FOXBOROUGH, MASS. — Ha Jin is a winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His day job secure at Boston University, he and his wife live in a fine suburban house, close enough to Gillette Stadium to hear the fireworks on Sundays as the New England Patriots routinely beat up on an NFL opponent.
He is an immigrant success story, arriving from China 20 years ago as a graduate student and staying on for good after the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 made him decide he couldn't return.
But in his mind, he remains, and always will be, not quite a part of this country.
"I prefer to live here, as an immigrant," he says.
Interviewed recently in his living room, the walls bare as if he can't quite decide if he'll stick around, the 51-year-old author, graying and round-faced, still speaks with a strong accent, still dreams at times in Mandarin and says he still writes more confidently in his native language than in the English prose that has brought him near-universal admiration.
"I might achieve more," he says of writing in Mandarin, dismissing the idea of having his works translated back into English as too time consuming. "I don't mean this to sound like a tragedy. [The Russian-born Vladimir] Nabokov said that for him to write in English was a personal tragedy, and it did not matter whether he could write better at one language than at another because he wasn't at home in English."
On paper too, Ha Jin's journey in America has been tentative, a race of the mind to catch up with the body. Virtually all his work has been set in China. Just three years ago, with "War Trash," did any of his characters step on U.S. soil. Only with his current book, "A Free Life," does the whole story take place here, if only to demonstrate that he's just getting started.
"A Free Life" is by far his longest book, more than 600 pages, and reflects his own early years in the United States, when the author studied at Brandeis and Boston universities, then taught at Emory University before joining the BU faculty as a full professor in 2002.
"This book is a big departure from the past," he says. "I wanted a book that reflects the American experience, and to do that I needed the heft."
