Ha Jin

• Name — Ha Jin 哈金 • Pen Name — Ha Jin • Born — 21 February 1956 • Birthplace — Liaoning, China • Occupation — * Poet • novelist • teacher • Education — Heilongjiang University (BA) Shandong University (MA) Brandeis University (PhD) • Genre — Poetry, short story, novel, essay • Subjects — China • Spouse — Lisha Bian

• Order — st • C — 哈 • P — Hā Jīn • Altname — Jin Xuefei • S2 — 金 • T2 — 金 • P2 — Jīn Xuěfēi Jin Xuefei (born February 21, 1956) is a Chinese American poet and novelist who uses the pen name Ha Jin. The name Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.

Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer; at thirteen, Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. Jin began to educate himself in Chinese literature and high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen as he entered Heilongjiang University, later earning a bachelor's degree in English studies. This was followed by a master's degree in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University. Jin grew up in the chaos of early communist China. He was on a scholarship at Brandeis University when the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre occurred. The Chinese government's forcible crackdown hastened his decision to emigrate to the United States, and was the cause of his choice to write in English "to preserve the integrity of his work." He eventually obtained a Ph.D. One of his mentors was literary critic Eugene Goodheart.

Jin sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional Muji City. He has won the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, Waiting (1999). He has received three Pushcart Prizes for fiction and a Kenyon Review Award. 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, while Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set during the Korean War, won a second PEN/Faulkner Award for Jin, thus ranking him with Philip Roth, John Edgar Wideman and E. L. Doctorow as the only other authors to have won the prize more than once. War Trash was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

• Between Silences (1990) • Facing Shadows (1996) • Ways of Talking (1996) • Wreckage (2001) • Missed Time • The Past • A Distant Center (2018, Copper Canyon Press)

• In the Pond (1998) • Waiting (1999) • The Crazed (2002) • War Trash (2004) • A Free Life (2007) • Nanjing Requiem (2011) • A Map of Betrayal (2014) • The Boat Rocker (2016) • A Song Everlasting (2021) • The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty (2023) • "Looking For Tank Man" (2025)

• The Banished Immortal (2019)

• The Writer as Migrant (2008)