Background
Mr. Jin was born in Liaoning, China, on February 21, 1956. He was a son of Danlin (an officer) and Yuanfen (a worker; maiden name, Zhao) Jin.
(Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a f...)
Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400075793/?tag=2022091-20
(National Book Award-winner Ha Jin's arresting debut novel...)
National Book Award-winner Ha Jin's arresting debut novel , In the Pond, is a darkly funny portrait of an amateur calligrapher who wields his delicate artist's brush as a weapon against the powerful party bureaucrats who rule his provincial Chinese town. Shao Bin is a downtrodden worker at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant by day and an aspiring artist by night. Passed over on the list to receive a decent apartment for his young family, while those in favor with the party's leaders are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his powerlessness. When he attempts to expose his corrupt superiors by circulating satirical cartoons, he provokes an escalating series of merciless counterattacks that send ripples beyond his small community. Artfully crafted and suffused with earthy wit, In the Pond is a moving tale about humble lives caught up in larger social forces.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375709118/?tag=2022091-20
(A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year Lilian ...)
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year Lilian Shang, a history professor in Maryland, knew that her father, Gary, had been the most important Chinese spy ever caught in the United States. But when she discovers his diary after the death of her parents, its pages reveal the full pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of her father’s dilemma—torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. As she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of the Shangs. A stunning portrait of a multinational family, an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of patriotism, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804170363/?tag=2022091-20
(From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book A...)
From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, a collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful. In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the hansomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is arrested for the "crime" of homosexuality. In "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," the workers at an American-style fast food franchise receive a hilarious crash course in marketing, deep frying, and that frustrating capitalist dictum, "the customer is always right."Ha Jin has triumphed again with his unforgettable storytelling in The Bridegroom.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375724931/?tag=2022091-20
(A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of th...)
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate  In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family â father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao â as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307278603/?tag=2022091-20
(The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns...)
The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing. In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin—an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save. With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history. At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004KPM1QM/?tag=2022091-20
(In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, Nation...)
In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle to remain loyal to their homeland and its traditions while also exploring the freedom that life in a new country offers. Stark, deeply moving, acutely insightful, and often strikingly humorous, A Good Fall reminds us once again of the storytelling prowess of this superb writer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307473945/?tag=2022091-20
(As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin ...)
As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival. As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival. As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226399885/?tag=2022091-20
(Poetry. Asian American Studies. New poems by the author o...)
Poetry. Asian American Studies. New poems by the author of Waiting, winner of the National Book Award. Ha Jin's writing has been called luminous and eloquent by The New York Times Book Review, extraordinary by the Chicago Sun-Times and achingly beautiful by the Los Angeles Times. Asianweek calls him a master of lyric.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1882413970/?tag=2022091-20
(Poetry. This is the second volume of poems from Chinese e...)
Poetry. This is the second volume of poems from Chinese ex-patriot poet Ha Jin, who moved to the United States after the Tiananmen massacre. "These poems are unflinchingly lucid, luminous, brave, and the shadows faced in this book are faced with a powerful light"--Thomas Lux. His poems have appeared in journals such as AGNI and Poetry, and he holds a doctorate in American Literature from Brandeis University. In 2004, his novel War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner award; his previous novel, Waiting, won the 1997 National Book Award. Ha Jin teaches English at Boston University.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1882413245/?tag=2022091-20
(Since the appearance of his first book of stories in Engl...)
Since the appearance of his first book of stories in English, Ha Jin has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and garnered comparisons to Dickens, Balzac, and Isaac Babel. “Like Babel,” wrote Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review, “Ha Jin observes everything . . . yet he tells the reader only—and precisely—as much as is needed to make his deceptively simple fiction resonate on many levels.” In his luminous new novel, the author of Waiting deepens his portrait of contemporary Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature at a provincial university, has had a stroke, and his student Jian Wan—who is also engaged to Yang’s daughter—has been assigned to care for him. What at first seems a simple if burdensome duty becomes treacherous when the professor begins to rave: pleading with invisible tormentors, denouncing his family, his colleagues, and a system in which a scholar is “just a piece of meat on a cutting board.” Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? And can the dutiful Jian avoid being irretrievably compromised? For in a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who hear the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. At once nuanced and fierce, earthy and humane, The Crazed is further evidence of Ha Jin’s prodigious narrative gifts.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375421815/?tag=2022091-20
("Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this bo...)
"Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this book is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's Cathay. This is a profound book, an event."—Frank Bidart "In these poems Ha Jin gives voice to the millions whose lives were altered and whose tongues were silenced by the Cultural Revolution. . . .If Ha Jin speaks in tongues in these poems, we feel him behind those voices—the hidden director behind the scenes—never as a presence filled with stridency and self-congratulation; he brings a great empathy and compassion to his depiction of the fallible men and women whose acts and attitudes together make up history."—Roger Gilbert, Hungry Mind Review "Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this book is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's Cathay. This is a profound book, an event."—Frank Bidart "In these poems Ha Jin gives voice to the millions whose lives were altered and whose tongues were silenced by the Cultural Revolution. . . .If Ha Jin speaks in tongues in these poems, we feel him behind those voices—the hidden director behind the scenes—never as a presence filled with stridency and self-congratulation; he brings a great empathy and compassion to his depiction of the fallible men and women whose acts and attitudes together make up history."—Roger Gilbert, Hungry Mind Review
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226399869/?tag=2022091-20
(Chinese edition of A Good Fall by Ha Jin. Chinese immigra...)
Chinese edition of A Good Fall by Ha Jin. Chinese immigrants living in Flushing New York - New York City's new Chinatown are caricatured in these short stories. Just like the old Chinatown, the new Chinatown is also a microcosm and the subjects range from the indigent to professional. Their stories touch a cord because these are also stories of all people. Ha Jin translated the book himself. With Chinese Ha Jin's native tongue, the Chinese translation of the original English work might just bring out more than the English ever could. Ha Jin is a multiple award winner, including a National Book Award in 1999 for Waiting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9571351385/?tag=2022091-20
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015X43BKI/?tag=2022091-20
Mr. Jin was born in Liaoning, China, on February 21, 1956. He was a son of Danlin (an officer) and Yuanfen (a worker; maiden name, Zhao) Jin.
Ha Jin had only a brief, incomplete education before the schools in China closed in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. At age 14 he joined the army, and he served for some five years. He later worked as a railway telegraph operator and began to learn English by listening to the radio. When Chinese schools reopened in the late 1970s, he attended Heilongjiang University in Harbin, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree (1981) in English. Mr. Jin earned a Master of Arts degree (1984) in American literature from Shandong University in Qingdao and the next year enrolled at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (Doctor of Philosophy, 1992).
After the Chinese government’s suppression of the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Mr. Jin elected to remain in the United States; he later became a U.S. citizen. He studied in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University (1991–1994).
Since 1993 Mr. Jin occupied the post of an assistant professor of creative writing at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. He taught creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta for nine years before returning, as a faculty member, to Boston University in 2002. Ha Jin’s first published books were the poetry collections Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996); a third collection, Wreckage, appeared in 2001.
Ha Jin currently teaches at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. Mr. Jin was inducted to American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014.
Military service: Chinese People’s Army, 1987-1995.
(A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of th...)
(Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, ...)
(National Book Award-winner Ha Jin's arresting debut novel...)
(From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book A...)
("In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedi...)
(A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year Lilian ...)
(The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns...)
(Since the appearance of his first book of stories in Engl...)
("Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this bo...)
(In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, Nation...)
(This new collection of short stories by the award-winning...)
(Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a f...)
(As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin ...)
(Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award The place is the chilly...)
(Chinese edition of A Good Fall by Ha Jin. Chinese immigra...)
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
(New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fierc...)
(Poetry. Asian American Studies. New poems by the author o...)
(Poetry. This is the second volume of poems from Chinese e...)
Quotations: "If I am inspired, it is from within. Very often I feel that the stories have been inside me for a long time, and that I am no more than an instrument for their Manifestation. As for the subject matter, I guess we are compelled to write about what has hurt us most."
Ha Jin married Lisah Bian on July 6, 1982. The couple has one child, Wen.