Download Ebook The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin
Based upon the The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin specifics that we offer, you might not be so confused to be here and to be participant. Obtain now the soft file of this book The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin and save it to be all yours. You conserving can lead you to evoke the ease of you in reading this book The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin Even this is types of soft file. You can really make better possibility to get this The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin as the suggested book to check out.
The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin
Download Ebook The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin
If you have actually been able below, it indicates that you have the ability to kind as well as connect to the web. Again, It implies that web turns into one of the remedy that can make simplicity of your life. One that you can do now in this set is additionally one part of your effort to enhance the life top quality. Yeah, this website currently provides the The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin as one of materials to check out in this recent age.
As one of the book compilations to suggest, this The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin has some solid factors for you to review. This publication is extremely ideal with just what you require now. Besides, you will certainly additionally like this book The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin to review considering that this is among your referred publications to read. When going to get something new based upon experience, enjoyment, and other lesson, you can utilize this publication The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin as the bridge. Beginning to have reading habit can be undertaken from various means and also from variant types of publications
As well as just how this publication will aid you? Do you assume that you have issue with similar subject? This is no fret about this. Even you have had the resources to address your problems; this book will finish what you require. The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin is one of guides that that has actually been created by the trusted author. With the experience, knowledge, and also facts that are offered by this book, it is really expert.
Well, when else will you locate this possibility to get this publication The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin soft file? This is your excellent possibility to be below and also get this terrific publication The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin Never leave this book prior to downloading this soft file of The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin in web link that we provide. The Bridegroom: Stories By Ha Jin will truly make a good deal to be your best friend in your lonesome. It will certainly be the very best partner to boost your business as well as leisure activity.
- Sales Rank: #672152 in Books
- Published on: 2001-09-11
- Released on: 2001-09-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.20" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 225 pages
Amazon.com Review
It's the little things that kill us, as that master of the miniature Ha Jin well knows. Not oppression in general, but the tea thrown at us by railroad policemen; not failure, but the old flame who fails to visit; not grief, but the peanuts our kindergarten teacher stole from our pockets. In The Bridegroom, such moments run surprisingly deep, as if they traced the grooves history has left on individual hearts. The book's 12 tales capture a China in transition, en route from Maoism to market-friendly socialism, from isolation to increasing contact with the West. "I never thought money could make so much difference," says the narrator of "An Entrepreneur's Story," who's been transformed from black-market lowlife to new-economy hero. He wins respect and gets the girl, but it all feels too easy somehow, and he revenges himself by lighting his kerosene stove with bank notes.
Other characters navigate this sea change with similar bewilderment. The professor mistaken for "The Saboteur" thinks news articles about the end of the cultural revolution mean he can reason with the police (wrong!), while the bridegroom of the title story is hauled off to jail for so-called hooliganism rooted in "Western capitalism and bourgeois lifestyle"--that is, loving other men. "What a wonderful husband he could have been if he were not sick," his father-in-law thinks. In the story that deals most explicitly with the conflict between East and West, an American chain named Cowboy Chicken sets up shop in Muji City. The new order isn't that different from the old one, thinks one of the Chinese workers: "We nicknamed Mr. Shapiro 'Party Secretary,' because just like a Party boss anywhere he didn't do any work. The only difference was that he didn't organize political studies or demand we report to him our inner thoughts." In the end, as often happens, greed begets revolution--but whose greed? When the workers at Cowboy Chicken go on strike, jealous of one of their coworker's paychecks, they're replaced by an African American woman who teaches English at a nearby college and her students, who sing "We Shall Overcome" while they wipe tables.
But as in Jin's National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting, even the broadest political and cultural ironies are painted with an extraordinarily light-handed brush. Despite their apparent simplicity, these stories run deep; it's as if some 19th century master had wandered into our midst, writing prose whose unruffled surface recalls the virtues of the very long view. Like Chekhov, another great miniaturist and the writer he most resembles, Jin understands that humor is compassion, that a well-honed appreciation for the absurd is sometimes the best and most honest way to honor failed lives. While his characters attempt to balance the needs of the self and the demands of the state, we see less what is foreign to us than what is native to the human heart. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
It's difficult to think of another writer who has captured the conflicting attitudes and desires, and the still-changing conditions of daily life, of post-Cultural Revolution China as well as Ha Jin does in his second collection, which follows his NBA-winning novel, Waiting. These 12 stories attain their significant cumulative effect through spare prose penetrated by wit, insight and a fine sense of irony. One realizes in reading them that while human nature is universal, China's cultural and political repression exacerbates such traits as fear of authority (and the desire to circumvent it), male chauvinism and suspicion of outsiders. In "The Woman from New York," a young wife and mother who goes to the States for four years finds, on her return to Muji City (where most of these tales are set), that her child, her marriage, her job and her honor are forever lost. American business methods clash with Chinese traditions in "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," in which Chinese workers' anger about the behavior of their boss, Mr. Shapiro, is redoubled when they discover one of their own countrymen practicing the strange ethics of capitalism. Such varied protagonists as college professors, a factory worker, a horny cadre member, two uneducated peasants and a five-year-old girl illustrate the ways in which hardship, lack of living space, inflexible social rules and government quotas thwart happiness. The title story is perhaps the most telling indication of the clash of humanitarian feeling and bureaucratic intervention. The protagonist, who has been taught to believe that "homosexuality... originated in Western capitalism and bourgeois lifestyle," is unable to credit his own sympathy for his son-in-law, who is sent to a mental hospital to cure his "disease." Ha Jin has a rare empathy for people striving to balance the past and the future while caught on the cusp of change. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Ha Jin follows up his National Book Award-winning novel, Waiting, with a collection of a dozen short stories dealing with political and human relations in China. In the opening work, "Saboteur," a newly married man is imprisoned and in an act of vengeance later becomes responsible for an outbreak of acute hepatitis that ultimately affects over 800 people and kills six. In the title piece, a gay man deceptively marries a rather homely and obtuse young woman, leaving her guardian to struggle with the consequences. "Entrepreneur's Story," a tale of class and greed, tells of a temporary brick layer who recalls being told by his sweetheart's mother that "she'd rather throw her daughter into a sewer" than to let him marry her. Two pieces in which Jin intertwines humor into otherwise intense stories are "A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find," in which a movie company pits an actor against a fierce tiger in a quest for realism results, and "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," which describes how a Texas-based fried chicken franchise affects the Chinese with its capitalistic ways. Jin uses this collection to exhibit his strong writing and storytelling skills with his laconic use of words. Recommended for most larger public, academic, and Asian literature collections.
-DShirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin PDF
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin EPub
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin Doc
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin iBooks
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin rtf
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin Mobipocket
The Bridegroom: Stories
By Ha Jin Kindle