I have a perverse habit of always reading about foreign places. Once I get somewhere, I immediately begin to yearn for a book about somewhere else.

An escapist tendency, but well suited to Ha Jin's newest collection of short stories, in which average characters employ ingenuity, denial, bribery, and every trick available to extricate themselves from unsatisfactory situations. I stumbled upon The Bridegroom, a group of stories set in China, while browsing for company during my first week of what I called "living in India" (as opposed to "visiting" or "touring" or "leaving soon").

My first views of Delhi were framed by the canopy of an autorickshaw, sitting low on three wheels, weaving in and out of a fabric of honking bicycles, ambassadors, and hand-drawn carts, getting chunks of soot in my eyes and trying not to breathe too deeply. The Bridegroom proved good company as I navigated India's famed bureaucracy. The stories--and a piece of advice I found on a student Web site before I left for Delhi, "Try to ignore all unfriendly bureaucratic behavior"--

helped me appreciate the humor in attempting to complete my "foreigner" registration with the police during their morning tea break, get vaccinations while the hospital staff was on strike, and enroll at a university where the standard answer to any administrative query was "Come back after lunch." Much of Jin's writing is preoccupied with delayed gratification, and he often throws in a twist that embitters the main characters just when they seem on the brink of getting what they most want. But in this holding pattern--which might be dead time to most people--Jin plays out scenes of human desire, desperation, and survival in the face of humiliation. All things which I felt in abundance in the waiting rooms of Delhi.

The first story in The Bridegroom introduces one of Jin's typically ambivalent characters. Mr. Chiu, in "The Saboteur," plays two roles simultaneously: newlywed and treasonous vandal. He illustrates the murkiness of our intentions, how we can come to resent or even sabotage our own sought-after dreams. Jin's previous novel, Waiting, presented the same theme. When Lin Kong finally obtains the divorce he has sought for the last eighteen years in order to marry the woman he loves, dealing with his success becomes an even bigger challenge. (More on Lin Kong later.)

Eating lunch with his new bride while waiting for the train that will take them home, Chiu is "glad that the honeymoon was finally over." Jin's expression of people's love for banal comforts over passionate exploits outs the Prufrock in all of us. There is a shameful relief at the end of a vacation in returning to old habits and work. (For me, it was the guilty pleasure of Barista, a Western-style coffee joint, only a few days into the Delhi experiment.)

But like life, Jin loves to upset our small comforts. When a policeman eating lunch nearby throws tea on the newlyweds' feet, Chiu's happy contemplation of a return to quiet nights in front of the TV are quickly squelched. Our innocent hero eloquently demands an apology: "Comrade Policeman, your duty is to keep order, but you purposely tortured us common citizens. Why violate the law you are supposed to enforce?" Here, as in any good Kafka novel, "The Saboteur" begins a downward spiral into the unjust and spiteful vagaries of officialdom.

The bride is sent on without Chiu, who is put in jail, then told he must confess to sabotage and "write out a self-criticism." Despite his insistence on justice, the police eventually break Chiu down and he agrees to their demands. Adding Dostoevsky's Underground Man to Kafkaesque nightmare, Jin shows how bureaucracy's squashing of the righteous individual leads to the transformation of a powerless but admirable university lecturer into a vengeful villain. When harsh jail life causes Chiu's hepatitis to relapse, he is determined to infect the entire Muji City populace upon his release, and carefully leaves half-eaten meals at fivedifferent eateries on his way out of the city.

This is a system of frightening logic, poignantly and ironically detailed by Jin. In this world, corruption is commonplace, but there is still beauty in moments of despair. His small observations gracefully point towards larger, symbolic interpretations, while also captivating the reader in their precision. The perfection of Jin's metonymic details were brought home by my own glimpses of Delhi from the autorickshaw. While I was learning the shape of the city, it was these small details that suggested larger stories, while at the same time offering something already complete. Bright snatches of silk saris, henna-painted feet, whole families on one motorcycle with the smallest child sleeping through the ride, thirteenth century ruins suddenly peeking out of a bustling market square: scenes so compelling that sometimes I forgot to be concerned about the pollution. Most striking was their ordinariness, the way that a different history had created an entirely different set of daily assumptions and commonplaces. Likewise, Jin's details reveal a world of assumptions behind them, a world, surprisingly, just as everyday as ours.

So I was plunged into another, yet equally convincing, city when I read Jin's frank description of Muji square: "The air smelled of rotten melon." Though I had just come into this cool bookstore for relief from a busy Delhi market, I could palpably sense the imminent decay of an upright citizen. Additionally, the crucial tea dumping takes place near a large statue of Chairman Mao "at whose feet peasants were napping," suggesting that the all-seeing, benevolent eye of the state has become blind to and possibly even complicit in what happens right under its nose. Jin's wry observations about the now faded excesses of the Cultural Revolution offer a refreshing awareness of history without the polemics.

Such dark humor fuels all of his stories. As in "The Saboteur," it often originates in a betrayal of trust, which isn't usually a laughing situation. Though little people are often reduced to achieving revenge in place of justice, retaliation can offer its own satisfaction. The third story in the collection, "In the Kindergarten," features Shaona, a five-year-old girl who tries to be brave about leaving her family for school and therefore depends even more upon her teacher, Shen. But the teacher, an unmarried young woman who owes money for a secret abortion, takes advantage of her charges by putting them to work. Convincing them that the purslanes they are picking will make a delicious addition to their dinner, she secretly sells the rare herb for her own profit.

The children are disappointed when their usual dinner of corn-glue, sweet potato and radish arrives. They notice, pathetically, "there wasn't even a purslane leaf on the table." Everyone is too respectful to question or grumble, but Shaona fumes silently. When her teacher's betrayal continues the next day and Shaona has to again pick purslanes in a field that has become muddy, she decides to express her indignation. When no one is looking she pees on the produce. Dinner appears, once again without the promised herbs, and confirms the wisdom of her trick. Shaona is wildly happy, "as though all of a sudden she had become a big girl. She felt that from now on she would not cry like a baby at night again." Growing up, it seems, means finding ways to cheat a system generally beyond one's control. And even a secret retribution brings victory.

These are characters enmeshed in the mechanism of the state, with a lack of individual choice that would surprise most Westerners. Yet, they practice their limited autonomy with great resourcefulness and even appreciation for beauty. Shao Bin, the hero of In the Pond, Jin's first novel, is their precursor. When this machinist/calligrapher uses his art to defame his vindictive and corrupt superiors, his pleasure in the task momentarily transcends his suffering. Painting a poster alluding to his tormentors' execution, Bin becomes ecstatic: "His eyes blurred with joyful tears. It seemed to him that this was his masterpiece; he found the whole painting marked by an august aura and radiating an upright spirit."

Waiting in Delhi

Bittersweet art and patriotic chicken

Story Index