Short Story

It pays not to be too disrespectful of those in authority for two ignorant peasants in China.

Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer, and Jin joined the People's Liberation Army in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. In 1981 he graduated from University with a B.A. in English studies, and three years later obtained his Masters in Anglo-American literature.

Ha Jin was on scholarship at Brandeis University when the 1989 Tiananmen incident happened. The Chinese government's forcible put-down hastened his decision to emigrate to the U.S.A. He sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional Muji City. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, Waiting (1999). Many of his short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthologies as well as smaller, independent journals. His collection Under The Red Flag (1997) won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, while Ocean of Words (1996) has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel War Trash (2004), set during the Korean War, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ha Jin currently teaches at Boston University.

The reader is Patrick Dickson.

Producer

Anne Wynter