Looking for Tank Man

A Harvard student from China discovers the fraught, hidden history of the Tiananmen Square massacre in this powerful novel of protest and suppression from the National Book Award-winning author.

When the Chinese premier visits Harvard, international student Pei Lulu encounters a lone protester, who will drastically change her understanding of the People’s Republic and her own place in the world. For the first time, Lulu learns of the 1989 protest movement and the government’s violent response. Determined to find out more, she seeks answers from her family, who share surprising stories of their involvement, and from a formative university course based on powerful firsthand accounts.

At once a compelling coming-of-age tale and a poignant tribute to the courage of activists, Looking for Tank Man keeps this tragedy alive in the public memory and warns against the dangers of authoritarian regimes.

Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English nine novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.