Ha Jin

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Jīn Xuěfēi (Simplified Chinese: 金雪飞; Traditional Chinese: 金雪飛; born February 21, 1956) is a contemporary Chinese-American writer using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金).

Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China in 1956. His father was a military officer, and Jin joined the Chinese liberation army in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. In 1981 he graduated from Heilongjiang University with a Bachelor's degree in English studies, and three years later obtained his Masters in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University.

Ha Jin was on scholarship at Brandeis University, in the United States, when the 1989 Tiananmen incident happened. The Chinese government's forcible put-down hastened his decision to emigrate. He remained in the United States after his Ph.D. in 1992, publishing his first book of poems, Between Silences, in 1990.

He sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional Muji City. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, Waiting (1999). Many of his short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthologies, and his collection Under The Red Flag (1997) won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, while Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set in the Korean War, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.