Ha Jin Can't Visit His Mother

Ha Jin has lived through difficult, defining events: the Cultural Revolution in his native China, military service that began when he was a young teenager, immigration and subsequent separation from home and family. On the page, he has vividly reproduced the repression of the Cultural Revolution, the brutality of the Korean War, and most recently the horror of the Nanjing massacre. His literary reputation is built on tight, exacting prose that captures the minutiae of daily lives often trapped in challenging -- if not downright tortuous -- circumstances.