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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