Poetry (July 2000 Issue)

Ha, Jin

Modern Poetry Association

This new collection of short stories by the award-winning author of Waiting confirms Ha Jin's reputation as a master storyteller, as well as a master of the miniature. In The Bridegroom, the twelve stories capture a China in transition, moving from Maoism towards a more open society. For these men and women, starting to feel the influence of the West, the daily dramas of a system that still struggles to control their every move and thought are made all the more painful by this. As his characters, from an entrepreneur, transformed from black-market criminal to free market hero, to the workers at Cowboy Chicken, to the professor mistaken by the police for a saboteur, continue to struggle against petty injustices and heartbreaks, Ha Jin celebrates their lives and humanity with the understated humour and simplicity that has won him widespread acclaim.

The Bridegroom

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Vintage Books

Ha Jin has been compared to the late Issac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. Winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection Under the Red Flag, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty and poignant irony. His themes of personal honour in the face of political rectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, In the Pond, a close, unsentimental depiction of life in a small factory town; the manoeuvring, posturing, petty jealousies and injustices of an ordinary man who tangles with the party bosses.

In the Pond

Random House]

Vintage

Shao Bin is a factory fitter in a small Chinese town, a poor and unconnected man with a young wife and a small child, but also an accomplished artist and calligrapher. He's worked at the plant for six years, so feels that this time his family will get an appartment in Worker's Park, where his wife won't have to walk two miles to wash their clothes.\nBut the party controls everything in the town, and again, the apartments go to corrupt officials and their cronies. Outraged, Bin pens a series of political cartoons attacking them, and finds his trouble is only just beginning.

In The Pond.

Contemporary

DABS (Directory and Book Services)

The Crazed

Waiting (Vintage East)

Literary

Pantheon Press

Waiting

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Modern Library

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Books by Ha, Jin