Ha Jin
Ha Jin, born Jin Xuefei on February 21, 1956, in Liaoning Province, China, is a renowned author known for his significant contributions to English literature, despite it being his second language. His most notable work, *Waiting* (1999), earned him the National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, highlighting his ability to craft compelling narratives that often explore themes of love and social injustice set against the backdrop of China. Jin's literary journey began in the tumultuous era of the Cultural Revolution, which deeply influenced his writings and personal experiences.
After serving in the People's Liberation Army and working various jobs, Jin emigrated to the United States, where he pursued advanced studies in English literature. He has published several acclaimed collections of short stories, including *Ocean of Words* and *Under the Red Flag*, both of which received prestigious awards. Throughout his career, Jin has focused on the complexities of Chinese life, the immigrant experience, and the political landscape, earning recognition not only for his storytelling but also for his reflections on exile and identity. Jin's works, including novels like *War Trash* and *A Map of Betrayal*, continue to resonate with readers, shedding light on the intricate narratives of individuals and society during pivotal historical moments.
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Ha Jin
Chinese-born poet, writer, and educator
- Born: February 21, 1956
- Place of Birth: Jinzhou, Liaoning Province, China
Ha Jin’s novel Waiting (1999) won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000. His short-story collections Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996) and Under the Red Flag (1997) received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996 and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction in 1997, respectively. Unlike many other authors who emigrated from China, Jin writes only in English, his second language, although his stories generally take place in China.
Early Life
Ha Jin was born Jin Xuefei in the Liaoning Province of northern China on February 21, 1956. His father’s position as a military officer allowed his family to live an easier life than the general population. Jin grew up amidst the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution; he was sent to boarding school when he was seven and was there for two years until Communist ruler Mao Zedong (also known as Mao Tsetung) closed schools in China at the beginning of the revolution. Having no school to attend, Jin became a member of the Red Guards and entered the People’s Liberation Army at age fourteen, although he had to say he was sixteen in order to join. He was stationed at the Russian border, where, like many young men of the time, he dreamed of being a hero.
After leaving the army, Jin took a job as a telegraph operator, which gave him the opportunity to listen to English-language radio broadcasts and also allowed him a great deal of time for reading. He worked hard to learn English and was able to enter university as an English major when the schools reopened in China in 1977. Following graduation, he went on to receive an MA in American literature from Shandong University. He also married a fellow academic, Lisah Bian, in 1982, and the couple went on to have one son together.
By that time, China had become more liberal, so it was acceptable for Jin to read American writers. Some visiting scholars at the university were impressed with Jin and encouraged him to come to the United States to study further. He was able to arrange a one-year scholarship to Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Jin’s plan was to return to China to get a good teaching job when he completed his PhD; however, that plan dissolved as he and his wife watched the events that took place in Tiananmen Square in 1989. While at Brandeis, Jin also studied fiction writing in the creative-writing program at Boston University (BU). He received his PhD from Brandeis in 1993 and completed the BU program the following year.
Life’s Work
Jin had trouble finding employment at a university, perhaps because of his difficulties with spoken English, so he took a series of odd jobs to support his family while continuing to write. Finally, based on his publishing success, he was hired by Emory University in Atlanta in 1993 as an assistant professor of creative writing. In 2002, he was offered a full professorship in creative writing at one of his alma maters, Boston University.
One of his first poems was published in the Paris Review; Jin had shown it to a professor at Brandeis, Frank Bidart, who thought the poem was so good that he called the editor of the Review and read it to him over the phone. A few years later, Jin published his first book of poetry, Between Silences (1990). Facing Shadows, his second book of poems, was published in 1996.
Jin’s first book of short stories, Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996), is a collection of stories based on his experiences with Chinese army life. This book received the 1997 Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. Under the Red Flag, his second book of short stories, was completed in 1997 and won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for that year. In this book, Jin focuses on life in China during the Cultural Revolution. His next two books of short stories, Quiet Desperation and The Bridegroom, both published in 2000, are based on how politics in China at that time affected people’s lives.
Jin published his first novel, In the Pond, in 1998. As in his previous work, the story is based in China and is a story of social injustice in modern China. His second novel, Waiting (1999), is based on a true story, with the characters drawn from a situation Jin heard about from his wife’s parents; this novel was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000. The Crazed (2002) is perhaps his most political novel, in which he traces the life of a young student studying for his PhD exams and engaged to his professor’s daughter. When Professor Yang is hospitalized after suffering a stroke, the young student begins to take care of him. Yang hallucinates, telling horror stories about life during the Cultural Revolution, which leads his prospective son-in-law to participate in student protests. Jin’s subsequent novel, War Trash (2004), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
In 2008, Jin published a collection of three connected essays titled The Writer as Migrant. In it, he compares his writing life to that of other literary exiles such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and another Chinese novelist, Lin Yutang. He explores how a writer feels obligated to write about his home country and how emigrating affects the meaning of home.
While events in Jin’s writing generally take place in China, as in the novel Nanjing Requiem (2011), about the Japanese occupation of Nanjing in the 1930s, he has written about the Chinese American immigrant experience as well in his short story collection, A Good Fall (2009), and in his novel, A Map of Betrayal (2014), about a Chinese mole within the CIA. He has never been back to China, partly because his books have been banned there.
Jin followed A Map of Betrayal with The Boat Rocker (2016), a novel about a Chinese journalist who finds himself in the uneviable position of having to investigate his own ex-wife. A Song Everlasting (2021) is about a singer whose choice to perform a show in New York ends up putting him at odds with the Chinese government. In 2023, Jin published The Woman Back From Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty, a novel about pioneering female Chinese stage director Sun Weishi.
Significance
In its fifty years of existence, the National Book Award has only gone to two other writers besides Jin who were not native English speakers: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosinski. Jin is also significant because he is one of the few writers from China who immigrated to the United States but who has set much of his writing in China. Other awards for his work include three Pushcart Prizes for fiction, a Kenyon Review Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jin became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He has won two PEN/Faulkner Awards, along with writers Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and John Edgar Wideman, who are the only other authors to have won the prize more than once.
Bibliography
Acocella, Joan. "The Two Sides of Ha Jin." New Yorker, 18 Aug. 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/the-two-sides-of-ha-jin. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.
Balial, Nandini. "Get Your Sea Legs Ready for Ha Jin's 'The Boat Rocker.'" Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 Oct. 2016, lareviewofbooks.org/article/get-sea-legs-ha-jins-boat-rocker. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.
Cheung, King-Kok. "The Chinese Writer as Migrant: Ha Jin's Restive Manifesto." Amerasia Jour. 38.2 (2012): 2–12. Web. 24 Dec. 2014.
Dobbins, Chloe. "Author Ha Jin unveils novel ‘The Woman Back from Moscow.’" Daily Mississippian, 25 Sept. 2023, thedmonline.com/author-ha-jin-unveils-novel-the-woman-back-from-moscow. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.
Fay, Sarah. "Ha Jin: The Art of Fiction No. 202." Paris Rev. 191 (2009): 117–145. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 24 Dec. 2014.
Garner, Dwight. “Ha Jin’s Cultural Revolution.” New York Times Magazine. New York Times, 6 Feb. 2000. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
Jin, Ha. War Trash. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.
Jin, Ha. The Writer as Migrant. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.
Johnson, Charles C. "Ha Jin's China." Rev. of Nanjing Requiem, by Ha Jin. New Criterion 30.7 (2012): 77–80. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2014.
Shan, Te-hsing. "Sublimating History into Literature: Reading Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem." Amerasia Jour. 38.2 (2012): 25–34. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Dec. 2014.