Ha Jin facts for kids
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Jīn Xuěfēi (simplified Chinese: 金雪飞; traditional Chinese: 金雪飛; born February 15, 1956) is a living Chinese-American writer. He uses the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. In 1984, he went to America and began to write about China only in English. His work increased international attention to Chinese culture and history.
Contents
Early life
Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer. Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution when he was 13 years old. He began to teach himself about Chinese literature and to learn the high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen, as he entered Heilongjiang University. He got his B. A. degree in English studies there. Next, he earned a M.A. degree in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University.
Jin grew up in the chaos of early communist China. He was at Brandeis University when the 1989 Tiananmen incident happened. The way the Chinese government stopped the protest by force was important to Jin. It helped him decide to emigrate to the United States. It also made him choose to write in English "to preserve the integrity of his work." He eventually earned a Ph.D..
Career
Jin sets many of his stories and novels in China in an imaginary place called 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. Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set during the Korean War, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Jin teaches at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. He used to teach at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jin was at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in the fall of 2008. He was a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction.
Major Works
Poetry
- Between Silences (1990)
- Facing Shadows (1996)
- Wreckage (2001)
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)
Essays
- The Writer as Migrant (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)
- John Noell Moore, “The Landscape Of Divorce When Worlds Collide,” The English Journal 92 (Nov. 2002), pp. 124–127.
- Ha Jin, Waiting (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
- 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.
- Ha Jin, The bridegroom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000)
- Yuejin Wang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (Dec. 1991)
- Ha Jin, "Exiled to English" (New York Times, May 30, 2009)
- Watch Ha Jin talk about the challenges of writing A Free Life on BUniverse.
