Universal Longing in Totalitarian State

Rarely has China seemed less exotic and more accessible than in these 12 stories by Ha Jin, author of last year’s National Book Award-winning novel “Waiting.” These are realistic stories, with beginnings, middles and ends. Ha’s style is simple, even flat. The motivations of his characters are transparent and, for the most part, universal: to get better jobs, find love, have children and secure their futures.

As in “Waiting,” however--in which a man’s wish to divorce his wife and marry his lover is endlessly frustrated--these desires are penned in by the rules of the state bureaucracy. Chairman Mao may be dead, the Cultural Revolution may be over, but in Ha’s China, it’s still taken for granted that people will be assigned jobs they don’t like, compete for scarce apartment space and be subject to thought control and police brutality.

In the title story, the narrator marries off his unattractive daughter to a handsome co-worker who turns out to be homosexual. The police arrest the bridegroom not only for this “bourgeois” crime but also for belonging to a literary discussion group that, because it meets in secret, is assumed to be subversive.

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The narrator pulls strings and keeps the son-in-law out of prison. Instead, he is sent to a mental hospital and given shock treatments. The narrator asks a doctor when the son-in-law will be cured. The answer bewilders him: “It’s not a disease . . . it may be congenital, like being left-handed.” The treatment is useless, but ideology demands it. “I bet cod liver oil, or chocolate, or fried pork, anything, could produce a better result.”

Ha describes these predicaments with a dry humor. Some of the stories have the air of fables, such as “Alive,” in which an executive, bucking for promotion, travels to a distant city to dun a coal mine that owes his cannery money. A huge earthquake strikes; the executive is injured and suffers amnesia. He becomes a laborer and forms a new family with a widow and an orphan boy. He’s happy until his memory returns and, with it, his complicated old life.

Some of the most amusing stories deal with post-Mao China’s encounters with the West. In “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” Chinese employees of an American fast-food franchise get a quick and dirty education in capitalism. The boss is “good-hearted and considerate to customers, but . . . cruel to us.” Managers’ pay is 20 times that of workers. Strikers are unceremoniously fired, though they have ways of using the socialist system to get revenge.

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As the narrator says, “I would ask my elder brother to cut the restaurant’s electricity first thing. . . . Baisha said she’d have one of her boyfriends create some problems in . . . mail delivery. Manyou would visit his friends in the garbage center and ask them not to pick up trash. . . . This was just the beginning.”

In “The Woman From New York,” a would-be expatriate returns to China. She says she ran a restaurant in the United States, but gossip has it that she was a rich man’s concubine. Her family shuns her. She can’t get a job because she is considered tainted, untrustworthy, no longer Chinese--but she can’t use her dollars to buy a fancy apartment because the rules reserve those for actual foreigners.

Ha’s characters usually bear their troubles with good grace, but now and then they snap, turn mean and ugly--proof of the pressures their stoicism and humor belie. A professor arrested by police on a whim and forced to sign a “confession” retaliates by spreading hepatitis. The narrator of “The Bridegroom” finally repudiates his daughter when she won’t divorce his gay son-in-law. His own career has started to suffer, and he decides he has been “humiliated enough.”