Ha Jin, pseud. of Jin Xuefei, 1956–, Chinese-American writer, grad. Heilongjiang Univ. (B.A. 1981), Shandong Univ. (M.A., 1984), Brandeis (M.A., Ph.D., 1993). In the early 1980s he came to the United States to study, immigrated after the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), and taught at Emory and Boston universities. His first published works were volumes of poetry, Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996). Ha Jin turned to fiction with Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996) and Under the Red Flag (1997), prize-winning collections of short stories set in China. His first novel, Waiting (1999), a tale of contemporary China, brought him widespread recognition and the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards. Written in a restrained and dispassionate style, his fiction also includes the novels The Crazed (2002), War Trash (2004), A Free Life (2007), an immigrant's story and his first set in America, Nanjing Requiem (2011), and A Map of Betrayal (2014) as well as the short stories in The Bridegroom (2000) and A Good Fall (2009). The Banished Immortal (2019) is a biography of the poet Li Po.
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