Every writer who makes it no doubt lives a life full of the same tales of early struggle and penniless ignominy. This was one of the subjects Ha Jin addressed yesterday afternoon at a question and answer forum run by Rice University’s student managed literary magazine R2. Ha Jin describes his own unique circumstances–as a displaced Chinese writer who writes most often about China and almost always in English–as often accidental or pragmatic. Ha Jin turned to creative writing and teaching to make a living. Early on he was a poet and translator, translating Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, and even Robert Penn Warren. Ha Jin stressed the craft of writing, the sheer and painful work of crafting stories in language. Writing is hard work, he maintained, and even discouraged the young writers in the crowd from becoming professional writers. The professional writer, he argued, is required to write more and more novels each year, each being different and new and better than the last. His words for this kind of life? Risky, maddening, and akin to training wild horses. Citing Gogol and Chekhov as huge influences, Ha Jin maintained that as writers we construct our own personal canons or literary traditions, ones not solely dictated by nation, origin, or ethnicity.
Of greatest interest to me (not surprisingly) was what Ha Jin had to say about poetry, since he began his career as a poet and was even employed (early on at least) as a poet rather than as a fiction writer. Ha Jin cited the great difficulty of writing poetry in a second (or third) language. At first, he said, the difficulty and obscurity of working in a second tongue may create forms of interesting ambiguity. However, as time passed and one became more familiar with a non-native language, the task of writing poetry became much harder or nearly impossible. Ambiguity, it seems, isn’t enough: hence his turn to the craft of assembling stories.