Xuefei (pronounced shu-FAY) Jin, who writes under the pen name of Ha Jin, was born on 21 February 1956 in Liaoning, China, where his father, Danlin, an officer in the Chinese People's Liberation Army, was stationed. Jin went to boarding school when he was seven but returned home to his father and mother, Yuanfen, two years later when Chairman Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution and closed schools throughout mainland China. In the years that followed, young Jin became a member of the Little Red Guard and spent his time, as he recalled in a 6 February 2000 interview with Dwight Garner of The New York Times, "wearing red armbands, waving flags and singing revolutionary songs." At age fourteen, amid rising tensions between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, he lied about his age and enlisted in the People's Liberation Army. "Like everyone else," Jin told Garner, "I wanted to be a hero, a martyr." His army service lasted five and a half years, one of which he spent on a frigid outpost on the border of China and Soviet Russia. He eventually developed an affinity for Russian literature that remains a strong influence on his work today.
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