Ha Jin has published volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, and novels. His short fiction in Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996) and Under the Red Flag (1997) won praise from critics and two prestigious literary prizes, the PEN/Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor Awards, while an even wider popular acclaim followed the publication of his best-selling novel Waiting (1999), which won the National Book Award. Jin's spare prose style in narrating the lives of ordinary individuals trapped in political and moral ambiguities has led to comparisons with Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Indeed, he explores a world as unfamiliar to most of his readers as Tsarist Russia: the Maoist Chinese culture of his youth.

Much of Jin's work is set in Manchuria, the forbidding yet strategically important northeastern region of China, and his stories generally take place in the turbulent period from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. His...