Ha Jin

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Ha Jin

Ha Jin ( Chinese  哈 金 , Pinyin Hā Jīn ; born February 21, 1956 in Jinzhou , China ) is an American author of Chinese origin.

Life

Ha Jin, actually Jin Xuefei ( Chinese  金雪飞 ), was born in 1956 in the northeast Chinese city ​​of Jinzhou . At the age of 14 he became a soldier during the Cultural Revolution and served on the Sino-Soviet border for five years. Under difficult conditions he trained himself further . In 1977, when the universities reopened, he enrolled at Harbin University .

In 1985 he emigrated to the USA . He received his doctorate from Brandeis University in 1992. He now works as a professor of English literature in Boston (Boston University).

His published 1999 novel Waiting (dt. Wait , 2000) won some of the most prestigious American literary awards : 1999 National Book Award, the 2000 PEN / Faulkner Award , at the same time there was a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize . The novel is about a love triangle that takes place in China during the Cultural Revolution. Doctor Lin Kong falls in love with a nurse, but is only allowed to divorce after 18 years. Meanwhile everyone involved - he, his wife and his lover - are waiting, and Lin Kong, who is not exactly steadfast, vacillates between the two women again and again.

This was followed by the novel The Crazed (2002, German crazy , 2004). A literature professor seems to have gone mad after a stroke and is being cared for by a student. At the same time, the issue of politics is always on the agenda, which in its gloom reminds us of Albert Camus .

His 2004 published novel War Trash , (dt. War Pack , 2005) tells the fate of a young Chinese with good English, who as a soldier in the Korean War gets captured by the Americans and acts in the camp as a translator for various political groupings.

The question of loyalty, if he is to return home to the People's Republic of China , to his mother and fiancé, but also to the communist regime, to which he does not feel a part, or to take the opportunity to emigrate to capitalist Taiwan , is a topic of the book. The brutality and misanthropy institutionalized by the war in all ideological camps is another. War Trash is the people without authority, soldiers and civilians who are interchangeable, expendable, cannon fodder.

Ha Jin received another PEN / Faulkner Award (2005) for War Trash . Ha Jin was Mary Ellen from the Heyden Fellow For Fiction 2008 at the American Academy in Berlin . He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014.

Works

  • In the Pond , Roman (1998, Eng. Im Teich )
  • Waiting , Roman (1999, German waiting )
  • The Crazed , Roman (2002, German crazy )
  • War Trash , Roman (2004, German war pack )
  • A Free Life , Roman (2007, German A Free Life ), German by Susanne Hornfeck; Ullstein, Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-548-60970-6 .
  • The Writer as Migrant , Essay (2008).
    • German from English by Susanne Hornfeck: The emigrated author. By searching for your own language . Arche Verlag, Hamburg / Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7160-2708-0 .
  • Nanjing Requiem , Roman (2011, German Nanking Requiem ), German by Susanne Hornfeck; Ullstein, Berlin 2012. ISBN 978-3-550-08890-2 ; excellent u. a. with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
  • A map of betrayal. Pantheon Books, New York 2014. (German. Betrayed. From the American by Susanne Hornfeck. Arche, Zurich / Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7160-2725-7 .)

stories

Poetry

  • Between Silences (1990)
  • Facing Shadows (1996)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 16, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Jin, Ha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jin Xuefei, Xuefei Jin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author of Chinese origin
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Jinzhou , China