In "The Bridegroom," Ha Jin seems more
interested in writing stories about circumstances than about people.
Almost all of the short stories collected in his 2000 book are
concerned with lower and middle class folk living in China,
struggling against greater, sometimes conflicting, forces: communism
and capitalism, encroaching western values
and small town prejudices, societal pressures and familial
obligations, and an overarching bureaucracy trying to stabilize and
control a vast population in a country in transition. The stories
explore life within this paradoxical environment, and are much more
preoccupied with introducing and stepping through the injustices and
dilemmas facing the characters than the characters themselves; they
are powerless to effect the unfolding situations imposed upon them,
and develop little more nuance beyond "worried businessman"
and "foreign-educated woman". This lends a universality of
sorts, and the stories do well in presenting different tableaus, even
if the stories tend to beat somewhat repetitious drums. As a
pounding critique of life in China it may work, but the futility that
permeates all the stories leads to a sameness, and at some point all
of the senselessness starts bleeding out, such that it's hard not to
redirect some of it onto the stories themselves.
Jin's prose is
spare and reserved, although I thought Wayson Choy, for example, did
a better job imbuing a Chinese "feel" into his text in this
manner, especially in dialogue. For both Jin and Choy, the rhythms
of their sentences are off beat from the norm of native English
fiction, but Choy also uses more metaphors, sayings, and turns of
phrase that evoke the differences in language and culture behind the
characters.
The best story of the collection is "After Cowboy
Chicken Came to Town," which centers around a newly opened
western-style fried chicken restaurant in China. This story manages
to touch upon the viewpoints of several different people working
there, which provides broader sympathies and allows Jin to continue
building out the world as the story goes along, and include moments
of humour, sympathy, and even triumph within the pages.
I've read
one other piece of Ha Jin fiction, his 2009 short story collection "A
Good Fall," which I enjoyed more, and whose stories work
together better. That book is more concerned with the plight of
Chinese immigrants in America, which probably resonates a bit more
with me, but also includes more varied shadings in tone and
protagonist, leading to less repetition and lending more texture to
the proceedings. Perhaps the change between these two books comes
down to the nine additional years for Ha Jin to hone his craft and
his English, but perhaps it also indicates the difference in setting.
It's odd reading about protagonists that have so little say in how
their stories play out, but perhaps that is somewhat indicative of
the differences between American and Chinese culture. In a country
of more than a billion, in a culture based more on collectivism,
duty, and the social unit, maybe what matters isn't who you are so
much as the context you find yourself in; parables and proberbs over
narratives, in other words.
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