Ha Jin has been considered a major American fiction writer ever since the publication of his first book of short stories, Oceans of Words, in 1996. His work has won major writing awards, including the PEN/Hemingway prize, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His books have been reviewed in academic journals such as World Literature Today, and in popular magazines with widespread circulation like Entertainment Weekly. In less than a decade, Ha Jin has earned a reputation as one of the most important voices in Sino-American literature.

His most successful book to date has been his second novel, Waiting, a love story about a Chinese army doctor who returns to his home village every year for seventeen years to beg for a divorce from his wife so that he can remarry. That book was the...