which the author speaks of in the last essay, which has been an enriching and captivating addition to the reading experience. I had also coincidentally intended to read W.G Sebald’s The Emigrant soon after, which he also talks about at length in the last essay. Something tells me I’m on the right track… to somewhere, someplace, significant.
April 6, 2024
i added so many books to my TBR as i was reading this!!!
February 11, 2023
Remarkable literary criticism. I’d love to sit down with these essays/lectures again after I’ve (eventually) read more of the works discussed.
January 15, 2019
Why write in the second language and how well can one achieve by writing in the second language.
June 3, 2012
This slim volume is focused on the immigrant/migrant experience of writers. However, as so many in the United States leave their birthhome to make their home in other states, there are applications to writers who domestically relocate, never to return. At play are nostalgia, longing, representing a land, culture or people that the writer him/herself may no longer have firsthand knowledge of and the changes in identity that both the homeland and the writer experience.
July 1, 2013
Ha Jin had used many writers'examples in this book.He had collected a few private life stories of those writers, so as to find some proofs for his arguments. However, I felt this book is more like his own bibliography.
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December 12, 2015Un ensayo sobre uno de mis temas preferidos en la literatura: el exilio.
April 15, 2018
Interesting perspectives on the writer as a migrant. Good read for students of literature or people interested in literature.
January 4, 2025
In fact, Nabokov himself might have been aware of this defect. When asked by an interviewer, "Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?" Nabokov admitted: The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one — my native tongue- I can no longer use, and this is not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium had faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain Jeep.33 Despite his emphasis on his difference from Conrad, Nabokov here reveals a Conradian plight — that is, his departure from his mother tongue crippled him linguistically. In general, he would not voice this pain explicitly, yet here is a clear admission: "My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful-like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion."24 We can see that he suffered from the same affliction as Conrad. - pp. 50
The tragedy is not that he might have written better in his mother tongue but that he had to give the prime years of his creative life to English, a language in which he never felt at home.
Many exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands. The nostalgia often deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere. The present and the future have been impaired by their displacements, and their absence from their original countries gives them nothing but pain. - pp. 63
To live and work in one's mother tongue, the migrant writer must root his existence in the language. If he does not use it frequently, his mother tongue will shrink and gradually lose its freshness, suffering from a 'linguistic lag' from the current idioms spoken back in his native land. - pp. 78-79
For most migrants, especially migrant artists and writers, the issue of homeland involves arrival more than return. The dichotomy inherent in the word "homeland" is more significant now than it was in the past. Its meaning can no longer be separated from home, which is something the migrant should be able to build away from his native land. Therefore, it is logical to say that your homeland is where you build your home. - pp. 84
The tragedy is not that he might have written better in his mother tongue but that he had to give the prime years of his creative life to English, a language in which he never felt at home.
Many exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands. The nostalgia often deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere. The present and the future have been impaired by their displacements, and their absence from their original countries gives them nothing but pain. - pp. 63
To live and work in one's mother tongue, the migrant writer must root his existence in the language. If he does not use it frequently, his mother tongue will shrink and gradually lose its freshness, suffering from a 'linguistic lag' from the current idioms spoken back in his native land. - pp. 78-79
For most migrants, especially migrant artists and writers, the issue of homeland involves arrival more than return. The dichotomy inherent in the word "homeland" is more significant now than it was in the past. Its meaning can no longer be separated from home, which is something the migrant should be able to build away from his native land. Therefore, it is logical to say that your homeland is where you build your home. - pp. 84
June 14, 2025
A great short book about the struggle of the migrant when writing in a language that it is not his native tongue. About adaptation and immigration. Through the lense of various great writers that were migrants, some exiled and some expats. How there is a reason to pick up another language especially english when writing, as a universal language. As a language detached from identity, detached from feeling. It talks about how it is seen as the migrant always betrays it's country by leaving or by abandoning native tongue but never the country is told that they have failed the individual. If someone is migrating it means they are looking for something better because they have been failed or silenced.
I enjoyed the definition he gave of homeland. By definition is the land that someone calls home. It is not the land that saw us be born. It is the land where we found our home, where we erect our families and where we can find our peace. It gave me peace about the struggle of leaving and creating a new life away. It is the first depiction of immigration that does not romanticize coming back to the native land that I have read and it resonates with me. It talks about the nostalgia of going back to a country that no longer exists. The thought that it will be like it was when you left but it is only an illusion because just as we have changed time has moved and our former country has changed as well.
It is an interesting exploration on the importance of language and identity, and how language can be polarizing when we talk about the country that we are born in. For me, the book gives me the words to recognize feelings of alienation that I had not been able to name, and at the same time a new tongue to communicate ideas that were repressed in the land I was born in. Defining homeland as the land where I will create my family and plant my roots felt liberating from the constant internal struggle of being a migrant.
I enjoyed the definition he gave of homeland. By definition is the land that someone calls home. It is not the land that saw us be born. It is the land where we found our home, where we erect our families and where we can find our peace. It gave me peace about the struggle of leaving and creating a new life away. It is the first depiction of immigration that does not romanticize coming back to the native land that I have read and it resonates with me. It talks about the nostalgia of going back to a country that no longer exists. The thought that it will be like it was when you left but it is only an illusion because just as we have changed time has moved and our former country has changed as well.
It is an interesting exploration on the importance of language and identity, and how language can be polarizing when we talk about the country that we are born in. For me, the book gives me the words to recognize feelings of alienation that I had not been able to name, and at the same time a new tongue to communicate ideas that were repressed in the land I was born in. Defining homeland as the land where I will create my family and plant my roots felt liberating from the constant internal struggle of being a migrant.
May 15, 2022
Es un trabajo literario bastante amplio que aborda a los escritores migrantes, expone sus obras y saca conclusiones de sus sentimientos.
La verdad tiene de ejemplos expuestos bastantes interesante que me harán comprar muchos libros que mencionan.
Mi problema es que muchas veces quiere llegar al mismo resultado en cada ejemplo que aborda, haciendo un poco pesada la lectura .
La verdad tiene de ejemplos expuestos bastantes interesante que me harán comprar muchos libros que mencionan.
Mi problema es que muchas veces quiere llegar al mismo resultado en cada ejemplo que aborda, haciendo un poco pesada la lectura .
December 8, 2019
Essay collection.
June 18, 2021
Very well narrated, concise and clear. 除了对移民的讨论（身份、离散、错位等等），哈金散文的写法很值得借鉴。
Want to read
November 29, 2021@2020-02-24 18:35:15
July 10, 2023
I felt as though I was re-introduced to authors I already loved, but I still came out of it... Not really knowing Jin and his views as much
December 8, 2023
An interesting concept and some really lovely observations drawn from the writer-migrant hybrid. However, I often got lost in the done-to-death examples of canonical texts used to the point where I procrastinated reading on.
December 25, 2025
interesting book. Not at all what I thought it was when we got it but turned out to be horizon expanding for me.
January 8, 2026
Was hoping this book was more like murakami harukis writer as a vocation. But it’s more academic. It’s super short so there’s that.
Want to read
November 29, 2021@2020-02-24 18:35:01
July 12, 2023
arrival is a euro-centric idea
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews