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.

### 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)

## Bibliography

1. John Noell Moore, “The Landscape Of Divorce When Worlds Collide,” The English Journal 92 (Nov. 2002), pp. 124–127.
1. Ha Jin, _Waiting_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
1. 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.
1. Ha Jin, _The bridegroom_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000)
1. Yuejin Wang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (Dec. 1991)
1. 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_

## Infobox (author bibliography)

- **author**: Jīn Xuěfēi
- **image**: Ha jin 8693.jpg