Xuafei Jin, who writes under the pen name of Ha Jin, was born in China in 1956. For much of his childhood, he was unable to attend school due to the closure of China’s schools during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. However, his family included many relatives, including his parents, who were well read and considered intellectuals, which led to some amount of persecution during the Cultural Revolution. In later years, Jin recalled seeing his father’s extensive book collection being hauled into the street and burned in a bonfire. He attended Heilongjiang University and Shandong University in China. There, he studied American literature, which became an in-demand area of study at Chinese universities after 1976.  Jin moved to the United States in 1985 to pursue his doctoral degree at Brandeis University. He opted to remain in the United States due to events such as the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. 

Jin has written more than twenty novels and collections of poetry and short stories, including Waiting (1999), In the Pond (1998), The Bridegroom (2000), War Trash (2004), Nanjing Requiem (2011), and A Song Everlasting (2021). Several of Jin’s novels and stories deal with topics such as the cultural and societal changes in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution, historical events such as the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, and the lives of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. Waiting, which won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is the story of a doctor who is torn between the modern, forward-thinking woman he loves and the wife who was chosen for him in an arranged marriage seventeen years before. Jin has taught at several colleges and universities in the United States, including Emory University in Atlanta. He is currently on the faculty at Boston University.