"Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this book is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's "Cathay." This is a profound book, an event." Frank Bidart
"In these poems Ha Jin gives voice to the millions whose lives were altered and whose tongues were silenced by the Cultural Revolution. . . .If Ha Jin speaks in tongues in these poems, we feel him behind those voices the hidden director behind the scenes never...

-In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know.---Judges' Citation,...

A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post, Los Angeles times, and San Jose Mercury News Best Book of the Year
Ha Jin's seismically powerful new novel is at once an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist Chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. When the venerable professor Yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. Since the dutiful Jian plans to marry his mentor's beautiful, icy daughter, the job requires delicacy. Just how much...

Ha Jin's masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao's "volunteer" army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from...

This collection of 12 short stories brings to life the daily dramas of Chinese men and women who are beginning to feel the influence of the West whilst still immersed in a society that attempts to control their every move and thought.

Ha Jin's themes of personal honour in the face of political rectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, 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 party bosses.