Ha Jin
His father was a military officer; at thirteen, Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution.Jin began to educate himself in Chinese literature and high school curriculum at sixteen.He left the army when he was nineteen[2] as he entered Heilongjiang University, later earning a bachelor's degree in English studies.The Chinese government's forcible crackdown hastened his decision to emigrate to the United States, and was the cause of his choice to write in English "to preserve the integrity of his work."Jin was a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in the fall of 2008.