23 Quotes by Ha Jin

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

English has more flexibility. It’s a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

Indifference is the strongest contempt.

You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.

Life is a journey, and you can’t carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

Where should he go? He wanted to find a building out of which he could jump and kill himself. How about the temple? No, it only had two stories. Too low. How about the elementary school? No, his ghost might frighten the children if he died there, and people would condemn him.

No, It’s hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it’s also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear – the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.