I was not so resourceful in combating the small indignities that accompanied my Delhi dealings. Paying only five rupees more than the local rate for autorickshaws became an absurd point of honor. It was absurd because it often led me to stubbornly wave on drivers demanding inflated rates. I found satisfaction in showing that I was no rube. But then, my Western mind began calculating whether saving ten cents was worth walking for another fifteen minutes with heavy bags.
Tragic colonial novels often depict the differences between Western and Eastern expectations as unbridgeable gulfs. But not Ha Jin, who is simultaneously an insider and outsider, having grown up in rural China before moving to the United States in 1985. The potential for humor--more than tragedy--in West-meets-East situations was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I was staring unrestrainedly at a group of young men flexing their arms muscles by grasping the bars of a van I took to be on its way to jail. It turned, revealing the contact details of a catering company. The men laughed at my expression of chagrin.
The clash of Western and Eastern expectations creates a delightfully funny dilemma for the characters in the collection's final piece, "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town." Hongwen, the narrator, and a critical employee of the U.S. chicken franchise, takes every opportunity to snicker at the naiveté of his American boss, Mr. Shapiro. While Shapiro teaches his Chinese employees good business maxims like "The customer is always right," they privately counter his American wisdom with their own proverbs, including, "You let a devil into your house, he'll get into your bed."
Shapiro soon learns that his American M.O. doesn't exactly work in Muji City. When the local merchants strike back against the capitalist usurper with signs selling "PATRIOTIC CHICKEN - CRISPY, TENDER, DELICIOUS, 30% CHEAPER THAN C.C.!" Mr. Shapiro counters by offering a buffet. While U.S. business theory assumes that more customers produce more profit, Shapiro's calculations don't take into account local appetites, or spite. The workers, resentful of the boss's "stingy" regulations against eating on the job, invite all their friends and relatives, who eat so much that the restaurant loses money and has to end the scheme.
Despite these cheeky critiques, Jin also acknowledges that American capitalism isn't the completely evil monster most card-carrying comrades would make it out to be. The Chinese employees grudgingly admit the benefits of working for the foreigner. When Hongwen's father sees him making more and getting paid on time, his son's ideological compromise seems worth it. "Cowboy Chicken is so delicious. If I could eat it and drink Coke everyday, I'd have no need for socialism," the old man declares. Seeing a man ready to throw away forty years of service to the state in exchange for a supply of K.F.C. is painful for both Hongwen and the reader, inextricably tragic and comic at the same time. Artfully bittersweet, Jin allows us to laugh both at the assuming American and the Chinese employees who wage war against him.
Jin taught me to be bemused by my own clashes with Delhi, moments when I thought I couldn't take it if one more person honked (I could), or when the effort of dodging rickshaws, vendors, and merchandise in the old city's narrow lanes made me ready to give up and be run over (I didn't). Finding Jin's Waiting, which more elaborately explores the conflicting nature of desire that inspires the best stories in The Bridegroom, was a link in the chain of surpassed expectations. The protagonist, Lin Kong, is anxious to escape a loveless arranged marriage to an older and unsophisticated woman so he can start a new life with Manna Wu, a passionate and ambitious nurse at his hospital. But as a military doctor, Kong gets leave only once a year to travel home to the country and request a divorce, which the judge denies every year because Shuyu, Kong's otherwise compliant peasant wife, won't consent. Yet it becomes clear that bureaucracy isn't the only thing in Kong's way. As year eighteen of his waiting approaches and Shuyu's permission is no longer required by law, his desire begins to be replaced by anxiety.
Beginning with a prologue in year eighteen, then returning to the day Kong and Wu meet in the first chapter, Jin shows his subject at multiple points along the spectrum. We see him anticipating the divorce he has been waiting for, falling in unconsummatable love, and then, after his dream is finally fulfilled, wondering "whether he cared for this married life, which was so tedious, so chaotic, and so exhausting." Passion binds Kong and Wu together when they secretly hold hands for the first time during the propaganda film The Navy Battle of 1894. But much later, when "Manna turned out to be a passionate lover, and her passion often unnerved Lin," we have come to know the doctor as an extremely cautious individual. Yet we also understand some of the reasons he has learned caution; we follow him through the Cultural Revolution, hiding his library, and being denied promotion for having an affair that is never allowed a moment of privacy.
Jin shows how the passage of time changes his characters' perspectives. Waiting is not neutral. And the more I live in Delhi, the more my eyes pass over the same scenes along the same morning commute, the more I realize how the passage of time changes what I am able to see. Barista turns out to be more than a one-time guilty pleasure for out-of-sorts Westerners--it is actually the place for cool young Indians to hang out. Even though the pollution can be suffocating, it can make for spectacular sunsets.
Recently, I was fuming at not being able to buy Jin's latest novel, The Crazed, recently out in the States. Until I found the British edition, already in paperback, on crowded Connaught Place shelves. I took it on my weekend trip out of Delhi (waiting is a way of life on Indian trains). You might take the title to refer to Professor Yang, an esteemed literary critic whose recent stroke has him babbling disturbing personal details to his young graduate student/future son-in-law, who is patiently attending his hospital bedside. Yet The Crazed also refers to the world's perception of Jian Wan who, encouraged by his teacher's revelations, slowly realizes his own political consciousness. Told in first person, this is Jin's most psychologically ambitious novel yet. The narrator's developing awareness and the plot both culminate in bloody Tiananmen Square, imposing a seriousness that is the death of naivete. As always, Jin's details create their own compelling reality; paying respects to his dead mentor, Jian notices, "a fat fly crept into his mouth and a moment later came out, zigzagging on his chin."
You may not have an Indian train to lull you through the passage of time. But if you find yourself waiting online, you can read the first chapter of The Crazed on the Web.
As for me, now that I'm taking a short trip to East Africa, it's the perfect opportunity to start that book on India.
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Bittersweet art and patriotic chicken