Ha Jin

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Jin.

Ha Jin

Jīn Xuěfēi (simplified Chinese: 金雪飞; traditional Chinese: 金雪飛; born February 21, 1956) is a contemporary Chinese-American writer and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin.

Early life

Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer; at thirteen, Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. Jin began to educate himself in Chinese literature and high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen, as he entered Heilongjiang University and earned a bachelor's degree in English studies. This was followed by a master's degree in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University.

Jin grew up in the chaos of early communist China. He was on a scholarship at Brandeis University when the 1989 Tiananmen incident occurred. The Chinese government's forcible put-down hastened his decision to emigrate to the United States, and was the cause of his choice to write in English "to preserve the integrity of his work." He eventually obtained a Ph.D..

Career

Jin sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional 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, while Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set during the Korean War, won a second PEN/Faulkner Award for Jin, thus ranking him with Philip Roth and John Edgar Wideman, who are the only other authors to have won the prize twice. War Trash was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Jin currently teaches at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. He formerly taught at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

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

Poetry

• Between Silences (1990)
• Facing Shadows (1996)
• Wreckage (2001)
• Ways of Talking (1996)
• The Past

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)
• Nanjing Requiem (2011)

Essays

• The Writer as Migrant (2008)

See also

• Saboteur (short story) (2000)

References

1. John Noell Moore, “The Landscape Of Divorce When Worlds Collide,” The English Journal 92 (Nov. 2002), pp. 124–127.
2. Ha Jin, Waiting (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
3. 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.
4. Ha Jin, The bridegroom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000)
5. Yuejin Wang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (Dec. 1991)
6. Ha Jin, "Exiled to English" (New York Times, May 30, 2009)

External links

• Listen to Ha Jin on The Forum from the BBC World Service
• Boston University staff page
• Watch Ha Jin talk about the challenges of writing A Free Life on BUniverse.
• 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
• 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
• "Ha Jin's Cultural Revolution" - New York Times Magazine profile (2000).