 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Ha JinHa Jin was born in 1956 in Liaoning Province in northern China. For six years, beginning at age 14, he served in the People's Liberation Army. After his military service ended, he taught himself English while working the night shift as a railroad telegrapher. In 1977, when colleges reopened after the Cultural Revolution, he passed the entrance exams and was assigned to study English, although this was his last choice for a major. Ha Jin received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Chinese universities, and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, supporting himself as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and as a night watchman in a factory. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he decided that, as a writer, he could not return to China. In 1993 he earned a Ph.D. in English from Brandeis. He has published two collections of poetry, Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996), and two collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words (1996), which received the PEN/Hemingway award, and Under the Red Flag (1997), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. In the Pond was published in 1998. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999, as well as the PEN/Faulkner award. Ha Jin lives in Atlanta, where he is Young J. Allen Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.Back to In the Pond, Ocean of Words, and The Bridegroom
|