Ha Jin

Ha Jin (born February 21, 1956, Jinzhou, Liaoning province, China) is a Chinese American writer who uses plain, unadorned English prose to explore the tension between the individual and the family, the modern and the traditional, and personal feelings and duty. He won a National Book Award for his novel Waiting (1999).

Early life and education

Jin had only a brief, incomplete education before the schools in China closed in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. At age 14 he joined the army, and he served for some five years. He later worked as a railway telegraph operator and began to learn English by listening to the radio. When Chinese schools reopened in the late 1970s, he attended Heilongjiang University in Harbin, graduating with a degree in English in 1981. Jin earned a master’s degree in American literature from Shandong University in Jinan in 1984 and the next year enrolled at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1992.

After the Chinese government’s suppression of the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Jin elected to remain in the United States; he later became a U.S. citizen. He studied in the creative writing program at Boston University (1991–94) and taught that same subject at Emory University in Atlanta for nine years before returning, as a faculty member, to Boston University in 2002.

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Literary works

Jin’s first published books were the poetry collections Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996); later collections include Wreckage (2001) and A Distant Center (2018). His volume of army stories, Ocean of Words (1996), received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1997, and his second book of stories, Under the Red Flag (1997), which tells of life during the Cultural Revolution, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

In Jin’s first full-length novel, Waiting, he recounted the story of a Chinese doctor who was forced to wait the prescribed 18 years before he could obtain a divorce and marry another woman. A critical and commercial success, it won a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Jin won the latter award again for War Trash (2004), becoming the third writer (after Philip Roth and John Edgar Wideman) to twice receive that honor. War Trash recounts the struggles of a Chinese soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Korean War.

Jin later wrote the novels A Free Life (2007), which centers on a Chinese family struggling to adjust to life in the United States; Nanjing Requiem (2011), which depicts the heroic deeds of an American missionary in China during the Nanjing Massacre; A Map of Betrayal (2014), about a Chinese mole in the CIA; and The Boat Rocker (2016), in which a Chinese journalist in New York City attempts to expose his novelist ex-wife as a fraud. In A Song Everlasting (2021), a Chinese singer runs afoul of his country’s government and flees to the United States. The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty (2023) is a work of historical fiction based on the life of Sun Weishi, a stage director and actress who was the adopted daughter of former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai.

Jin’s other works of fiction include the novella In the Pond (1998), the novel The Crazed (2002), and the short-story collections The Bridegroom (2000) and A Good Fall (2009).

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In 2008 Jin published The Writer as Migrant, which comprises three essays on literary exiles. His other nonfiction work includes The Banished Immortal (2019), a biography of the Chinese poet Li Bai. In addition, with Chinese composer Tan Dun, he cowrote the libretto for Tan’s opera The First Emperor (2006), about Qin dynasty ruler Shihuangdi.

Honors

Jin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014.