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Book Description
Fiction. Asian Studies. Winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection OCEAN OF WORDS, and of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction for UNDER THE RED FLAG, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty and poignant irony. IN THE POND is a close, unsentimental depiction of life in a small faCtory town; the manuevering, posturing, petty jealousies and injustices of an ordinary man, Shao Bin, who tangles with the party bosses. In this first novel, as in his short fiction,
Amazon.com
In the Pondis a slim little book about some very big issues: power, vanity, art, injustice, and politics. Where Tom Wolfe would find the makings for a doorstop, however, debut novelist Ha Jin has created a rough-cut comic gem. Set in Communist China, the book takes as its hero a small, unprepossessing man named Shao Bin, a maintenance employee at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant and also a self-taught artist. Together with his wife and 2-year-old daughter, Bin inhabits a tiny 12-by-20-foot room. Bin is desperate to move into the newly built workers' compound, and he places his name on the waiting list with high hopes. But when the plant managers pass him over, despite the fact that he's been working there for years, Bin finally cracks. "In brief, the true scholar's brush must encourage good and warn against evil," he reads in The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought, and inspired, he publishes a satirical cartoon protesting official corruption. The consequences of this simple act snowball, and in self-defense, Bin finds himself aiming his attacks ever higher up the bureaucratic ladder. This is a book that works on multiple levels: as character study, as political allegory, as sly bureaucratic satire, even, at times, as the broadest kind of slapstick. (One memorable scene involves Bin biting his superior on the butt.) Bin himself is half persecuted artist, half self-righteous boor; readers both sympathize with him and wonder along with one of his coworkers, "Why do you enjoy fighting so much?" Even his putative victory is left in doubt. As the book ends, Shao Bin has become perhaps a bigger fish, but there's no doubt about it; he's in the very same small pond where he started.
--Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
Prize-winning short-story writer Ha Jin (Ocean of Words won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; Under the Red Flag won the Flannery O'Connor Award) offers a wise and funny first novel that gathers meticulously observed images into a seething yet restrained tale of social injustice in modern China. Talented artist Shao Bin has an unsatisfying job at a large fertilizer plant. After being denied a decent housing assignment, he begins a series of retaliatory satirical cartoons, which illustrate his employers' flaws and in turn earn their wrath?which in turn inspires more cartoons. When his superiors try to transfer him, they are chagrined to discover that Bin is much in demand?and that any new job he gets is likely to be a step up. So they decide to keep him on. After an occasionally monotonous sequence of attacks and counterattacks, Bin finally gets promoted to the propaganda office. He is ecstatic, although his family must still make do with the same uncomfortable apartment that started the conflict. Luckily, the characters' complexity saves the story from political overkill. The supervisors, through moments of vulnerability, come to seem like genuinely detestable human beings rather than one-dimensional villains. Bin, similarly, is both justifiably indignant and annoying in his self-absorption. Ha Jin's humor initially appears clownish but almost always has a double purpose: when Bin's supervisor sits on his face to silence him, Bin bites the boss' posterior?illustrating rather vividly his refusal to kiss ass. Through Ha Jin's gently ironic treatment, Bin's struggle both to achieve power in his community and retain his own dignity transcends its Communist Chinese setting, engagingly illustrating a universal conundrum.
From Kirkus Reviews
A first novel by the Chinese dissident and poet whose previous stories (Under the Red Flag, 1997, etc.) have already entitled to him fair comparisons with Solzhenitsyn. Anyone in the West who picks up Ha Jin for the first time must experience a close approximation of what readers of Arthur Koestler or Isaac Babel felt 60 years ago, insofar as Ha Jin is the first Chinese Communist to make fictional use of daily life under the Party. Here, he describes the travails of Shao Bin, an amateur painter and calligrapher who works as a department-store fitter. Annoyed that his housing application has been passed over in favor of Party relatives and cronies, Shao Bin begins drawing and circulating satirical cartoons accusing the local Party heads of corruption. One of these eventually gets published in a Beijing newspaper, and Shao Bin finds himself at the center of a national debate on Party leadership and local politics. The ease with which Ha Jin's characters move between the old and new worlds that they simultaneously inhabit (praying to Buddha, for example, in order to receive Party preferment) lends a satiric edge to the daily ironies of Communist life in an essentially feudal society and gives Ha Jin's account a fabulous, almost allegorical tone much like that of Orwell's Animal Farm. If his prose occasionally gives off a leaden ring (``They had taken him for a mere bookworm, but all of a sudden he had emerged as a man of both strategy and action'') reminiscent of a Maoist Party slogan, it can only add to the atmosphere. Fascinating, refreshing, and uncommonly subtle: Ha Jin has made China available to a new world and a world of new readers.
Inside Flap Copy
National Book Award-winner Ha Jin's arresting debut novel , In the Pond,is a darkly funny portrait of an amateur calligrapher who wields his delicate artist's brush as a weapon against the powerful party bureaucrats who rule his provincial Chinese town.
Shao Bin is a downtrodden worker at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant by day and an aspiring artist by night. Passed over on the list to receive a decent apartment for his young family, while those in favor with the party's leaders are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his powerlessness. When he attempts to expose his corrupt superiors by circulating satirical cartoons, he provokes an escalating series of merciless counterattacks that send ripples beyond his small community. Artfully crafted and suffused with earthy wit, In the Pond is a moving tale about humble lives caught up in larger social forces.
Book Dimension
length: (cm)18.1 width:(cm)11
