Sunday, November 10, 2002		Books

What it takes to be human
Deepika Gurdev

In the Pond
by Ha Jin. Vintage. Pages 178. $12 (Singapore)..

Ha Jin won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Waiting. He could just as easily have won those for In the Pond, an equally stunning tale of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Set in Dismount Fort, a locale that Jin has explored in other stories, In the Pond is a slim book that takes on some very big issues. These cover power, vanity, art, injustice and politics. The book is set in Communist China and its hero is the simple Shao Bin. He’s a maintenance employee at Harvest Fertilizer Plant by day and a self-taught artist who transforms into a skilled calligrapher by night.

The insightful tale covers his life at the plant, which is marked by rather unjust treatment at the hands of Secretary Liu and Director Ma, the Party leaders who dominate his work and life.

Together with his wife and two-year-old daughter, Bin inhabits a tiny 12-by-20-foot room. He’s desperate to move into a newly built workers’ compound, and places his name on the waiting list time and again with high hopes. But the plant managers pass him over, despite the fact that he’s been working in the plant for years. This, after they claim that there is plenty of land for everyone.

When he’s passed over yet again, Bin finally cracks. And it is while reading The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought that the course of his life changes. One of the ideas contained in the book reads: "The true scholar’s brush must encourage good and warn against evil."

Inspired by this, Bin publishes a satirical cartoon protesting against official corruption. What starts off as a simple act snowballs into something much bigger. The crackdown by the party leadership intensifies and Bin finds himself aiming his attacks ever higher up the bureaucratic ladder. Emboldened by the new party offensive, Bin finds himself not just making satirical cartoons but also speaking to journalists and presenting his case in a big way to a newspaper.

In addition to all this, there is a rather memorable scene that sees Bin biting his superior on the butt.

Clearly, this is a book that works at several levels. It is at different times a political allegory, a bureaucratic satire and even a slapstick comedy.

In the end, Shao Bin emerges victorious but the reality remains unchanged. It dawns on him that he’s ended just where he’d started off, "in the pond," albeit a cleaner one.

The book’s style maybe minimalist, but that’s precisely what makes Ha Jin’s prose stand out. It sparkles in its simplicity and purity, aptly capturing the pettiness and quirks that motivate day-to-day behaviour. Through his protagonist, Shao Bin, Ha Jin clearly establishes what it takes to be human.