Xuefei Jin, who writes under the pen-name Ha Jin, was born in 1956 in Liaoning province in northern China. At only 14 years of age, Ha Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army. He began teaching himself the middle and high school courses since his third year in the army. After his military service ended, he taught himself English while working the night shift as a railroad telegrapher in Jiamusi, a remote frontier city in the Northeast. During that time he followed the English learner’s program, hoping someday to read Friedrich Engels'works in the English original.

Through his perseverance and hard work, he not only succeeded in improving his English skills but also got his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in universities. In 1985 he left for the United States to study English literature for future education.

“For the initial years it was like having a blood transfusion, like you are changing your blood,” recalled Ha Jin. But his perseverance paid off. Not only did he secure a job teaching creative writing after graduation, but his fiction received a number of important praises. In the spring of 1997，he won the prestigious Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for First Fiction for his collection of short stories, Ocean of the Words. “This debut book, of simple style and understated beauty,” the judge commented, “is occasion for real celebration.”

While Jin admits there are elements of his life and experiences in much of his writing, he says his work is not autobiographical, a practice he tells his students puts serious constraints on a writer. “When you construct a piece of work, a novel or a story, you need a lot of drama and a message,” explains Ha Jin. “But when you write an autobiographical piece, you cannot create a happening. If this has not happened, you cannot say it happened. It is not faithful to reality, and so that is the limitation. In addition to that, I want to make my work better than myself.”

While he enjoys each of these forms of writing, Ha Jin says practical reasons make short stories his favorite genre. “You can get into a short story and out easily，” he explains. “If I work on a novel, I have to immerse myself in it completely for a long time. You are just absorbed by the work, so it is a very hard process, and sometimes I don’t have the time and the leisure to do that. As for poetry, it’s pure luck. You don’t know whether this work will work, and you just try and try. I abandon a lot of poems, and so I think it is a high order of writing. It’s harder and it depends on luck. Sometimes you write a poem without much effort but it works well, and sometimes you just work for months on one but it doesn’t work.”

In an interview when asked about the most important advice he could give to young writers, he said, “Be patient. Patience is everything. Sometimes you just waste weeks and months. It happened to me a few times. I wrote eighteen pages and realized it was terrible and had to start again. This is why patience is everything.”