[.ca] In the Pond: A Novel (ISBN 0375709118)

From Amazon.com:
In the Pond is a slim little book about some very big issues: power, vanity, art, injustice, and politics. Where Tom Wolfe would find the makings for a doorstop, however, debut novelist Ha Jin has created a rough-cut comic gem. Set in Communist China, the book takes as its hero a small, unprepossessing man named Shao Bin, a maintenance employee at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant and also a self-taught artist. Together with his wife and 2-year-old daughter, Bin inhabits a tiny 12-by-20-foot room. Bin is desperate to move into the newly built workers' compound, and he places his name on the waiting list with high hopes. But when the plant managers pass him over, despite the fact that he's been working there for years, Bin finally cracks. "In brief, the true scholar's brush must encourage good and warn against evil," he reads in The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought, and inspired, he publishes a satirical cartoon protesting official corruption. The consequences of this simple act snowball, and in self-defense, Bin finds himself aiming his attacks ever higher up the bureaucratic ladder. This is a book that works on multiple levels: as character study, as political allegory, as sly bureaucratic satire, even, at times, as the broadest kind of slapstick. (One memorable scene involves Bin biting his superior on the butt.) Bin himself is half persecuted artist, half self-righteous boor; readers both sympathize with him and wonder along with one of his coworkers, "Why do you enjoy fighting so much?" Even his putative victory is left in doubt. As the book ends, Shao Bin has become perhaps a bigger fish, but there's no doubt about it; he's in the very same small pond where he started. --Mary Park

Simply told and exquisitely written:
In the Pond is the story of Shao Bin, a Chinese worker denied better housing who decides to fight against injustice and corruption in the Communist authority. Using his paintbrush as a wand and his imagination as a planner, he executes a series of actions to rankle the leaders. As each side becomes more enmeshed in the conflict, the results are more serious, and often more humorous. Jin takes a serious subject matter, the subjection of the individual to a malfunctioning system, and adds art, humor, and human passion to construct a tale that is simply told, but exquisitely written.

Learning about China...:
Not knowing much about China and its culture, I'm glad that my book club chose this novel to read. It was enlightening and comical. 4 stars.

Ha Jin writes another hit:
I enjoyed this book. I am a fan of Ha Jin's WAITING. I struggled more with this book, but it was every bit as good. I felt frustrated with the main character at times and wanted to shake sense into him. This is well written satire and the character's actions were highly realistic and believable. Nicely done.

Biting (!) Chinese satire:
Ha Jin's book is a pungent and hilarious picture of the Chinese One Party State, dominated by rampant corruption, a stiff bureaucracy and favouritism. The individual who has the most power or the highest placed friends gets the most out of the system. The author depicts here the pettier but still very irritating corruption, like the allotment of apartments, year end bonuses or promotion. The main character of the book misses an allotment of a new apartment and under instigation of his wife attacks the CP delegates in his small village. In a series of hilarious scenes with bawdy scolding and buttock biting incidents, his complaint mounts to the highest power circles in Beijing. Ha Jin gives us in unstoppable flowing prose a dramatic and incisive picture of Chinese everyday life. A small, but highly recommendable book.

A New Ah Q:
Ha Jin's In the Pond, although billed as a novel, is really more of a long story, filling less than 200 small pages. It thus in form as well as in content follows the example of Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q. This is another somewhat heavy-handed tale of an antihero, posessed of wilfulness rather than ability, who struggles against the society in which he finds himself. Ha Jin does, however, contrive a more subtle climax than his predecessor: rather than Ah Q's total defeat and death, his protagonist Shao Bin achieves an apparent victory, but one hedged with plenty of indications that he will not live happily ever after. An ambiguous story such as this is perhaps the only kind which can be told of modern China: Ha Jin is a realist, acknowledging that things are better than they were, but that this is not saying a great deal. His portrait of the petty corruption of the Chinese system is clear-sighted, and provides a good idea of the realities of contemporary life in the country. Again like Lu Xun's, the value of Ha Jin's work is primarily didactic, being informative rather than great literature, but it is well worth reading for all that.