WHEN XUEFEI JIN first arrived in the US, he dreamt of returning to his native China after getting his PhD and working as an academic or a translator. Nineteen years later, the young American literature major is pepper-haired Ha Jin, 48, one of the most influential immigrant writers in the US. And he's never gone home.
Which means that his books, including four novels, three short story collections and three poetry collections - all of them about events in and around China - are based on increasingly distant memories and research done from afar. He can cling onto a lot from his youth. After all, Xuefei, meaning swirling snow, is a reminder of chilly winters in northeast China, where he grew up, and his pen name, Ha, was picked from Harbin, the Chinese city he likes most.
'I miss China,' he says. 'But usually it's the China I lived. I don't know about the current China.'
Jin knows that the era when everyone earned similar lowly wages (he earned 60 yuan per month as a college instructor) is long over. But the increasing gap between rich and poor unnerves the writer, whose first book was published in the US in 1990.
'It's hard for me to imagine that I [could] live a better life in China when there are a lot of people who are so poor in the countryside,' he says.
Jin's fears about a changed homeland are reflected in his fourth novel, War Trash (Pantheon), published this week. The novel looks at a little-known aspect of the Korean war: the Chinese soldiers in American prisoner-of-war camps.