Why English?

"Do you write in English or Chinese?" was a question a friend asked me three years ago, when I started writing publicly. He was the first and in fact one of the very few, and he is a Dutchman. I remember I answered without an ounce of doubt and hesitation, "in English."

Why do I write in English? I've asked myself and answered it many times in my head and in writing, none of them told half of the truth as Ha Jin did in his novel "A Free Life". In a book review the critic used "Another Country", a poem the protagonist Wu Nan wrote, to praise Ha Jin's works , "the freedom he seeks is the freedom of art, more radical and dangerous than the merely political, and one Ha Jin has confronted with powerful results."

"You must go to a country

without border,

where you can build your home

out of garlands of words,

where broad leaves shade familiar faces

that no longer change in the wind and rain."

(Partial)

In another article from the Boston Review, this is what was said about Ha Jin, "We hear in these poems the living and the dead..... in an uncanny language in which English is carried up into a region of pure human authenticity - the language of no nation but the nation of the person who speaks willingly or unwillingly the truth."

I rest my case. By the way, Ha Jin is also a professor of English Department at the Boston University.