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175 Ha Jin Ha Jin is the author of five novels, three collections of short fiction, and three collections of poetry. Born in Lianoning, China, he joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. In 1981 he graduated from Heilongjiang University with a BA in English studies , and three years later obtained his MA in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University. Ha Jin was on scholarship at Brandeis University during the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, which hastened his decision to emigrate. Ha Jin’s novel Waiting won the National Book Award. Other honors include the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fellowship. He teaches at Boston University. Ocean of Words, 1996 (stories); Under the Red Flag, 1997 (stories); In the Pond, 1998; Waiting, 1999; The Bridegroom, 2000 (stories); The Crazed, 2002; War Trash, 2004; A Free Life, 2007 When did you begin to write? Is your impulse to write purely political, or is it intrinsic? Do you think you’d have been a writer regardless of the experiences you had coming of age in Communist China? I began to write seriously since 1990. I have never been a political writer. In fact, for years I was halfhearted about writing. Regardless of my experience in China, it’s the American experience that forced me to be a writer. I have to survive and to exist here. After the Tiananmen Massacre I decided to emigrate, but psychologically I was not ready to live in this country. I didn’t know what I could do. Having failed to find employment related to Chinese, I concluded that English was the only means of my survival, since all my degrees were in English. Also, I realized that I wouldn’t starve here as long as I worked and was in good health, but what was hard would 176 the INtervIewS be how to live meaningfully. It took me more than a year to decide to write in English only. Before coming to the States, I had written some poems in Chinese, but I had never had an audience. It would have been suicidal for me to write in Chinese here. In this sense, I began to write out of necessity. You have said, “As for the subject matter, I guess we are compelled to write about what has hurt us most.” To what extent is your work autobiographical? How do you go about transforming autobiographical material to fiction? I don’t write my personal story in my fiction. Occasionally I may give my experience to a character, but my fiction is never autobiographical. For example, in the story “Love in the Air,” all the knowledge and experience of telegraphy are my own, but I used them only to produce the texture of the protagonist’s life to make him convincing. On the whole, my life is limited, and my own story cannot give enough room for imagination, so I don’t write my personal story. For many years, I was hurt by China. Because of that stubborn, mad country, I landed here, having to struggle for a different kind of existence. Then, gradually, China became less overwhelming. The immigrant experience is essentially a traumatic experience to most people, which involves truncation of one’s old life and the painful creation of a new life. I have been hurt by this experience deeply. Often I feel crippled, but I am not complaining. The American experience has toughened me up and turned me into a different man. You have said, “Very often I feel that the stories have been inside me for a long time and that I am no more than an instrument for their manifestation.” How do these stories gather inside you, present themselves, and take shape? Usually I don’t have enough time to write what is in my mind, so the seed of a story will stay a long time in me until I begin to work on it. Mostly they have the form of a key event, which gradually sprouts into the shape of a story. For instance, the story “Saboteur” originated from two key events I had heard and read long ago. One is that some workers in Shanghai contracted hepatitis, and that the moment they knew they were victims of the disease, they went out to eat at different restaurants to spread the virus. The other...

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