Ha Jin was born Jin Xuefei in Liaoning, a province in northeast China, on February 21, 1956. Growing up, he expected to follow a military career like his father. One of the most significant events in China when Jin was growing up was the Cultural Revolution declared by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s. Because education was considered dangerous to Communist ideology, schools were closed, leaving Jin to piece his education together from whatever few written materials he could obtain. At age fifteen, he entered military service, starting as an artillery gunner and then becoming the operator of a telegraph machine. While he was in the service, stationed at a small town near the Russian border, he began the habit of reading, as books were passed around among the soldiers. In 1974, he left the army and worked as a telegraph operator for the Harbin Railroad Company. Listening to...