A Free Life

An Exchange

You have been misled by your folly,
determined to follow the footsteps of Conrad
and Nabokov. You have forgotten
they were white Europeans.
Remember your yellow face
and your puny talent-unlikely
to make you a late bloomer.
Why believe you can write verse in English,
whose music is not natural to you?

You have betrayed our people,
scribbling with the alphabet out of
contempt for our ancient words,
which stand like rocks in time's river,
against the tides of gibberish.
Carried away by hatred,
you have mistaken diversion for devotion.

Even if you're lucky and earn a seat someday
in the temple housing those high-nosed ghosts,
do you really think they will accept you
just on the merits of your poems?
Be warned-some of them, who were once SOBs,
will call you a clever Chinaman.

For God's sake, relax a little.
Stop raving about race and loyalty.
Loyalty is a two-way street.
Why not talk about how a nation betrays a person?
Why not condemn those who have hammered
our mother tongue into a chain
to bind all the different dialects
to the governing machine?
Our words, yes, once like a river,
have shrunk into a man-made pond
in which you are kept, half alive,
as a pet to obey and entertain.
So, I prefer to crawl around at my own pace
in the salt water of English.
As for the great ghosts in the temple,
why should I bother about their acceptance?
The light of dawn does not discriminate.
A tree, or butterfly, or stream
(unlike the dog corrupted by humans)
does not notice the color of your skin.

To write in this language is to be alone, to live on the margin where loneliness ripens into solitude.

Another Country

You must go to a country without borders,
where you can build your home
out of garlands of words,
where broad leaves shade familiar faces
that no longer change in wind and rain.
There's no morning or evening,
no cries of joy or pain;
every canyon is drenched in the light of serenity.

You must go there, quietly.
Leave behind what you still cherish.
Once you enter that domain,
a path of flowers will open before your feet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a generous fellowship that enabled me to complete the first draft of this novel in 2000, and to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a residency during which I worked on "Poems by Nan Wu."

I am grateful to LuAnn Walther for her comments and suggestions; to Lane Zachary for her critique; to Wilborn Hampton for reading the beginning pages of this novel; and to Dick Lourie and Donna Brook for their comments on the appended poems.

Ha Jin

Born in mainland China, Ha Jin grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning Province. From the age of fourteen to nineteen he volunteered to serve in the People's Liberation Army, staying at the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union. He began teaching himself the middle-and high-school courses since his third year in the army, which he left in the sixth year because he wanted to go to college. But colleges remained closed during the Cultural Revolution, which continued when he was demobilized, so he worked as a telegrapher at a railroad company for three years in Jiamusi, a remote frontier city in the Northeast. During this time, he began to follow the English learner's program, hoping that someday he could read Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 in the English original.

In 1977 colleges reopened, and he passed the entrance exams and went to Heilongjiang University in Harbin where he was assigned to study English, even though this was his last choice for a major! He received a B.A. in English in 1981. He then studied American literature at Shandong University, where he received an M.A. in 1984. The following year he came to the United States to do graduate work at Brandeis University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English in 1993. In the meantime, he studied fiction writing at Boston University with the novelists Leslie Epstein and Aharon Appelfeld.

After the Tianeman massacre, he realized it would be impossible to write honestly in China, so he decided to emigrate. Unlike most exiled writers already established in their native language, Ha Jin had no audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English. To him, this meant much labor, some despair, and also, freedom.

Currently he is an associate professor in English at Emory University. He has published two volumes of poetry, BETWEEN SILENCES (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and FACING SHADOWS (Hanging Loose Press, 1996), and two books of short fiction, OCEAN OF WORDS (Zoland Books, 1996) which received the PEN Hemingway Award, and UNDER THE RED FLAG (University of Georgia Press, 1997), which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Award. He also published a novella, IN THE POND (Zoland Books, 1998), which was selected as a best fiction book of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune. His short stores have been included in The Best American Short Stories (1997 and 1999), three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and Norton Introduction to Fiction and Norton Introduction to Literature, among other anthologies. WAITING Ha Jin's first full-length novel, is the winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction. He has also written a collection of stories called, THE BRIDEGROOM, published by Pantheon Books.

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