This study sketches a vocabulary profile of Ha Jin, a prominent Chinese writer. Ha Jin’s writings have been repeatedly used to show-case a Chinese variety of English, and his repertoire of words deserves systematic de-scription on its own right. A sample of his novels is constructed for this research, and is compared with novels written by (a) native English speakers and (b) creative writing by advanced Chinese-speaking learners of Eng-lish. Corpus-based analysis reveals that Ha Jin’s vocabulary repertoire is as extensive and diversified as those of native speaker novelists, while markedly richer than those of advanced learners.