Ha Jin

Captured by enemy forces, Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer serving in Korea in 1951, takes on the role of interpreter thanks to his proficiency in English, a role that places him in the middle of the conflict between his fellow prisoners and their captors and between rival groups of prisoners. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

A Novel

War Trash

Een professor krijgt een beroerte, waarna zijn student en aanstaande schoonzoon plichtsgetrouw de verzorging op zich neemt.

The Crazed

Jin Ha (écrivain).)

During the 1937 attack on Nanjing, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.

Nanjing Requiem

An anthology by the National Book Award-winning author of The Bridegroom contains intricately detailed pieces illuminating the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America, from a lonely composer who takes comfort in a parakeet's song to a group of children who want to change their names.

A Good Fall

Shocked by discoveries in her late CIA mole father's diary, Lilian Shang travels to China to meet the family her father was forced to abandon after World War II. By the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting. 40,000 first printing.

A Map of Betrayal

"An urgent, timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country as he works to find his way in the United States. After popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York at the end of a tour with his state-supported choir, expecting to pick up some extra cash for his daughter's tuition fund, the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, he is informed that the sponsors of the event were in support of Taiwan's secession and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, he impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government's threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend, Yabin, Tian's career begins to flourish in the United States. Soon placed on a government blacklist and thwarted by the State at every turn, it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. But Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art."--

A Song Everlasting

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Nan Wu, who had studied in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, leaves China with his wife and son to seek the freedom of the West, embarking on a migration that takes them through the heart of contemporary America.

A Free Life

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Mannu Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lves forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of wisdom.

Waiting

A new collection of twelve short stories captures the daily lives and experiences of Chinese women and men who struggle to deal with the influx of Western influence into a society that attempts to control their every thought and move. By the author of Waiting. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

Stories

The Bridegroom

From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai—also known as Li Po In his own time (701–762), Li Bai's poems—shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life—were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years—in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history—and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.

A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)

The Banished Immortal

Twelve stories describe the experiences of Chinese officers and soldiers stationed along the Chinese-Russian border

Ocean of Words

Ha Jin has been compared to the late Issac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. Winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection Under the Red Flag, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty and poignant irony. His themes of personal honour in the face of political rectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, In the Pond, a close, unsentimental depiction of life in a small factory town; the manoeuvring, posturing, petty jealousies and injustices of an ordinary man who tangles with the party bosses.

In the Pond

From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist's dogged quest for truth in the Internet age. New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by the Chinese diaspora around the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers--and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom. Haili's scheme infuriates Danlin both morally and personally--he will do whatever it takes to expose her as a fraud. But in outing Haili, he is also provoking her powerful political allies, and he will need to draw on all of his journalistic cunning to emerge from this investigation with his career--and his life--still intact. A brilliant, darkly funny story of corruption, integrity, and the power of the pen, The Boat Rocker is a tour de force of modern fiction.

The Boat Rocker

As a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

The Writer as Migrant

Tamer Tosun

Savaş artığı

This unforgettable novel tells the story, in memoir form, of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, one of a corps of 'volunteers' sent by Mao to help shore up the communist side in Korea. When Yu is captured by the Americans, his command of English thrusts him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that defines the POW camp. Desperate to return to his beloved fiancee and his widowed mother, Yu Yuan is trapped not only by barbed wire, but also by politics...Taking us behind the barbed wire, Ha Jin renders brilliantly the complex world the prisoners inhabit. As Yu and his fellow captives struggle to create some sense of community while remaining watchful of the deceptions inherent in every exchange, only the idea of home can hold out the promise of a return to their former selves.

Poetry. Asian American Studies. New poems by the author of Waiting, winner of the National Book Award. Ha Jin's writing has been called luminous and eloquent by The New York Times Book Review, extraordinary by the Chicago Sun-Times and achingly beautiful by the Los Angeles Times. Asianweek calls him a master of lyric.

Wreckage

In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's brilliant poems--shaped by Daoist thought, filled with an irrepressible lust for life--were never given their proper due. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname: the Banished Immortal. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story, following Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his rambling travels as a young man. Jin also takes us through the poet's later years--in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history--and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Today, Bai's verses remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language--taught to schoolchildren, recited at parties and toasts--and are famed throughout the world. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, drink, dance, and mourn without reservation produced some of the world's most enduring verses.

Saboteur

In the bold tradition of the “Misty Poets,” Ha Jin confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape. The poems of A Distant Center speak in a voice that is steady and direct, balancing contemplative longing with sober warnings from a writer who has confronted the traumas of censorship and state violence. With unadorned language and epigrammatic wit, Jin conjures scenes that encompass the personal, historical, romantic, and environmental, interrogating conceptions of foreignness and national identity as they appear and seep into everyday interactions and being. These are poems that offer solace in times of political reaction and uncertainty. Jin’s voice is wise, comforting, and imploring; his words are necessary and his lessons are invaluable. Question your place in the world—do not be complacent—look for strength and hope in every nook: “Keep in mind the meaning of / your existence: wherever you land, / your footprints will become milestones.”

Ha Jin

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