Ha Jin

Biography

Ha Jin

Born
in mainland China, Ha Jin grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning
Province.  From the age of fourteen to nineteen he
volunteered to serve in the People's Liberation Army, staying at
the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union.
He began teaching himself the middle-and high-school courses since
his third year in the army, which he left in the sixth year because
he wanted to go to college.  But colleges remained closed
during the Cultural Revolution, which continued when he was
demobilized, so he worked as a telegrapher at a railroad company
for three years in Jiamusi, a remote frontier city in the
Northeast.  During this time, he began to follow the
English learner's program, hoping that someday he could read
Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844 in the English original.

In 1977 colleges reopened, and he passed the entrance exams and
went to Heilongjiang University in Harbin where he was assigned to
study English, even though this was his last choice for a
major!  He received a B.A. in English in
1981.  He then studied American literature at Shandong
University, where he received an M.A. in 1984. The following year
he came to the United States to do graduate work at Brandeis
University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English in
1993.  In the meantime, he studied fiction writing at
Boston University with the novelists Leslie Epstein and Aharon
Appelfeld.

After the Tianeman massacre, he realized it would be impossible to
write honestly in China, so he decided to emigrate. Unlike most
exiled writers already established in their native language, Ha Jin
had no audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English. To
him, this meant much labor, some despair, and also, freedom.

Currently he is an associate professor in English at Emory
University. He has published two volumes of poetry, BETWEEN
SILENCES (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and FACING SHADOWS
(Hanging Loose Press, 1996), and two books of short fiction, OCEAN
OF WORDS (Zoland Books, 1996) which received the PEN Hemingway
Award, and UNDER THE RED FLAG (University of Georgia Press, 1997),
which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and
was a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Award. He also
published a novella, IN THE POND (Zoland Books, 1998), which was
selected as a best fiction book of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune. His
short stores have been included in The Best American Short Stories
(1997 and 1999), three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and Norton
Introduction to Fiction and Norton Introduction to Literature,
among other anthologies. WAITING Ha Jin's first
full-length novel, is the winner of the 1999 National Book Award
for Fiction and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a
finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction. He has
also written a collection of stories called, THE BRIDEGROOM,
published by Pantheon Books.