Chinese American Artists

Ha Jin

Born:  1956 
Place of Birth: Liaoning, China 
Came to U.S.: 1985
Profession: Professor, writer

	Ha Jin, a Chinese born English Writer, became famous because he is the 
first Chinese American ever to win the National Book Award for fiction.
Ha Jin (Xuefeng Jin)t was born in mainland China, and grew up in a small
rural town in Liaoningt Province. When the Cultural Revolution began, he
was ten years old. The schools were fully or half shut down. At age fourteen, he joined the 
Liberation Army. He stayed in the Northeastern Border between China and 
the former Soviet Union. Ha Jin began to teach himself middle and 
high-school courses while he was still in the Army, and decided to go to 
college. Yet the colleges remained closed when he left the Army in 1975. 
He worked as a telegrapher at a railroad company for three years in 
Jiamusi, a remote border city in China's Northeast. During that time, Ha 
Jin began to follow the English courses on the radio hoping someday he 
could read Friedrich Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in England 
in 1944 in English original.

	In 1977, colleges in China reopened. Ha Jin passed the very competitive 
entrance exam and was admitted to Heilongjiang University in Harbin 
majoring English, even though English was his last choice among the three 
majors he picked. After earning his BA in English, he went on to study 
American Literature in Shandong University and earned his MA in 1984. The 
following year, Ha Jin came to the United States to do graduate work at 
Brandeis University and received his Ph.D. in English in 1993. During that 
period, he also studied fiction writing at Boston University with the 
novelists Leslie Epstein and Aharon Appelfeld.

	Ha Jin published his first poetry book in English, "Between Silences" 
(University of Chicago Press) in 1990. Then in 1996, he published another 
poetry book, "Facing Shadows" (Hanging Loose Press). His two short story 
books "Ocean of Words" (Zoland Books) and "Under the Red Flag" were 
published in 1997 and 1999. "Ocean of Words" won the PEN/Hemingway Award 
and "Under the Red Flag" was the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for 
short fiction and was one the finalists for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book 
Award.  "In the Pond" (Zoland Books, 1998) was his first novel. Soon 
after,"Waiting" followed (Pantheon, 1999), his hit novel.  "Waiting" was 
well received by the critics and won the 1999 National Book Award for 
Fiction. His stories and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, 
Harper's, The Paris Review, The TriQuaterly, The Kenyon Review, and 
elsewhere. They have been included in anthologies, such as The Pushcart 
Prize, the Best American Short Stories (1997, 1999), The 
NortonIntroductionto Literature, and others.

	Ha Jin's stories are mostly about life in the Army, in the factory or in 
the small rural towns during China's Cultural revolution. Those are 
peculiar times with peculiar characters, hardly an average American is 
familiar with.  Yet, being such a remarkable story teller, with his dry 
humor, and his subtle style, Ha Jin brings everyone to his stories with 
ease. In reading the exotic, bizarre, sometimes funny yet mostly true 
stories, one feels the pure exploration of the human heart.
Currently, Ha Jin is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing/English at 
Emory University.