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The acclaimed poet Ha Jin was raised in China and emigrated to the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In Under the Red Flag, he writes about loss and moral deterioration with the keen sense of a survivor. His stories examine life in the bleak rural town of Dismount Fort, where privacy is nonexistent and paranoia rules as neighbor turns against neighbor, husband turns against wife, state turns against individual, history turns against humanity.
In "A Man-to-Be," an engaged militiaman participates in a gang rape, but finds himself impotent when he looks into the eyes of the victim. His fiancee's family breaks off the engagement, not because of the rape, but because they doubt his virility. In "Winds and Clouds over a Funeral," a Communist leader disobeys his mother's last wish for burial to keep his good standing in the party, but his enemies bring him down for being a bad son. "In Broad Daylight" is the story of the public humiliation of a woman accused of being a whore. Her dignified defiance is gradually stripped away as she is dragged through the streets, cursed and spat upon by strangers and family alike.
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Release date
October 7, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780820336787
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780820336787
- File size: 2510 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 3, 1997
The spirit of a rural town during China's Cultural Revolution is captured in this strong collection from poet and People's Army veteran Jin (Oceans of Words), one of China's best-known post-Tiananmen emigres. Fear of public humiliation and punishment haunts these 12 tales of small-town political rivalries, marital despair, family clashes and the balance between new and ancient China. Through a series of troubling vignettes, many of which involve sadism (rape, castration, a cuckold's decapitation), the reader gains a unique picture of a people struggling in a world in which matchmakers and fortune tellers exist with party officials and Red Guards. At the same time, Jin uses these simple stories to explore larger themes about human relationships and the effect of government on individual lives. Sometimes his allegories are too simple. For all the beauty of Jin's pared-down prose, one sometimes wishes for more of such evocative passages as "...a line of colorful washing, frozen and sheeny, swaying in the wind like landed kites tied up by children." (Nov.) FYI: Ha Jin won the 1997 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
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