With expressive hands and pursed lips, he nurses creases of wisdom behind his rectangular glasses. His eyes sparkle with a delightful mystique as he brings his hands to his chest, and begins to speak.

Fear is inherent to immigration, Ha Jin said. “[You] have an intense fear because [your] reference frame and values are all shattered. Reforming your reference frame takes many years to do, [and] sometimes people cannot do it.”

The Chinese author and two-time Pulitzer finalist discussed his new book, A Good Fall, as part of Victoria Lautman’s Writers on the Record broadcast series at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library on Jan. 14. Jin, 53, expressively recounted the difficulties of a decisive break from the past for Chinese immigrants, touching on stories from his new collection as well as dabbling in personal experience.

“[With] the language and the culture in the United States, you have to play the games and continue. And whether you can do it, [you] have no choice,” Jin explained.

Chinese immigrants navigate a new sense of freedom and foreign culture in A Good Fall. Lautman describes the channeling of “so many different voices,” united around the motif of how alienated and alone immigrants are, a feeling with which Jin can empathize.

“The life of a professional writer is a very hard life, a miserable life,” Jin sighs. “Between my first and second book, there was a six year gap where I couldn’t get a book accepted.”

A soldier at the tender age of 13, Jin came to the States in 1985 to pursue his graduate studies at Brandeis University, deciding to stay after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. He triumphed through the common immigrant dilemma of being neither here nor there, living as though on a seesaw teetering between a distant home and unknown future.

“After finishing my degree, my concern was China would [someday] close its door,” Jin recounts. “All [the] things I learned here would become obsolete. Without academic exchanges, I would be obsolete. That was my fear.”

Currently a professor of English at Boston University, Jin considers himself a better short-story writer because it “fits the rhythm of [his] life.” Although he planned to devote a collection of stories to Chinese immigrants for some time, he was unsure of the setting for his stories. After attending a newspaper conference in Flushing, New York, he “realized it was a beginning for many immigrants,” ultimately deciding to “set the stories there.”

The narratives of A Good Fall are based on actual events in Flushing, such as the grapple between social integration and continuing demands back home, or the immigrant Chinese professor who freaks out at the small mistake on his tenure application, or the alienated middle-aged woman who is exploited by her caretaker. Although his focus is on the plight of Chinese immigrants, Jin recognizes the universality of any immigrant tale.

“[If] you left China, you were supposed to get rich, make a lot of money and send the money home to support others,” he said. “But there’s a lot of misunderstanding… most people cannot imagine how hard Americans work.”

Among the hundred or so in attendance the evening of Jan. 14, Robert Warburton, a professor at the University of Chicago, was particularly impressed with the author.

“My wife and I taught at Shan Dong University in China, and we introduced the students to [Ha Jin’s] work,” Warburton said. “He is [such] a compelling author, and his story is simply fascinating.”

Lautman, host of the broadcast, gushes she “could have talked to him for a whole other hour.” Her extensive preparation for Jin’s interview was due to his wide collection of published works and captivating personal experiences.

“I owe it to the author to read every single thing they’ve written, along with everything written about them,” Lautman asserted, “so by the time I get on this stage, virtually any direction the conversation goes, I can just keep up with it.”

Despite the hardships of immigration, Jin underscored the novel’s message as one of perseverance. Jin smiles as he details the life of a professional writer as “miserable,” but even faced with such tenacious demands, he has never even considered a career change.

“You want to exist as a voice to make your life meaningful,” Jin articulated. “Since I’m on this boat [and] can’t get off, I [must] continue. I feel that’s the way for me to exist. On the one hand, it is a miserable life, because there’s so much anxiety. But on the other hand, if I don’t write, I feel ill. [Writing] is my way of existing as a human being.”