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Loading... The Bridegroom: Storiesby Ha Jin
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  helka | Sep 22, 2009 |  Ha Jin writes spare prose about a China that is rapidly changing. His stories always deal with loss and disappointment, and that makes them hard to read at times. Although I was interested enough to finish, I didn't find much that I liked. (  ) apartmentcarpet | Aug 5, 2008 | Ha Jin has the amazing ability to tell a story in the way that the people in Communist China seem to live. His descriptions appear tightly controlled, and there is a heaviness and suppression in his telling that give us a glimpse of what it must be like to live in such a society. As I read these short stories, I feel, along with the characters, the subtle clenching fear of being found out, of being seen as different from what is acceptable to the collective whole that is permissible in Chinese life. It's hard to describe how I feel after reading something by Ha Jin except to say that I'm moved with melancholy--I love his work but want to run outside screaming at the top of my lungs afterwards...simply because I can. (  )1  thatbooksmell | Sep 30, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375420673, Hardcover)It's the little things that kill us, as that master of the miniature Ha Jin well knows. Not oppression in general, but the tea thrown at us by railroad policemen; not failure, but the old flame who fails to visit; not grief, but the peanuts our kindergarten teacher stole from our pockets. In The Bridegroom, such moments run surprisingly deep, as if they traced the grooves history has left on individual hearts. The book's 12 tales capture a China in transition, en route from Maoism to market-friendly socialism, from isolation to increasing contact with the West. "I never thought money could make so much difference," says the narrator of "An Entrepreneur's Story," who's been transformed from black-market lowlife to new-economy hero. He wins respect and gets the girl, but it all feels too easy somehow, and he revenges himself by lighting his kerosene stove with bank notes.Other characters navigate this sea change with similar bewilderment. The professor mistaken for "The Saboteur" thinks news articles about the end of the cultural revolution mean he can reason with the police (wrong!), while the bridegroom of the title story is hauled off to jail for so-called hooliganism rooted in "Western capitalism and bourgeois lifestyle"--that is, loving other men. "What a wonderful husband he could have been if he were not sick," his father-in-law thinks. In the story that deals most explicitly with the conflict between East and West, an American chain named Cowboy Chicken sets up shop in Muji City. The new order isn't that different from the old one, thinks one of the Chinese workers: "We nicknamed Mr. Shapiro 'Party Secretary,' because just like a Party boss anywhere he didn't do any work. The only difference was that he didn't organize political studies or demand we report to him our inner thoughts." In the end, as often happens, greed begets revolution--but whose greed? When the workers at Cowboy Chicken go on strike, jealous of one of their coworker's paychecks, they're replaced by an African American woman who teaches English at a nearby college and her students, who sing "We Shall Overcome" while they wipe tables. But as in Jin's National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting, even the broadest political and cultural ironies are painted with an extraordinarily light-handed brush. Despite their apparent simplicity, these stories run deep; it's as if some 19th century master had wandered into our midst, writing prose whose unruffled surface recalls the virtues of the very long view. Like Chekhov, another great miniaturist and the writer he most resembles, Jin understands that humor is compassion, that a well-honed appreciation for the absurd is sometimes the best and most honest way to honor failed lives. While his characters attempt to balance the needs of the self and the demands of the state, we see less what is foreign to us than what is native to the human heart. --Mary Park (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Ha Jin celebrates his characters' lives and humanity with simplicity, from an enterpreneur transformed from black market criminal to free market hero, to the homosexuals jailed because of their 'illness'. Brilliantly, Ha Jin arranges the different stories around one theme: all the short stories are related to past or future weddings somehow and the tension of the short stories lies in the bridegrooms.
What I found amazing about this book was that I still was not able to stop thinking about the stories after I finished it. The practices of the Chinese political system weigh you down, and while you feel sorry for the friendly Chinese citizens, you are also glad that you are not led by such a political system.
I am convinced that 'The Bridegroom' has everything a good book calls for; it makes you think, once you start you can't finish it, and last but not least the short stories are likely to break your heart. (