Facing Shadows
Ha Jin is a Chinese writer in exile, an assistant professor of English at Emory University in Georgia. He is also one of the most talented poets writing today. Born in mainland China, Ha Jin grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning Province. At at the age of fourteen, he volunteered to serve in the People's Army and was stationed on the northeastern border between China and the Soviet Union. He began studying on his own and, after six years, left the army to attend college. But the Cultural Revolution closed the colleges, so he put in three years as a railroad telegrapher in another remote area. In 1977, when the colleges finally opened, he enrolled at Heilongjiang University in Harbin, where the study of English was assigned to him. He went on to earn an M. A. degree in American literature from Shandong University and then came to the United States, receiving a Ph. D. from Brandeis University in 1992. He also studied fiction writing at Boston University. After the Tiananmen massacre, it would be impossible to write honestly in China," so he decided not to return to his homeland. "Unlike most exiled writers who are already established in their mother tongues, I had no audience in Chinese, so I thought the only way I could become a writer was to write in English.  --Midwest Book Review