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.[3]
Jin was a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in the fall of 2008. He was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014.
On July 28, 2021, an asteroid was named after him: (58495) Hajin.[5]
John Noell Moore, "The Landscape Of Divorce When Worlds Collide," The English Journal 92 (Nov. 2002), pp. 124–127.
Ha Jin, Waiting (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).
Neil J Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 59.
Ha Jin, The Bridegroom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).
Yuejin Wang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (Dec. 1991).
Ha Jin, "Exiled to English" (New York Times, May 30, 2009).
