Customer Reviews

In the Pond

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

Normally I wouldn't take the time to do something like this, but this is one of the best books I've ever read. When I read, I tend to be aware of style--that an author is trying to convey something in a certain way. I was swept away by this book. In the book, the main character thinks about what it means to produce a masterpiece; he thinks it means to become one with the artistic piece. "In the Pond" must be a masterpiece. The story is so alive. You live the book as you read it. You feel as if you're there. If you'd like to get outside of yourself completely for awhile, this is the book for you.

After first reading Ha Jin's short story collections, like Under the Red Flag, I was very interested in reading a novel. He did not disappoint. One might expect the gut punch his stories like "Emperor" throw at us, but rather Jin did what few can do well. He created a subtle satire that extends beyond Communist China to all the world, just imagine your corporate heirarchy instead of a communist regime. Using humor that is either sly or farcical, he reminded me of another cunning writer, Don Delillo. In studying what makes a hero, he gets closer to such a character, a more real person than any Odysseus could ever be. This is the best book that I have read in the past year, except maybe McCarthy's Cities of the Plain.

Wow, what a book! I read this book three times in four days. The first time, the plot kept me captivated, and the author's style created a current of alternating tension and release that swept me away. Once I'd finished, I couldn't stop thinking about the main character and how his goal had been fulfilled but maybe also frustrated, so I read it the second time to learn more about that. Then on the fourth day, I read it again because I still couldn't stop thinking about the power of the author's storytelling. This ought to be on everyone's bookshelf. This would be a fabulous book club and literature class read.

"Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China!"

So goes a popular government slogan in China, which has been made into a most irritating song.

Ha Jin is remarkable as the only modern Chinese novelist writing for Western audiences without catering to their assumptions. Chinese lit in English is full to gagging point with tramatic, melodramatic accounts, hyperboles of the hyperbolic, of the evils of Communist China.

But the truth is, the majority of Chinese have suffered quietly and in small, irritating ways under the current regime, rather than in the excesses so often portrayed in the West. The persecution even of the Cultural Revolution was, for most, a swarm of mosquitos rather than a gun to the head.

Ha Jin's talent is for displaying the humour in the ironies of modern China: the grasping, petty bureaucratism of small officials, the obsession with face, the reluctance to stand up for justice, the fatalistic passivity. These are things inherent to China, but exacerbated by Communist rule.

"In the Pond" is my favorite of Ha Jin's novels, mainly due to its gentle mocking of all of its characters. Like all of Ha's works, it is a fast, engaging, enjoyable read. But, more interestingly, it is a subtly scathing portrait of the ineffectiveness of China's intellectuals: sometimes mice that roar, but ultimately easily bought out.

This book is one of the fairest portrayals of the idiosyncrasies of modern Chinese society, politics, and the mainstream mentality.

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.

In his first published book, Ha Jin, winner of this year's National Book Award for Waiting, has written a fascinating novel about political structure and favoritism in Communist China.

Shao Bin and his wife have been passed over for better housing and rather than suffer silently, he sets upon a course of action which he hopes will result in better housing for his family. In a series of well conceived cartoons, Shao Bin, mocks the officials where he works. But instead of better housing the officials become antagonized and Shao Bin is reprimanded and told to stop publicly ridiculing them. Again, in his own fasahion Shao Bin becomes even bolder steaming ahead to a conclusion which is sheer irony.

Although this is a short book, it does give the reader a good idea of the political manipulations and ways of dealing with workers prevalent in China.

Ha Jin's novel "In the Pond" is one of the purest and most elegant works of fiction that I have read recently. I felt that I was reading lines of poetry, as unadorned and profound as an ode by Lao-Tzu. Jin writes of an artist's confrontation with the oppressive Communist system, but Jin's story is more about the individual asserting the power of the self against the monolith and the artist against the philistines. This novel can be finished in an hour, but its spare, simple truths resonate long after.

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.

"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.