The novelist Ha Jin felt he couldn’t complete his latest story collection without making a fresh study of the immigrant experience, said Anna Mundow in The Boston Globe. In 1999, only 14 years after he emigrated from China himself, Jin won a National Book Award for his novel Waiting. But when he decided, four years ago, to start writing about the new Chinese immigrants crowding into New York’s Flushing neighborhood he sensed that the challenges they faced had been subtly changed by technology. They still come to America expecting to start a new life, he says. “But you can’t sever your ties with the past; it’s impossible. With e-mail and such technology, the distances are shortened. No matter where you go, you are closer than ever, in a way, to those at home.”
Jin’s new story collection, A Good Fall, makes inventive use of reporting he did in Flushing, said Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal. Jin visited the neighborhood some 20 times while writing, but never spoke to anyone while he was there. “They get nervous; they won’t tell you the truth,” he says. “It’s better to just walk around, keep notes, and observe.” Jin listened closely to patterns of speech, then created his own idiom to capture that speech in English. In Flushing, he explains, no one would actually use the expression “hitting a dog with a meat ball,” as one of his characters does. “Hitting a dog with a pork bun,” however, is a common phrase. It means bestowing a reward when your intent is to punish.
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