Ha Jin

Jīn Xuěfēi (simplified Chinese: 金雪飞; traditional Chinese: 金雪飛; born February 15, 1956) is a living Chinese-American writer. He uses the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. In 1984, he went to America and began to write about China only in English. His work increased international attention to Chinese culture and history.

Early life
Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer. Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution when he was 13 years old. He began to teach himself about Chinese literature and to learn the high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen, as he entered Heilongjiang University. He got his B. A. degree in English studies there. Next, he earned a M.A. degree in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University.

Jin grew up in the chaos of early communist China.  He was at Brandeis University when the 1989 Tiananmen incident happened. The way the Chinese government stopped the protest by force was important to Jin. It helped him decide to emigrate to the United States. It also made him choose to write in English "to preserve the integrity of his work." He eventually earned a Ph.D..

Career
Jin sets many of his stories and novels in China in an imaginary place called Muji City. He has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, Waiting (1999). He has received three Pushcart Prizes for fiction and a Kenyon Review Prize. Many of his short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthologies.  His collection Under The Red Flag (1997) won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set during the Korean War, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Jin teaches at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. He used to teach at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jin was at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in the fall of 2008. He was a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction.

Major Works

Poetry
 Between Silences (1990)
 Facing Shadows (1996)
 Wreckage (2001)

Short story collections
 Ocean of Words (1996) 
 Under the Red Flag (1997)
 The Bridegroom (2000)
 A Good Fall (2009)

Novels
 In the Pond (1998)
 Waiting (1999) 
 The Crazed (2002)
 War Trash (2004)
 A Free Life (2007)

Essays
 The Writer as Migrant (2008)

Awards and honors
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (1996)
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (1997)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1999)
National Book Award (1999)
PEN/Faulkner Award (2000)
Asian Fellowship (2000–2002)
Townsend Prize for Fiction (2002)
PEN/Faulkner Award (2005)
Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006)

References

Bibliography
 John Noell Moore, “The Landscape Of Divorce When Worlds Collide,” The English Journal 92 (Nov. 2002), pp. 124–127.
 Ha Jin, Waiting (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
 Neil J Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 59.
 Ha Jin, The bridegroom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000)
 Yuejin Wang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (Dec. 1991)
 Ha Jin, "Exiled to English" (New York Times, May 30, 2009)

Other websites
Listen to Ha Jin on The Forum from the BBC World Service
Boston University staff page 

Author interview in Guernica Magazine (guernicamag.com)
Online interview with Ha Jin 
On Point: Ha Jin and "A Free Life"
Ha Jin audio interview re: A Free Life, November 2007
Watch Ha Jin talk about the challenges of writing A Free Life on BUniverse .
Exiled to English
Emotions and dilemmas are universal - Ocean of Words  
Audio: Ha Jin in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum

1956 births
Living people