The Symbol of Plenty and Nothing : A first novel explores the pain that makes us human : RICE, <i> By Su Tong (translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt) (William Morrow: $23; 266 pp.)</i>

If we feel bad when bad things happen to good people, do we feel any better when they happen to bad people? That seems to be the question posed by this first novel from the young Chinese writer of “Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas,” which was successfully adapted for the big screen.

In “Rice,” the author follows the fortunes of Five Dragons, a teenage orphan who flees the grim, between-world-wars poverty of Maple-Poplar Village for the city, where he hopes not so much to establish himself as simply to avoid starvation, for floods have destroyed the rice paddies of his home. Rice becomes the standard by which Five Dragons measures everything. Indeed, the measure supplants what would be measured. For Five Dragons, rice is the world, and the world is rice. Thus, a symbol of plenty--of food, fortune, fecundity--rice becomes, in this novel, its own opposite. It stands for the absence of itself, for a brutal existence of desperation and struggle, the struggle to survive.

Five Dragons finds work at the Great Swan Rice Emporium on Brick Mason Avenue. The proprietor, Feng, is a widower with two daughters, Cloud Weave and Cloud Silk. Early descriptions charm with a lyrical exoticism--”Sitting on the shop counter eating sunflower seeds, Cloud Weave cast sidelong glances outside”--but are soon belied by scenes that remind us that America does not have a monopoly on dysfunctional families.

By the time Five Dragons’ daughter-in-law says to her husband (who has been beating her), “Your aunt was a whore, your father’s a one-eyed dragon who murders for fun, and your brother’s a cripple who suffocated his own baby sister,” we know she is telling the truth--though not all of it, having left out the fact that it was his mother and father who, vengefully, crippled his brother. “There isn’t a decent human being in the family,” she says.

It is a sentiment shared by the members of the family themselves, including Five Dragons’ elder son, who “was convinced that a core of darkness lay at the center of his family, darkness that thrived in an atmosphere of anger and insult.”

Five Dragons’ own philosophy is that “you can forget your mother and father, but you must never relinquish your hatred.” He says that it is “by nurturing that hatred” that he has managed to become what he is. But what is that, if not someone hateful?

Someone whom others hate and therefore come to resemble?

The plot of “Rice” presents a Zola-like catalog of horrors: murder, mutilation, torture, rape, wife-battering, child abuse, theft and blackmail, famine and flood, while the characters’ contempt for one another makes it impossible for them to cooperate or commiserate.

Even the writing, ably translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, seems numbed by what it has to say, emotion flattened into exposition, the sentences themselves shell-shocked. Only near the end is there a moment when Cloud Silk, learning that her husband, Five Dragons, has saved the first dollar he ever earned, “realized how pitifully fragile he was. . . . She believed that all people are condemned to live in isolation, beyond the help of others, that they must hide their cash boxes in the rafters or in a wall somewhere or beneath floorboards, that they spend part of their time walking in the light of day, and part hidden in darkness, where no one can see them.”

It is only a moment, not an epiphany. As the Japanese invade and occupy China in the 1930s, slaughtering at random, Five Dragons reflects that cities are graveyards, that “they come into being for the sake of the dead. Throngs of people materialize among crowded, noisy streets, only to disappear, like drops of water evaporating in the sun’s rays.

“Throngs of them are murdered, or carried away by disease, or killed by depression and apoplexy, impaled on Japanese bayonets, or dispatched by Japanese bullets. For them the city is a gigantic coffin. . . . An arm, shapeless yet limber and powerful, grows out of the coffin, which contains gold, silver, cash and other valuables, reaching into the streets and alleys to drag wanderers into the cold depths.” As a summary of his own life, this seems fair enough.

In the end, dying painfully of venereal disease, blind and stinking, he fills a boxcar with rice and sets out to return home to Maple-Poplar Village.

He will die on the way.

And how do we feel, reading of the unhappy lives of people who further their unhappiness by blaming and horribly punishing others for it? And why would anyone read such a book in the first place? Because Su Tong renders these people so vividly that they possess, for us, the individuality that they deny one another. Even their rampant misogyny, breathtaking in the context of the recent World Conference on Women in Beijing, tells us how willfully alone each is, how frightened and defensive. And because when we read about bad things happening to bad people, we feel bad--and that’s good. That’s what makes us human.