ALIEN LAND

By Paul Gray

Who is Ha Jin, and why has his slender collection of published work already earned him the PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction and the Flannery O'Connor Award, plus a handful of other literary accolades? The answer hinges partly on the accident of his birth and the raw materials that fed his literary imagination. Now 41 and teaching English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Ha Jin had the good luck to be born outside the U.S. and hence be protected from the homogenizing and potentially trivializing influences that afflict so many U.S.-born aspiring authors. Beginners are advised to "write about what you know." Ha Jin inherited a frame of reference broader than sex and MTV.

Ha Jin spent the first 29 years of his life in Communist China, including five years of service in the army. He was a boy of 10 when the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, spreading fanaticism and witch hunts across the land. That is the world--and rampaging ideologues are some of the people--portrayed in the 12 stories that make up his second collection, Under the Red Flag (University of Georgia Press; 207 pages; $22.95).

The very first tale, In Broad Daylight, invites Western readers into an alien landscape and a harrowing situation. White Cat, the young narrator, learns from his friend Bare Hips that the Red Guards have caught Old Whore, a local woman accused of prostitution, and will parade her through the streets to the place of public denunciations and punishment. White Cat is excited at the promised spectacle, as is everyone in the town; a bleak place like Dismount Fort offers few public diversions.

This boy is too young to feel any pity for the tormented woman. But he does report his grandmother's opinion that Old Whore is getting off lightly: "They should burn the bitch on Heaven Lamp like they did in the old days." And he describes what happened to a woman condemned to Heaven Lamp: "She was hung naked upside down above a wood fire whose flames could barely touch her scalp, and two men flogged away at her with whips made of bulls' penises." The release of death usually came "a day and a night" later.

The moral quandary posed by this story--the difficulty, given the context of the people and mores of Dismount Fort, of defining proper or humane behavior--permeates Under the Red Flag. Ha Jin is not a preachy author. He offers his characters choices that are incompatible and potentially destructive and then dispassionately records what they do next.

In Winds and Clouds over a Funeral, the best story in the collection, a Communist official named Ding Liang finds himself trapped between competing loyalties. On her deathbed, his aged mother has begged him not to have her remains cremated; at the same time, the party is waging a nationwide campaign in favor of cremations so that burials of the dead will not use up more of China's arable land. Clearly, Ding's dilemma calls for a meeting of local party officials, some of whom are his enemies. Follow your conscience, they advise the bereaved and now relieved son, who has already arranged for his mother's coffin. A trap, says his friend: "If you bury your mother tomorrow morning, I'm sure they will report you to the higher-ups tomorrow afternoon." What is Ding to do?

That question is as old as storytelling, and Ha Jin has found fascinating ways to answer it. Like R.K. Narayan's imaginary Indian village of Malgudi and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Polish shtetls, Ha Jin's Dismount Fort teems with vivid life and people who grow ever less strange as their struggles unfold. An exotic subject matter helps, but narrative talent proves victorious.

--By Paul Gray