Ha Jin
Ha Jin is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary scholar who has received both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, among the most significant literary prizes available to fiction writers in the United States.
Ha Jin was born on February 21, 1956, in Jinzhou, in the People's Republic of China. He pursued his early education at Heilongjiang University and Shandong University before completing further academic training at Brandeis University in the United States. He holds citizenship in both the People's Republic of China and the United States, and has worked across multiple literary forms, including the novel, the short story, poetry, and literary scholarship, while also serving as a university teacher. The Chinese language has been part of his working life as a writer.
The range of formal recognition Ha Jin has received reflects the breadth of his activity across genres. In addition to the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Asian American Literary Awards, the Great Immigrants Award, and the Berlin Prize. These awards span fiction, early short-form work recognized by the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and broader recognition of his career through fellowships and international prizes.
The Berlin Prize represents one of the more recent formal acknowledgments of Ha Jin's work as a writer and literary scholar. His roles as novelist, short story writer, poet, literary scholar, and university teacher together account for the varied institutional recognition he has accumulated. The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, which is typically given to short fiction, points to the early development of a career that would go on to receive the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, two of the most prominent prizes in American letters.
Quotes by Ha Jin
Once you’ve done it with him, he won’t abandon you. If he really loves you, if he’s a man with a heart, he’ll follow you wherever you go. If he doesn’t, he isn’t the man you want, is he?
He sat down in a corner and ordered half a pound of dumplings, which came in a white bowl with a blue rim. While he was eating, his memory was further revived and sharpened by the familiar taste of the stuffing, made of pork, leeks, cabbage, dried shrimp, ginger, sesame oil. Every bit of the memory became unmistakable now.
To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.
I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear – the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.
No, It’s hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it’s also an opportunity, another kind of growth.
Where should he go? He wanted to find a building out of which he could jump and kill himself. How about the temple? No, it only had two stories. Too low. How about the elementary school? No, his ghost might frighten the children if he died there, and people would condemn him.
You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.