In the Pond

Rating:
Summary: Bureaucratic conflict with an ironic twist
Review: "In the Pond" is the story of a rebellious young man in China who fights to keep from being crushed by the weight of Communist bureaucracy. Such a premise has shades of Orwell and Koestler, but the difference is that Shao Bin, Ha Jin's protagonist, is fighting not an abstract, intangible political system but a personal battle with three specific men who are trying to grind him down.

Bin lives with his wife and baby daughter in a miserably cramped apartment near the fertilizer plant where he is employed in maintenance. An artist at heart, his underlying passions are poetry, painting, and calligraphy, the latter at which he excels despite his limited formal education. When Liu and Ma, the Communist Party officials who run the plant, turn down his demands for better living arrangements for his family, he takes revenge by drawing them in a satirical cartoon which he sends to a newspaper.

Bin believes this simple act of dissent will support his cause, but in reality it initiates a cycle of retaliation in which Liu and Ma's immediate supervisor Yang, unsympathetic to Bin's plight, also becomes a target of the mudslinging campaigns. The Party officials' attempts to silence Bin by subjecting him to any kind of humiliation and psychological warfare they can orchestrate only make him more determined. Inspired by verses from a time when Chinese poets were more free to express themselves artistically without fear of government reprisal, he perseveres in his quest to make things better for himself and his family.

Ha Jin could have ended this novel similar to the way Bernard Malamud ends "The Fixer," in which the hero loses materially but achieves at least a moral victory over his evil oppressors. However, Jin chooses a more subtle and ironic path by showing that Bin, far from trying to destroy his antagonists and all they represent, is happy to become one of them in a compromising lateral move that benefits everybody. "In the Pond" effectively illustrates why bureaucracy survives in every type of society and political system: It knows how to withstand criticism and protect itself from intrusion and sabotage.

Rating:
Summary: A comic and satirical view of Communist China
Review: Deceptively simple, this slim book, set in Communist China, is the story of Shao Bin, a maintenance worker by day and an aspiring artist by night. When denied a larger apartment for his small family, he creates a political cartoon blaming his bosses for corruption. This begins of series of increasingly provocative attacks and counterattacks as the humble man outwits his superiors over and over again.

The author, Ha Jin, came to the United States at the age of 29 in 1985, having spent six years serving in the People's Liberation Army. His descriptions of daily life and typical frustrations are refreshing. This is not a book about prison camps or starvation. This is not a book about the tyranny of communism or of escape to freedom. This is simply a book about a man who wants a larger apartment.

Anyone who has ever felt frustration by being a little fish in a big pond can identify with Shao Bin who, in spite of setback after setback just keeps on going. There is satire in this book, and very funny slapstick comedy, and I felt myself laughing out loud at times.

Do not miss this delightful gem of a book.

Rating:
Summary: Another Little Gem from Ha Jin
Review: Ha Jin won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award in 1999 for his second novel, "Waiting". He just as easily could have won the award for his first novel, "In the Pond", an equally stunning tale of life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Set in Dismount Fort (a locale that Jin has explored in other stories, notably in his fine collection, "Under the Red Flag", which won the 1997 Flannery O'Connor Award), "In the Pond" is a sparely written, profoundly witty and insightful tale of Shao Bin and his struggle for just treatment by Secretary Liu and Director Ma, the Party leaders who dominate his work and life.

A worker in the Harvest Fertilizer Plant by day, Shao Bin is a remarkably talented and creative artist by night, a self-educated and self-styled intellectual whose talent goes unrecognized by Liu and Ma. When Shao Bin and his wife, Meilan, and their young infant daugher are passed over for a decent apartment because Shao Bin refuses to make gifts and payments to his bosses, he begins a campaign of satirical cartoons and attacks on the corruption of Liu and Ma. Liu and Ma, in turn, mercilessly persecute and humiliate Shao Bin. The result is a seemingly endless series of attacks and counterattacks, thrusts and parries. Each time, Shao Bin succeeds in escalating the struggle to another level, his lonely battle against the local Party bosses eventually widening to the highest levels of the Party.

Like the humble lives of his characters, Ha Jin's prose once again sparkles in its simplicty and purity. And like human nature everywhere, Ha Jin's narrative wittily captures the pettiness, the foibles, which often motivate day-to-day behavior. In Shao Bin, Ha Jin has created an irrepressible and deeply human hero. Like his other work, "In the Pond" is another little gem of English prose, another simple tale of what it's like to be human.

Rating:
Summary: Biting (!) Chinese satire
Review: Ha Jin's book is a pungent and hilarious picture of the Chinese One Party State, dominated by rampant corruption, a stiff bureaucracy and favouritism. The individual who has the most power or the highest placed friends gets the most out of the system.
The author depicts here the pettier but still very irritating corruption, like the allotment of apartments, year end bonuses or promotion.

The main character of the book misses an allotment of a new apartment and under instigation of his wife attacks the CP delegates in his small village. In a series of hilarious scenes with bawdy scolding and buttock biting incidents, his complaint mounts to the highest power circles in Beijing.

Ha Jin gives us in unstoppable flowing prose a dramatic and incisive picture of Chinese everyday life.

A small, but highly recommendable book.

Rating:
Summary: A New Ah Q
Review: Ha Jin's In the Pond, although billed as a novel, is really more of a long story, filling less than 200 small pages. It thus in form as well as in content follows the example of Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q. This is another somewhat heavy-handed tale of an antihero, posessed of wilfulness rather than ability, who struggles against the society in which he finds himself. Ha Jin does, however, contrive a more subtle climax than his predecessor: rather than Ah Q's total defeat and death, his protagonist Shao Bin achieves an apparent victory, but one hedged with plenty of indications that he will not live happily ever after.
An ambiguous story such as this is perhaps the only kind which can be told of modern China: Ha Jin is a realist, acknowledging that things are better than they were, but that this is not saying a great deal. His portrait of the petty corruption of the Chinese system is clear-sighted, and provides a good idea of the realities of contemporary life in the country. Again like Lu Xun's, the value of Ha Jin's work is primarily didactic, being informative rather than great literature, but it is well worth reading for all that.

Rating:
Summary: Not nice
Review: I fell in the pond once, and it really wasn't very nice, and this book brought back horrible memories for me, especially with its overly descriptive passages on pondweed and quacking ducks. I was too traumatised to carry on reading. Not a book for sensitive people.

Rating:
Summary: Simply told and exquisitely written
Review: In the Pond is the story of Shao Bin, a Chinese worker denied better housing who decides to fight against injustice and corruption in the Communist authority. Using his paintbrush as a wand and his imagination as a planner, he executes a series of actions to rankle the leaders. As each side becomes more enmeshed in the conflict, the results are more serious, and often more humorous. Jin takes a serious subject matter, the subjection of the individual to a malfunctioning system, and adds art, humor, and human passion to construct a tale that is simply told, but exquisitely written.

Rating:
Summary: Learning about China...
Review: Not knowing much about China and its culture, I'm glad that my book club chose this novel to read. It was enlightening and comical. 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: funny insight into a past China
Review: The striking thing about this novel is that whatever happens seems silly and hilarious. You are reminded of kindergarden more than of the adult world of intrigues and politics. But if you have lived in China about 15 years ago, it also reminds you of the way people dealt with each other in those days quite frequently...
Jonathan, this review is for you, as the book was on your wishlist. This is Tessy writing. [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Dickensian tale of triumph of human spirit over adversity
Review: This was my first book of Ha Jin. I have not read a nicer novel than this; about the working men and women of China since Pearl S. Buck wrote her Good Earth. Essentially we all try to deal in our own way with our own struggles in life and our fair and unfair shares of injustice in it. This is an allegory of a calligrahper/painter grappling with the Chinese communist party bureaucracy through his own troubles and tribulations and patiently and cleverly using the system to accomplish his own purpose in life; get paid for doing what he likes to do most : his hobby of calligraphy and painting. Those who disliked Solzhenystin or Pasternak may denounce this work as well. After all today everyone including the literature Nobel prize selectors may be wearing socks and undergarments made in China by the indentured labor, blessed by its ruling oligarchy and hence condone the system that germinated seeds of creativity from the likes of Ha Jin. This is a book written with a remarkable economy of words dealing with pathos and humor with a tight plotline revolving around petty workplace squabbles.