A Literary Departure
A Journey to Freedom: Ha Jin Discusses His Latest Novel
Click here to watch a video of Ha Jin on BUniverse.
After winning his second PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005, for War Trash, Xuefei Jin said that the book represented a literary departure from China, his homeland. “This book is a transition,” the College of Arts and Sciences professor of creative writing said of his third novel. “A step towards the United States.”
Two years later, Jin (GRS’94) completed the transition with the publication of A Free Life,a novel that chronicles a family’s migration to America after the 1989Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The novel is the first setentirely in the author’s adopted country. Jin, who uses the pen name HaJin, discusses writing A Free Life at Barnes and Noble at Boston University.
Thenovel’s main character, Nan Wu, is an exiled poet who settles in theUnited States with his wife and young son in 1989 after troops andtanks broke up protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds ofpeople. The family lives at first in the Boston area, then in theAtlanta suburbs, where Nan manages a Chinese restaurant. Nan worriesabout how to make money, whether hardship helps or hurts his writing,and if it’s better to write in English.
Jin first came up withthe idea for the book in the early 1990s, when a friend showed him somepoems written in Chinese that were given to her by a Hong Kong nativewho ran a Boston-area restaurant. Jin says he was very moved by thework and knew that he wanted to use the man’s story as a starting pointfor a novel.
October 30, 2007, 7 p.m.
Barnes and Noble at Boston University
About the speaker:
Born in China in 1956, Ha Jin was a teenager when the country entered the Cultural Revolution. His novel Waiting, which won a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award,was based on his experiences during five years in the Red Army,beginning at age 14. He earned a master’s degree at China’s ShandongUniversity, and in 1986 he came to the United States to begin doctoralwork at Brandeis. He enrolled in BU’s Creative Writing Programafter earning a doctorate there and is currently a professor ofcreative writing at the College of Arts and Sciences. He received a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for his second, Under the Red Flag. When War Trashwon the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005, Jin joined only two othernovelists, Philip Roth and John Edgar Wideman, to have been given thePEN/Faulkner twice in its 25-year history. He was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
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