Although the current political climate, beclouded by the Trump administration’s isolationism, might slow down the process of globalization, such a historical course will definitely continue. Today we live in a world where peoples and cultures have to meet and mingle in order to prosper and develop. The meeting of different languages and cultures often creates spaces that can be called the overlapping territory. Some people have to live and work in such spaces. To them, the overlapping territory can be slippery and opaque, slippery in the sense that some of one’s former references and values are no longer intact or applicable, and opaque in the sense that there are a lot of uncertainty and confusion that can easily obscure one’s bearings and even paralyze one’s sense of identity. Still, such overlapping spaces are fertile and vital for some of us if we want to exist meaningfully.

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Since our topic is literature, we should focus our attention on writers and languages that work and function in the overlapping territory and on some problems that arise in this area. We can roughly divide writers who exist in the overlapping spaces into two kinds: those who write about two and more cultures but work only in one language, their first language already given them, and those who have to work hard to acquire their first language. Most writers from the Indian Subcontinent belong to the first kind; English is their first language, since they grew up with English, which is the official language in their native countries. Some Asian American writers, whose parents originally came from East Asia, are also this kind of writers, such as Chang-Rae Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Ruth Ozeki, and others. They all have English as their working language, in most cases the only language in which they can write creatively. The other kind of writers, those who have to acquire a working language, are in a more complicated situation, because they have to struggle in an area where they often feel out of their element but have to continue in order to survive. This second kind of writers are the center of our discussion, and we will consider some basic problems they face.

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Before delving into our topic, let me speak briefly about a novel that can illustrate and illuminate some of the essential language issues from the perspective of the American immigrant experience.

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The novel in question is A Feather on the Breath of God, by Sigrid Nunez. Since its publication in 1995, it has been taught in American universities and has enjoyed a devoted readership, especially among college students. In some ways it is a seminal novel that has inspired younger fiction writers. At the core of the immigrant experience described in the novel is language, by which we can say that most of the characters’ lives are shaped and defined. The most tragic figure among them is the father, Carlos Chang, who is half Chinese and half Panamanian. Because when he was an infant he was taken back to China, where he lived until age ten, he always feels that China is his homeland, though he has lived in Panama and the United States for the rest of his life. When he serves as a GI in Germany, he falls in love with Christa, a German girl, and promises her that after they get married, they will have a house with a small garden in New Jersey. But when he comes back to the States, he returns to the New York Chinatown instead, where he resumes waiting tables. The emotion that prevents him from getting out of Chinatown is fear—he is afraid to be on his own entirely. However, his fear is justified, also intensified, by the fact that he is nearly illiterate in any language. He has to exist in the overlapping space between languages and cultures. In other words, he lives only in the gaps. Even at home he doesn’t have his own voice and remains silent most of the time, even unable to call his daughters by their Nordic names given by his wife. In contrast, his wife Christa, also a new immigrant, learns English fast mainly by reading romance novels. She is fluent in this new language, though she still makes idiomatic mistakes and always has an accent. When she speaks English, people can tell she is a foreigner, who is “weird,” despite her fair skin and blond hair. She refuses to teach her children German, believing that English is “a very good language” and can get them anywhere. She always dreams of returning to Germany, to “go home,” but as years wear on, she begins to order food in English even in German restaurants in New York. That’s to say, English gradually replaces her mother tongue to become her first language. Many years later when she finally sets foot in her native soil again, she finds that the Germany she has remembered is no longer there—her homeland is mostly Americanized. Worse yet, when she goes shopping, she cannot come up with the German words for some goods. Evidently her immigrant experience has transformed her, within and without. Even her mother tongue has become her second language.

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Christa has a younger brother, Karl, who also comes to America but serves in the U.S. army as a soldier. Karl goes to Vietnam and brings back to the States a young Vietnamese woman as his wife and also two children of theirs. What is amazing is that he has grown into an American in every way, speaking English with a Southern drawl and without any trace of his mother tongue German. In a way, we can say that Karl’s story is a perfect example of Americanization, in which an immigrant has found himself completely at home in his new country and in his adopted language.

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The last part of the novel is a long narrative about a recent Russian immigrant Vadim, with whom the narrator has a love affair, partly because she is attracted to Vadim’s tremendous effort to learn English and to his fearlessness, which was a quality seemingly absent from her father, Carlos Chang. Vadim is a shrewd and bold man, who has intuitively grasped two essential facts that he has to accept for his survival in America. First, he will not be able to return to Russia anymore, having to manage to live here; second, in America only through acquiring enough English can he become a man again. In truth, he feels that his manhood is damaged by the deprivation of his mother tongue in his everyday life. He emphasizes to his English teacher, the unnamed narrator, that if he could use Russian, he could surely persuade her to go out with him. In other words, using his mother tongue, he could be a more capable seducer. He is tormented by the loss of his mother tongue and has to work devotedly to learn English. For him, this is a matter of survival. That’s why he tells his English teacher, who eventually becomes his lover, that she is his America. He makes rapid progress in his English, and a few years after the narrator left him, they run into each other again and she finds him speak English fluently without making any mistake, switching tenses with ease and precision. His is a typical case of acquiring a new language as a way of survival.

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The novel is charged with a deep emotion in the immigrant experience, namely fear. This is a fundamental emotion in the human migration, because in a new social and linguistic environment, the migrant’s inner reference frame can be severely damaged, traditional values no longer applicable to new situations, beliefs being challenged and often rendered meaningless, even one’s perception of oneself growing uncertain and ambiguous. Worst of all, one’s mother tongue stops functioning and its loss of use often makes one appear stupid and incapable in a new place. Compared to the other components in the migrant’s frame of reference, language is the most important part, whose malfunction produces a great deal of fear. In American immigrant fiction, this cause of fear is often presented and dramatized. For instance, the boy in Call It Sleep, David, cannot pronounce a street name correctly to pedestrians and the police, so he is terrified, unable to return home to join his mother. Henry Roth’s novel is about a new immigrant boy’s fear, an emotion that permeates everywhere in the novel. In the case of A Feather on the Breath of God, fear possesses all the main immigrant characters.

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Now, let me use the characters in Nunez’s novel as a backdrop to illustrate the language problems our writers face. Of course, the writer’s predicament is multidimensional and more metaphysical, but by using the examples of these characters from the novel, we can somewhat place the writers’ struggle in the context of human migrations. Carlos Chang can speak several languages but is literate in none. This is obviously due to his migrant experiences, which prevent him from putting down roots in a single language. In recent years I have often met young aspiring writers from East Asia who have been trying to write in English. In some cases, they are multilingual, fluent in more than two or three languages. For instance, a young woman, originally from Gwangju, speaks fluent Korean and German, having married a German man, and is now writing in English. But though she speaks English well, clearly her written English is not strong enough yet for producing literary work. There will be a long struggle ahead of her. I once asked her if she might write in her mother tongue Korean eventually, but she said she had never thought of that and never written anything in Korean, a language she just speaks with her family. In other words, she is still a child in her mother tongue, which cannot serve as her first language at all. Another young woman from Taiwan grew up in different European countries and is fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, and also English. For her, to write in English is a matter of choice, but her English is far from maturity and will take a long time to grow into a creative literary language. I also reminded her of the possibility of returning to her mother tongue, Chinese, and she gave me the same answer that she had never thought of writing in Chinese.

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The two examples I mentioned above are by no means exceptional nowadays. Probably they are a contemporary phenomenon, thanks to the fact that migrations are easier and that more people have actively gotten involved in the process of globalization. Despite some multilingual writers’ talent and aspiration, they do not have a productive first language. Their mother tongues can no longer fulfill such a role. Unlike most writers from the Indian and Pakistan and Nigeria, English to them is not a given, not a colonial heritage. To put it another way, without such a linguistic heritage, they will have to labor to acquire their first language, which in most cases is a major Western language they have chosen. Such a process can be lifelong and will surely cause a lot of frustration and pain. But if they are determined to survive in English or French as a writer, they would have to take their choice of language as a matter of survival and fully invest their energy and lives in its acquisition. Otherwise, they might end up like Carlos Chang, unable to be at home in any language. Compared to Carlos Chang, they are in a much more privileged position. In fact, they can take advantage of their linguistic prowess by trying to enrich their chosen tongue with resources from other languages. To put this plainly, they should learn how to sacrifice and even to give up some languages, if necessary, in order to claim their existence in a single tongue, which must be their first literary language.

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Christa and Karl in Nunez’s novel represent other linguistic possibilities in the immigrant experience. Theirs is a success story in a way. They both have managed to replace their mother tongue with English, which has become their first language eventually, though Christa’s English is still affected by her mother tongue German. But actually, in life and in writing, very few people can achieve Karl’s type of success, having erased all the traces of his mother tongue. In truth, such a success is unnecessary for literary writers, and even unhealthy, because nonnative-speaking writers’ worth is measured by what they can bring to the language they have adopted and by how they exist in the language differently from others, especially from native speakers. It is more wholesome for nonnative-speaking writers to preserve some elements of their native tongues so that their adopted languages might appear distinct and unusual. In other words, it is entirely healthy to have some accent as Christa does in English. Otherwise a new literary arrival in another language can easily lose his or her identity, reduced to normality and banality.

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As a matter of fact, most people, who, out of necessity, have to struggle to acquire another language, will go through a process similar to Vadim’s, which is painful and even maddening. But ironically the most accomplished writers of this type, such as Conrad and Nabokov, never managed to speak English fluently like Vadim and even appeared more damaged by their linguistic migrations. Vadim is a taxi driver and doesn’t need to master English in writing to survive. He only wants to learn enough English for his work and life so that he can function as a normal man again. In other words, he strives to repair or restore his manhood by learning enough spoken English. Paradoxically, literary masters like Conrad and Nabokov never mastered enough spoken English that could make them feel at ease and at home in the language. In both of them we can see an acute sense of being crippled. Nabokov gave interviews only through writing, because he could not speak English spontaneously and had a heavy accent. Neither could Conrad speak English well, and his friends often couldn’t understand him. This defect in their linguistic acquisition can be detected in their fiction as well, in which dialogues are not natural and don’t flow with ease. But for them to write in English was not just a matter of choice but more a matter of survival. They had to make a living and also to claim their literary existence in this tongue. We often admire their magnificent achievements, but hardly can we imagine the intense effort they made in order to survive in English. After Conrad had published twelve books, he told a friend that he could not recall fifteen minutes of diversion during the past eleven years. Such a concentration seems unthinkable, but it must have been true. When he had finished his novel Nostromo and come back from his working place to join his family, he found that his children had all grown considerably. Twice Nabokov was shipped by ambulance from his office to the hospital on account of exhaustion. Conrad and Nabokov both had to exist in English so as to become significant writers. Nabokov often mentioned that his mother tongue was about to be extinct, so he could not continue to write in Russian in spite of his accomplishment in his mother tongue as a prose stylist. Generally speaking, very few writers can exist in more than one language. Nabokov is an exception, because before switching to English, he was already a noted fiction writer in Russian despite his exile from his native land. To survive, he had to branch out into English to resume his literary existence and also to support his family. Even before his immigration to the United States in 1940, he had spent two years writing his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. He wrote the book at night in the bathroom of a small Parisian flat in which his family was crammed. His immediate plan was to find a job in the English-speaking world, but not until more than a decade later, in 1953, did he land a full-time teaching position at Cornell University. Despite his linguistic extravagance and his great stylistic achievement in English, he was never at home in this language. There is a distinct foreignness in his style, which is humorous, witty, subtle, ornate, and laden with jokes. He meant to write differently from Conrad, whose prose style Nabokov despised and thought too conventional. He was often irritated by his friend Edmund Wilson’s comparing him to Conrad and defended himself by saying that at moments he might have sunk lower than Conrad in English but Conrad could never scale his, Nabokov’s, linguistic peaks in English. Such a literary stance was necessary if Nabokov intended to stand out as an original master in English prose.

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The irony is that the two great English prose masters, Conrad and Nabokov, did not just choose this language. They wrote in English out of necessity so that they could exist both physically and literarily, to become significant fiction writers who eventually occupy their respective spots in English letters. In other words, their migration into this tongue was not purely by choice. Rather, it is a something that circumstances thrust upon them. Their greatness lies in the fact that, though linguistically crippled, they were fully aware of their disadvantages and managed to turn their defects to their advantage. There must have been numerous nonnative-speaking writers who adopted English during the times when Conrad and Nabokov were writing, but those works have mostly disappeared. The writings of Conrad and Nabokov have survived largely because both of them are great stylists, whose efforts have enriched the language they adopted.

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Because of the success of some Chinese migrants who have written fiction in Western languages, in mainland China’s media the subject of language choices has often been raised in recent years. It has been discussed whether writers should choose to write in Chinese or in a major Western language. Such a topic seems inane, if not frivolous. The critics have neglected that a writer strives to write in another language mostly out of necessity. In other words, it is more a matter of survival. Once language has become merely a free choice, it tends to lose the intensity and urgency associated with the writer’s struggle for survival. Even Joseph Brodsky, who gave much thought to this issue, seems to have simplified it. His essay “To Please a Shadow” begins: “When a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so either out of necessity, like Conrad, or because of burning ambition, like Nabokov, or for the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett.” Brodsky goes on to say that his beginning in English has nothing to do with those three motivations. He writes in this foreign tongue to please the great poet W. H. Auden. To my mind, Brodsky’s sweeping statement about the motivations in embarking on another language is oversimplified. First, none of the three writers, Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett, was a successful writer yet when they started to write in another language, and their new endeavor was a matter of literary survival as well as their livelihood, so they had to blaze their ways in the languages they adopted. “Burning ambition” and “greater estrangement” are not essential motivations in the matter of resorting to a foreign language and might not be strong enough to compel writers to go far in their literary adventures in another tongue.

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When a renowned writer simply chooses to write in another language that is not his first language, he tends to lack the kind of energy and dedication shown in the cases of Conrad and Nabokov. Having lived in France for two decades, Milan Kundera began to write fiction in French in the 1990s. By then he was already in his sixties and was an internationally celebrated author with his major fiction books written in Czech. His switch to French is clearly a case “of greater estrangement” from his mother tongue and motherland. Brave and admirable as such a move is, we can see that his fiction written in French no longer possesses the richness and density of his previous works written in his native tongue. We can say with certainty that he will not be able to achieve the kind of linguistic magnificence in French as Conrad and Nabokov did in English. One reason for this is that estrangement is not a motivation strong enough to empower the writer to undertake the long, arduous, rewarding journey in another language. Such a painful literary endeavor demands nothing less than all the energy from the depths of one’s being.

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Even Brodsky’s adventure in English is not that successful. His motivation is rather feeble. Auden had died before Brodsky started to write in English, though we can say that for the younger poet, death was less relevant, as poetic communication can be atemporal and entirely spiritual. Yet what is at stake is whether such an effort can produce significant poetry that might enrich the English language. If a poem is not good enough, how can it please the ears we compose for? It is generally held that Brodsky is not a significant poet in English. If we compared the English poems he wrote by himself to those of his poems translated from the Russian by Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott, and Anthony Hecht, we can see that Brodsky’s own compositions are inferior to the English translations by the other poets. His lines move heavy-footedly and his rhymes are often clunky and stale. He rushed into English too easily, having neglected William Yeats’s warning: No poet “can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought” (Letter to William Rothenstein, May 7, 1935). Beneath his intension to please Auden’s shadow, I suspect that Brodsky wrote in English also with a burning ambition; that is, to become a major poet in English as well as in Russian. In contrast, other emigrant writers were more clearheaded about the linguistic migration. Czeslaw Milosz continued to write in Polish, though he lived and taught in America for decades. W. G. Sebald, despite being fluent in both English and French, kept writing in German, saying there was no need for him to switch to another tongue. Indeed, German is a major Western language, in which writers can claim their literary existence internationally without too many obstacles.

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Yeats’s statement about the impossibility to write great poetry outside of one’s first tongue might appear conservative now in the light of literary globalization. In English there are already significant poets who came from other languages, such as Charles Simic and Agha Shahid Ali; yet we don’t have a great poet whose mother tongue is not English. Though we can argue whether Simic, who immigrated to America at age sixteen from the former Yugoslavia, is a major poet in English, the conventional rule stated by Yeats might be still relevant. On the other hand, times have changed. Surely there will emerge master poets in their adopted languages, whose presence will eventually render the Yeatsian principle obsolete. Nonetheless, we are still waiting for such a great poet to arrive.

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The Internet has greatly facilitated verbal communications, and nowadays few writers face total isolation and suppression. As a result, we can publish our writings in our native languages less difficultly. I often imagine what Nabokov might have accomplished if he could have continued to write in his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue” while living in the United States. One result would be obvious—we might not have some of his great novels, such as Lolita and Pnin, which are our boons from his loss of the use of his mother tongue and from his painful labor and artistic struggle for survival in English. Considering those masters who were compelled to write in an adopted language and achieved their greatness despite never being at home in the tongue, writers like us in a similar situation ought to accept the language of survival as our working conditions and as a meaningful journey full of adventures and promise. We ought to take heart.