Conducted in April 2008 via e-mail, this interview with Ha Jin explores various aspects of this first-generation Chinese American author who writes in English and has won a number of prestigious literary awards in the U.S. The issues covered include the difficulties of writing in a language other than his other tongue, his literary ideas and system, his role as a poet and storyteller, he contents and characteristics of his poetry, his comments on his fiction including his latest novel A Free Life), the relationship between craft and vision, the question of intellectual climate and censorship, the concepts of Chinese diaspora and Sinophone literature, his writing and publishing projects, and his observation of Taiwan as a site of cultural production in the Chinese speaking world.