Ha Jin: Across an Ocean of Words
哈金：超越字海
Xuefei Jin, who writes under the pen-name Ha Jin, was born in 1956 in Liaoning province in northern China. At only 14 years of age, Ha Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army. He began teaching himself the middle and high school courses since his third year in the army. After his military service ended, he taught himself English while working the night shift as a railroad telegrapher in Jiamusi, a remote frontier city in the Northeast. During that time he followed the English learner’s program, hoping someday to read Friedrich Engels'works in the English original.
金雪飞，以哈金的笔名写作，1956年出生于中国东北的辽宁省。14岁时，哈金加入中国人民解放军，入伍第3年，他开始自学初、高中课程。服完兵役后，他在东北偏远城市佳木斯做了一名铁路话务员，并利用夜班时间，自学英语。在这期间，他通过收听电台的英语节目学习英语，希望有一天能读懂恩格斯的英文原著。
Through his perseverance and hard work, he not only succeeded in improving his English skills but also got his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in universities. In 1985 he left for the United States to study English literature for future education.
由于哈金的坚持不懈和刻苦努力，他不仅提高了英语水平，而且取得了大学的学士学位和硕士学位。1985年，他离开中国赴美深造，研究英语语言文学。
“For the initial years it was like having a blood transfusion, like you are changing your blood,” recalled Ha Jin. But his perseverance paid off. Not only did he secure a job teaching creative writing after graduation, but his fiction received a number of important praises. In the spring of 1997，he won the prestigious Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for First Fiction for his collection of short stories, Ocean of the Words. “This debut book, of simple style and understated beauty,” the judge commented, “is occasion for real celebration.”
哈金回忆道：“在美国的最初几年，感觉就像一次大换血。”他的努力没有白费，毕业后，找到了一份稳定的工作，教授写作课程，并通过自己的小说得到了他人的认可。对他而言，得到他人认可非常重要。1997年春天，他凭借短篇小说《字海》赢得了享有盛誉的海明威基金会第一小说奖。评审这样评价：“他的首部短篇小说集，风格简练，有一种朴实的美，这是真正值得庆祝的事情。”
While Jin admits there are elements of his life and experiences in much of his writing, he says his work is not autobiographical, a practice he tells his students puts serious constraints on a writer. “When you construct a piece of work, a novel or a story, you need a lot of drama and a message,” explains Ha Jin. “But when you write an autobiographical piece, you cannot create a happening. If this has not happened, you cannot say it happened. It is not faithful to reality, and so that is the limitation. In addition to that, I want to make my work better than myself.”
哈金承认他的作品中包含一些个人的生活经历，但他表示自己的作品不是自传。他告诉学生，作家写自传会有许多限制。“如果创作小说或故事，只需一个主旨和大量的虚构情节。但写自传时，不能随意编造，如果某事没发生过，就不能说它发生过，否则就是对现实的不忠，这就是自传本身的限制所在。除此之外，我不想使我的作品仅仅局限于自身。”
While he enjoys each of these forms of writing, Ha Jin says practical reasons make short stories his favorite genre. “You can get into a short story and out easily，” he explains. “If I work on a novel, I have to immerse myself in it completely for a long time. You are just absorbed by the work, so it is a very hard process, and sometimes I don’t have the time and the leisure to do that. As for poetry, it’s pure luck. You don’t know whether this work will work, and you just try and try. I abandon a lot of poems, and so I think it is a high order of writing. It’s harder and it depends on luck. Sometimes you write a poem without much effort but it works well, and sometimes you just work for months on one but it doesn’t work.”
哈金喜欢各种写作形式，但更青睐短篇小说，原因很实际，他解释说：“融入和走出短篇小说很容易。我写小说，必须长时间完全沉浸其中，必须要全身心投入到创作中，这是个相当艰难的过程，有时我没时间也没心情去写小说。至于诗歌，全凭运气，因为你不知道写出的诗是好是坏，只能一首接一首地写。我写过很多诗，后来都扔掉了，觉得诗歌对写作要求太高、太难，而且也要靠运气。 有时候，你毫不费力就能写出不错的诗，而有时花费几个月心血写出来的诗却不怎么样。”
In an interview when asked about the most important advice he could give to young writers, he said, “Be patient. Patience is everything. Sometimes you just waste weeks and months. It happened to me a few times. I wrote eighteen pages and realized it was terrible and had to start again. This is why patience is everything.”
在一次访谈中，哈金被问及给年轻作家的一条最重要的忠告时，他说：“一定要有耐心，耐心就是一切。 有时你们会浪费好几个星期甚至几个月的时间，我有几次就是这样，写完18页后发现自己写得很糟，不得不重头写起。这就是耐心即是一切的根源。”