HA JIN left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of six previous novels, four story collections, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is director of the creative writing program at Boston University.
Ha Jin only gets better and better. In The Boat Rocker he continues with his supply of unadorned prose, as evocative as Chekhov s and sometimes as charming as E.B. White s. But he also draws us, so gently that we hardly notice, into some very deep questions, first about Chinese-American identity, then about identity for any person, and then about the value and the risks, for anyone, of living with integrity. Perry Link