Through this tangle of voluntary and forced migrations, Ha Jin offers the reader a string of glittering insights. For example, that exiles, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, can confuse personal longing with collective need; that the allotted task of witnessing may turn, as in Solzhenitsyn’s case, a literary work into a historical one; that nostalgia is never more than individual longing; that memory, when manipulated even for the best of reasons, can become a dangerous falsehood. All these are happy caveats and speak of a reflective and extensive reading.

Ha Jin ends his third lecture with the reminder that the migrant who, after a difficult or enthralling journey, reaches his new homeland, even when knowing that there is little likelihood of a return, must bear in mind that ‘we cannot shed our past completely — so we must strive to use parts of our past to facilitate our journeys.’ This is a useful reminder to those who settle in societies that demand from a stranger the shedding of skin and stories in order to ‘become’ a citizen of the new place, that he accept the strictures of the American ‘melting pot,’ of Gordon Brown’s self- proclaimed ‘Britishness,’ of Sarkozy’s bombastic Ministère de l’immigration et de l’identité nationale. In other societies (in Canada, for example, where multiculturalism is, for the time being at least, still an official policy) things are otherwise. But that is another story. 

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