Aleksandar Hemon is eating my orange chicken. The big, 38-year-old Bosnian-born author had ordered the noodle dish in front of me, but when the waitress unloaded our lunches in the wrong order, he just took what was put in front of him.

You get the sense that adaptation is key to this guy’s life. In early 1992, he was just Sasha HeMonday, a journalist in his hometown of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzigovina, writing magazine, radio and newspaper pieces alongside fiction and what he decribes as “godawful poetry” for a Bosnian-language newspaper. Armed with a little bit of school-taught English, a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and a few words and phrases he’d picked up from American pop culture, he was packing his bags for a short visit to the United States on a cultural exchange program.

Ten years, a bloody civil war and one exile later, Hemon is an American citizen living in Chicago whose first major work in English – a collection of short stories entitled “The Question of Bruno” – has critics hailing him as everything from “maestro” to “the next Nabokov.” And all this has led the author to Northwestern, where he teaches two English seminars full of students half his age who have been speaking his adoptive tongue more than twice as long as he has.

Hemon’s American odyssey began at the end of his cultural exchange. After extending his trip to visit friends in Canada and Chicago, the young writer found himself trapped on the shores of Lake Michigan as the news broke that civil war had erupted at home. On May 1, 1992, the day he was scheduled to arrive home, the other shoe fell: Sarajevo came under siege. HeMonday, 28, had just become an accidental refugee.

“(I was) lucky in as much that I didn’t have to suffer,” Hemon says about missing the war. “It would be hypocritical to say anything else.”

There had been signs of war before he left home, Hemon says. “Because I worked in journalism, I knew some military secrets,” he says. “The paper I was working for had reports of trenches in late ’91.” But even so, he describes the news as “a tremendous shock.” No matter what information he had, Hemon says, “there’s a psychological mentality that keeps people from imagining their own death.”

Hemon stayed with friends for six months, living in the Ukranian Village on the North Side. He moved to Edgewater before settling in Uptown.

The displaced author decided he had to start writing in English. Part of his decision came from the realization that speakers of his native tongue had entered a new era in their history. “Language is created by experience,” he says, “and I wasn’t part of that experience (anymore).”

So Hemon gave himself five years to complete his first English short story. He would only need three. Working in kitchens, operating as a bike messenger, teaching basic English to Jews from the former Soviet Union – anything to put food on the table and pick up the language – Hemon found his way into the master’s program in literature at NU, where he befriended English Prof. Reginald Gibbons, who would eventually help Hemon publish his first story, “The Sorge Spy Ring,” in Tri-Quarterly. The two still have lunch weekly.

But first there would be another setback. Hemon was rejected from NU’s doctoral program in English.

“I had nothing to do, essentially, and I panicked,” Hemon recalls. “I wrote ‘Sorge’ because I had nothing to do. I got broke, really broke.”

The rejection proved fortunate in the long run. Hemon entered the Ph.D. program at Loyola University and received his doctorate there; he kept writing, and within a few years “Sorge” had become one of the eight chapters in “The Question of Bruno.”

Hemon takes a bite of my rice and smiles at the idea that “Bruno” was a successful venture. “It did well for a first book of short stories,” he says. “I wasn’t surprised because I knew it was a good book. I had a general belief that good books find their readers.”

He appreciates the Nabokov comparisons but says they are premature. “It’s very unfair,” he says. “The man has a lifetime of masterpieces in two languages. To be compared with Nabokov, I need another 40 years or so.”

Hemon is currently working on his second book, titled “Nowhere Man.” Its title inspired by the John Lennon song, Hemon says “(the book) is about displacement,” with scenes set in Chicago, Sarajevo, Kiev, Shanghai and Oak Ridge, Tenn. “It’s both a collection of short stories and a novel – it is up to the marketing division of my publisher,” Hemon says.

And there are his classes at NU, one a writing seminar and the other a literature course. “I’ve been learning a lot from (my students),” Hemon says. “They all seem to be smart, but being smart isn’t enough sometimes. Being curious (is), so you can be in a situation of exchange. I want to teach them, I have a desire to teach them – it’s fertile ground.”

The author finally returned to Sarajevo in 1997. “Everything was the same and nothing was the same,” he recalls. “You couldn’t walk down the street without being surrounded by destruction.” Hemon has also begun writing in his native language again for the revived newspaper of his youth, authoring an opinion column. He has complete control over the space. “(My editors) don’t touch it,” Hemon says.

The main thing for Hemon is to maintain his balance as a writer. “For writers,” he says, “it’s very important not to write. If writing becomes a job, it’s not a good thing. In order to write well, I need to play my soccer, I need to go skiing, I need to do nothing.”

Hemon finishes my food, thanks me for lunch and exits the restaurant in time to teach his afternoon class, leaving his fortune cookie behind. It reads, “There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead for you.” nyou