Born in Jing County, Liaoning Province in northeastern China in 1956, Xuefei Jin with a pen name of Ha Jin, adopted for easier pronunciation, was the first Chinese-born American writer who won both National Book Award and PEN/Hemingway Award. However, Jin became an English-language writer almost by happenstance. His father was an army officer. Therefore, when facing the choices between going to work in the countryside and joining the People's Liberation Army at age fourteen, he choose the later and patrolled the board between Northern China and the Soviet Union for six years. After leaving the Army, he worked as a railroad telegrapher in Harbin, the capital city of Helonjjiang Province from 1975 to 1977 and taught himself English by listening to the radio. In 1988, he went to Helonjjiang University, also in Harbin, a city he loved so much that he used the first character of it, Ha, in his pen name, and graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1982. Then he moved with his father, who just retired from the Army, to their home province of Shandong.
Two years later, Jin received his M.A. degree in American literature from Shandong University, there he was taught by visiting American Fulbright scholars and exposed for the first time to former National Book award-winning authors such as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. While Jin enjoyed reading Faulkner and Flannery and other American novelists, he never imagined he would one day follow in their footsteps. He wanted to be a scholar and a translator. Shortly after his marriage to a young mathematician, Lisha Bian, Jin was given the opportunity to pursue a scholarship overseas. In 1985 he came to the United States to begin doctoral work on modern American poetry at Brandies University in Waltham, Massachusetts, left his new wife behind until she managed to join him in the States in 1987. He had planned to return to China after four years, but in the turmoil following the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he decided to stay. It was difficult for him to find a job in academia. By then he had published a book of poems in English (Between Silences) so he thought if he continued to publish some books in English he might find a job teaching creative writing. Basically it was an instinct for survival that forced him into writing. Although Jin was determined to write, he had only written several unpublished short stories back in China. To him, chose to write in English meant much labor and some despair. When he applied to the Creative Writing Program at Boston University in 1991, Leslie Epstein, the program director, could not accept him because his English was not quite fluent. But Epstein was impressed by Jin's determination to write and allowed him to audit the courses. As a result, all the short stories in Ocean of Words were written during that audit year. When Jin reapplied to the program a year later he was accepted as a full-time student.
In 1992, Jin received his Ph.D. degree from Brandies. One year later he was accepted by Emory University as an assistant professor of creative writing. In the following years, he published two collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, which received the PEN/Hemingway award, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His novel In The Pond was selected as a best fiction book of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune and Waiting, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999 as well as the PEN/Faulkner award (2000). His short stores have been included in The Best American Short Stories (1997 and 1999), three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and Norton Introduction to Fiction and Norton Introduction to Literature, among other anthologies. He also became the Young J. Allen Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. (Guoqing Li)