Imprint: Vintage
Published: 03/01/2002
ISBN: 9780099428169
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
Weight: 139g
RRP: £9.99
Shao Bin is a factory fitter in a small Chinese town, a poor and unconnected man with a young wife and a small child, but also an accomplished artist and calligrapher. He's worked at the plant for six years, so feels that this time his family will get an appartment in Worker's Park, where his wife won't have to walk two miles to wash their clothes.
But the party controls everything in the town, and again, the apartments go to corrupt officials and their cronies. Outraged, Bin pens a series of political cartoons attacking them, and finds his trouble is only just beginning.
Imprint: Vintage
Published: 03/01/2002
ISBN: 9780099428169
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
Weight: 139g
RRP: £9.99
Though art and politics figure in the action, In the Pond is first and foremost a comedy - naughty, lusty, raucously entertaining. Ha Jin's language echoes working-class Chinese at its rough, bawdy best
Fascinating...spare and taut... A fable about morality and power
Ha Jin captures the particularities of life in China, yet we recognise his characters intimately. The 'otherness' of this most foreign nation falls away as one vividly drawn human after another takes flesh on the page
Fascinating, refreshing and uncommonly subtle: Ha Jin has made China available to a new world and a world of new readers
A compelling exploration of the terrain that is the human heart... an all too rare reminder of the reasons why someone might feel so strongly about a book