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.
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