Powerlessness pervades Ha Jin's perceptive A Song Everlasting, as his protagonist leaves fame and familiarity in one country to flee toward ambiguity and adaptation in another. Freedom, Yao Tian reasons, is his driving motive. National Book Award-winner Jin (A Map of Betrayal), notable for empathically crafting...
*STARRED REVIEW When Fen Danlin first landed in New York to join his wife, Yan Haili, she delivered him to a "seedy" Chinatown inn with $500 and instructions to stay – alone – within walking distance of an arranged restaurant job. She returned the next day...
*STARRED REVIEW CIA agent Gary Shang was convicted of spying for China yet called himself "a patriot of both the United States and China." Decades after Gary's death, Lilian, his only child with his American wife, unexpectedly inherits his diary from his longtime mistress and discovers...
Ha Jin has lived through difficult, defining events: the Cultural Revolution in his native China, military service that began when he was a young teenager, immigration and subsequent separation from home and family. On the page, he has vividly reproduced the repression of the Cultural...
*STARRED REVIEW In an introductory galley letter, National Book Award winner Ha Jin (Waiting, 1999) announces his intent to reclaim American missionary Minnie Vautrin’s heroism during the 1937 Nanjing massacre: “She suffered and ruined herself helping others, but she became a legend. At least her story has...
With an enviable literary reputation built on award-winning titles set in China, poet/novelist/short story writer Jin recently debuted his first U.S.-based novel, A Free Life, about the Americanization of a Chinese immigrant family. While the 12 stories in his latest release continue to explore familiar...
In spite of a spare not-quite 100 pages, Ha Jin's first nonfiction – and must-read – title is filled with fascinating, challenging ideas about writers living in countries and creating in languages not originally their own. Best known for his 1999 National Book Award winning novel, Waiting,...
If literary awards are any measure of prowess, then native Chinese speaker Ha Jin has most certainly mastered the English language. As a writer of poems, short stories, and fiction, he has been showered...
Based on historical accounts, Ha Jin’s third novel opens with the words of an elderly man who records his memoirs for his American-born grandchildren. He
methodically recounts his experiences as a young “volunteer” Chinese army...
From the author of the National Book Award-winner, Waiting, another spare, disarming, amazing novel about trying to survive life in post-Mao China. Jian Wan, a graduate student in literature, cares for his hospitalized mentor, a professor,...
Twelve short stories about daily life in modern China, penned by National Book Award winner for Waiting. The collection could be read as a companion title to Waiting, as Ha Jin returns to the same Muji...
