The Writer as Migrant collects Ha Jin's three Campbell Lectures, held at Rice University in 2006. Both an exile and immigrant -- Ha Jin left China as an adult and settled in the United States, where he has become an English-writing author --, Ha Jin doesn't delve deep into his own experience, but he does mention it, and it obviously colors much of what he writes here. Early in the first piece he recalls that when he published his first book of poems (written in English):

I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.