A Journey to Freedom, in Fiction
CAS’s Ha Jin reads from his newest novel Tuesday
Click on the video above to hear Ha Jin read from his short story “A Composer and His Parakeet.”
After winning his second PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005, for War Trash, Xuefei Jin said that the book represented a literary departure from China, his homeland. “This book is a transition,” the College of Arts and Sciences professor of creative writing said of his third novel. “A step towards the United States.”
Two years later, Jin (GRS’94) has completed the transition with the publication of A Free Life, a novel that chronicles a family’s migration to America after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The novel, published tomorrow by Random House, is the first set entirely in the author’s adopted country. Jin, who uses the pen name Ha Jin, will read from A Free Life Tuesday, October 30, at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble at Boston University, 600 Beacon St.
Born in China in 1956, Jin was a teenager when the country entered the Cultural Revolution. His novel Waiting, which won a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award, was based on his experiences during five years in the Red Army, beginning at age 14. He earned a master’s degree at China’s Shandong University, and in 1986 he came to the United States to begin doctoral work at Brandeis. He received a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for his second, Under the Red Flag. When War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005, Jin joined only two other novelists, Philip Roth and John Edgar Wideman, to have been given the PEN/Faulkner twice in its 25-year history. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
In the video above, Jin reads from his short story “A Composer and His Parakeet” at the annual Faculty Reading on January 30, 2007. He was one of seven faculty members who read from their work at the event, sponsored by BU’s Creative Writing Program.
Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.