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Top spot for emigre writer

By Bradely Winterton
SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR
Sunday, Sep 10, 2000, Page 18

Of all the Chinese emigre authors now writing and publishing abroad, Ha Jin must come close to being the leader of the pack.

His recent novel Waiting was with justification highly praised. He has published two books of poetry in his adopted language, and is now a professor of English. This is his third collection of short stories.

It is a considerable achievement. His quiet tone, his economy, his ironic but sympathetic view of his characters, are reminiscent of the short stories of Chekhov.

He has been in the US now for 15 years, but his subject is always provincial China. His tales are tragi-comedies of small town life.

The title story is a masterpiece. Set in 1976, it is narrated by a conventional, good-hearted, middle-aged man who has been asked by a dying friend to help his daughter find a husband. The girl is generally considered unattractive, but to everyone's astonishment the best-looking man in the work unit offers to marry her.

Shortly afterwards the new husband is arrested along with other members of a secret gay group, which two Communist party members have managed to infiltrate. At first he's given electric shock treatment in an institution for the mentally ill. But after he begins a relationship with one of the hospital workers, he is sent to prison.

This is a gruesome enough story of prejudice and cruelty, and its events must contrast strongly for Ha Jin with the high-profile tolerance gays generally receive in present day America. What are interesting, however, are the attitudes of the narrator and the wife.

The wife is unperturbed. It's true, she says, that she and her husband have never had sex, but she is determined to wait for him nevertheless. He has always been kind to her, and she refuses to consider divorcing him. "He just wanted a good time," she says. He's her man, and she quite simply wants him back.

The narrator, on the other hand, is comically perplexed. His old-world, provincial assumptions have no place for what he hears. He doesn't want to be seen to be connected with someone the state has decreed is a criminal, and he angrily gives up on the wife when she refuses to apply for a divorce.

It's what's not said in the story that's so impressive. Ha Jin never suggests the wife might want her husband back because she knows she will never find another one. Nor is the ironic contrast between the narrator's general kindness of heart and his inability to accept the phenomenon of homosexuality pointed out. Instead, the two characters are painted like poor victims in an illustration of a Biblical parable by Rembrandt. They're ordinary people with feelings and stubbornness that cut both ways, and that don't fit into any black and white categories.

Ha Jin originally sold "The

Bridegroom" to the high-paying Harper's magazine, and it was subsequently reprinted in The Best American Stories 2000. It is the finest of the tales in this collection, but several others are almost as good.

The characters frequently respond to situations in unexpected and illogical ways. In the first tale in the book, "Saboteur," for instance, a newly-married couple are sitting in a restaurant admiring the view when a policeman at the next table flings some hot tea over the man's foot. He jumps up and complains loudly, on which he is arrested. After spending the weekend in a police-station cell, during which the hepatitis he contracted on his honeymoon seems to him to be re-appearing, he grumblingly signs a trumped-up confession, couched in absurd Marxist terms, and is released.

So what does he do? Make an official complaint? Seduce the policeman's daughter? No. He eats in as many restaurants as possible and infects half the town with hepatitis.

If people's irrationality, and the unpredictability of their behavior, are two of Ha Jin's constant themes, comic absurdity is one of his favorite tools.

Thus, in "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," a group of young workers in an American-style fast-food outlet discover the assistant manager is being paid in US dollars, and vastly more than they are. They decide on a "strike," and write a note to that effect in broken English. But it is interpreted as the threat of a terrorist attack, rather than staff refusing to work, and next day they see the store surrounded by armored police vehicles.

It may not be the cleverest of story endings but it's emblematic of Ha Jin's penchant for the ridiculous tinged with sadness. The youths all lose their jobs. They threaten to do something in retaliation, but you know they never will.

Several of these stories involve sex, and you quickly realize what a puritanical society China is, or was at the time Ha Jin is remembering. Any sexual act outside marriage is an offense, and little escapes detection by the party.

In one, "Broken," a married man and a glamorous secretary are found making love in an office after hours. The party members convene, and the woman is castigated as having a corrupt bourgeois lifestyle and moved to another job.

Later, a modest and sexually inexperienced male office-worker goes to see a movie and, in the dark, a woman comes and sits next to him and initiates some advanced erotic exploration. When she leaves half way through the film, he excitedly follows her out. Seeing a solitary girl standing in the lobby, he throws his arms around her and says "Let's do that again!" The woman screams and the man is arrested for attempted assault. It turns out she was someone else, and daughter of the deputy mayor.

This is comic, and vividly described. But the tone of the narrative abruptly changes when the accused man tells the court he thought the girl in the cinema was the recently disgraced secretary. Finding her name dragged through the mud once again, the secretary kills herself by drinking a bottle of DDT.

Ha Jin's comedy is pervasive but deceptive. Similarly, his description of life in China under communism is made up of amusing incidents that cumulatively constitute a deadly indictment.

Humanity and quiet perceptiveness are qualities shared by rare individuals in all the arts. On the evidence of the best of these stories, they'd surely be unanimous in admitting Ha Jin into their unpretentious, though highly select, family circle.
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