49 pages • 1 hour read
Ha JinThe Bridegroom
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 7-9
Story 7 Summary: “An Entrepreneur’s Story”
After the narrator becomes a rich man, he notices that everyone treats him differently. When he had worked at a construction company, three years before, he had proposed to a woman named Manshan. Manshan’s mother, Mrs. Pan, had sharply denied him and criticized him. In addition to the fact that he did not have a steady income, the narrator supposes that the Pans had turned him down because they thought he was a criminal.
Two years before, the narrator had fallen into a business arrangement with a colleague. They planned to buy cigarettes in the South and sell them for a profit in their own city. At the time, this was illegal. The police caught them, and the narrator went to jail for three months. His picture appeared in the local papers. The Pans likely noticed.
The narrator begins attending night college after hearing that Manshan has enrolled. She doesn’t treat him meanly and he wonders if her opinion of him has changed. Through a match-maker, he proposes to her again, but once more, Mrs. Pan turns him down with cruel words. The narrator begins to try and approach Manshan at the night college. One night, he talks to her before she enters class. He asks her out. She says she’s busy during the week, but asks, “how about next week?” (119).
The narrator waits for her patiently, but she doesn’t arrive at class the following three weeks. He realizes that she quit the night college. He quits as well, and then quits the construction company where he works. Meanwhile, the times have changed. It is no longer illegal to have a private business or sell things for profit. The narrator begins selling fashionable clothes at a market downtown. The business is extremely profitable, bringing the narrator more money than he had ever expected. He accumulates great wealth, depositing more than a thousand yuan into his bank account every month. His neighbors soon take note of his growing savings. He reflects on how money can change the way people treat someone, and how this in turn can change the way a person sees themselves.
He recalls a time when he went to the zoo. At a bakery kiosk, the two servers seem to ignore him. After a while, they eventually help him. He asks about the best and most expensive items they have on the menu, and they joke that he would not be able to afford them. Suddenly angry, the narrator demands to order all of the cookies and cakes that they have. A manager comes out to plead with the narrator, but the narrator demands all of the bakery’s goods. He then hires two boys to help him take all of the goods to a bear pit, where he dumps the baked goods before a watching crowd.
The gesture makes the narrator famous in the city, and those in his neighborhood begin to show him respect. Matchmakers and women begin to pay him attention. His business continues to grow and soon his profits have tripled.
One day, his former matchmaker asks him if he’s still interested in Manshan. He says he is. This time, Mrs. Pan lavishes praise on the narrator and asks the matchmaker to help her daughter.
The narrator meets Manshan on the Songhua River on a Saturday. She seems to him to be completely different person. She’s dressed well and treats him with familiarity. They paddle in a small boat to a small island in the river. Manshan asks if the narrator hates her. The question troubles the narrator, but he puts an arm around her shoulder and kisses her. She doesn’t resist his advances.
The narrator and Manshan get married one month later. The narrator is unable to impregnate Manshan and secretly wonders if she is on birth control. The relationship between Mrs. Pan and the narrator remains strained and problematic, with the narrator continuing to “hate” (125) his mother-in-law. One night he hits her, but the mother-in-law doesn’t tell Manshan. He wishes for revenge against Mrs. Pan for his earlier humiliations, but focuses his energies instead on having a child with Manshan.
Story 8 Summary: “Flame”
Nimei receives a letter from Hsu Peng, a man she has not heard from for 17 years. In the letter, Hsu Peng writes that he is attending a conference in Muji City in September. He would like to visit Nimei and her family. He mentions that he has three children and is the “commissar of an armored division” (127).
Nimei locks the letter away. A nurse comes to her office and tells her that the patient staying in room 3 wants to see her. This patient is the “director of the Cadre Department at the Prefecture Administration” (127). He had gastric perforation surgery two weeks prior. When she arrives at his room, he complains about his diet and requests fish soup. Still thinking about Hsu Peng’s letter, Nimei goes down to the kitchen to request that they make Director Liao, the patient in room 3, a fish stew the following day.
While walking along Peace Avenue, Nimei thinks about Hsu Peng. Seventeen years ago, they had been lovers. After Nimei’s father had died, a man named Jiang Bang courted Nimei. Jiang Bang worked in the army’s kitchen, so he always brought food. This was during a time of food shortage, and Nimei was lucky to have a man with access to food courting her. Nimei’s mother encouraged Nimei to marry Jiang Bang, but Nimei was in love with Hsu Peng, a high school graduate and platoon leader. Nimei pleaded with her mother to meet Hsu Peng, but Nimei’s mother refused. Out of duty to her mother, Nimei ultimately married Jiang Bang.
Nimei told Hsu Peng that she had decided to marry Jiang Bang, and Hsu Peng replied by telling her that he hated her and would get his revenge. That had been the last time they had spoken. Nimei had been married to Jiang Bang for 16 years. During this time she continued to think of Hsu Peng often.
Nimei lies in bed and considers Hsu Peng’s motives for wanting to visit her. She considers that he wants to flaunt his high rank as a commissar. She imagines the impact a visit by such a high-ranking person might have. Although she is embarrassed by her own husband’s low rank, she imagines that letting her mother see who Hsu Peng has become might make her see that she had made a mistake in forcing Nimei to marry Jiang Bang. She writes Hsu Peng and invites him to visit.
At the hospital, she learns that Director Liao complained about the fish stew he received. She goes to his room and promises to find him freshwater fish. Back at home, she asks her husband to buy a carp and to make a stew of it. Nimei wakes up early the following morning and goes jogging.
Jiang Bang leaves work early in order to prepare the fish stew Nimei has asked him to make. That evening he takes the prepared stew to Nimei’s office, and together they present the meal to Director Liao. Director Liao tries the soup and likes it very much. He asks who made the soup and Nimei tells him that her husband made it.
From then on, Jiang Bang continues to prepare fish for Director Liao. He spends time with Director Liao at the hospital, and over time, they get to know one another.
Nimei enlists Jiang Bang’s help in leveling their yard and paving it with bricks. She buys pots of roses and places them by the front gate. Before Director Liao leaves the hospital, he calls in Nimei and thanks her for her hospitality. He asks if there is anything he can do for her, and she tells him that Jiang Bang might appreciate working in a different office. Director Liao agrees to write a note to the hospital leaders recommending Jiang Bang for a promotion.
With Jiang Bang likely to receive a promotion, the front yard paved with bricks, and Nimei’s daughter recently admitted to a nursing school, Nimei finally feels that she can present herself to Hsu Peng without embarrassment.
One evening at the end of September, a jeep arrives at Nimei’s home. Two soldiers enter, asking if this is the house of Head Nurse Nimei. They announce that their commissar cannot come this evening. Instead they present Nimei with a gift of salmon and soy oil. Nimei tells Jiang Bang that the commissar is a former patient of hers.
Nimei rushes back into the house and lies down in bed, crying. She doesn’t know if Hsu Peng had ever intended to visit in person.
Story 9 Summary: “A Bad Joke”
The police finally apprehend two suspects who enter Everyday Hardware, plugging their mouths with washcloths and then taking them to the city’s police station for interrogation. Both men, who are peasants, deny that they have spread any slander against the revolution. They pretend not to know who Deng Xiaoping is. The chief realizes that the culprits are smarter than he thought, and puts off the rest of interrogation until the following day.
Seven weeks earlier, the culprits had gone into a department store. While there, they told a joke to the salesgirls about the rise in inflation over the past month. One said, “Damn, all the prices go up—only our chairman never grows” (144). The salesgirls laughed and spread the joke around the department store, saying, “All the prices go up, but Deng Xiaoping never grows” (144). Soon the joke spread throughout the entire city.
The police summon the salesgirls for interrogation. One claims that the taller of the two culprits said the joke using the words “Deng Xiaoping” and not just “chairman.” The culprit continues to deny that he has ever heard of Deng Xiaoping. The culprits insist that they had said that their “chairman” (145) never changes, not “Deng Xiaoping.” They claim that the chairman of their commune, Chairman Lou, is a dwarf.
The salesgirls agree that the taller man had in fact said “chairman” and not “Deng Xiaoping.” The interrogators are at a loss, but feel that someone must face responsibility for the crime. They call in Chairman Lou for interrogation. Although very short, Chairman Lou is attractive and well-educated and tells the policemen that they should punish the two culprits.
The two culprits receive more interrogation. They continue to refuse responsibility for the slander of Chairman Deng. Chairman Lou admonishes them while standing in a chair. The chief orders them to the city prison. After the tall man pleads with Chairman Lou for mercy, the short man mocks Chairman Lou, and the policeman take the two prisoners away.
Stories 7-9 Analysis
As with other stories in The Bridegroom, the end of “An Entrepreneur’s Story” reveals an ironic undercurrent to the surface meaning of the narrator’s words. The narrator claims, for example, that having money greatly changed the way people treated him. This is most evident in the case of his wife and her mother. When he only had unsteady work and was seen as a petty criminal, both Manshan, his future wife, and Mrs. Pan, his future mother-in-law, treated him harshly. After he becomes a successful entrepreneur, however, Manshan treats him with familiarity and respect, and Mrs. Pan suddenly approves of him as a son-in-law.
While it is true that Manshan and Mrs. Pan treat him differently on the surface, details from the final paragraphs of the story suggest that Manshan and Mrs. Pan’s opinions of the narrator have not changed. The narrator admits that he is unable to get Manshan pregnant and says, “Sometimes I can’t help wondering whether Manshan is on the pill, but so far I haven’t found any evidence” (125). The fact that the narrator must look for evidence, rather than being able to ask Manshan directly about something so essential, suggests that there is a level of mistrust between the narrator and Manshan, and also suggests that the two have not grown very close.
In the next paragraph, the narrator reveals how deep the chasm of hatred and anger is between him and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Pan. He says frankly, “I still hate my mother-in-law” (125). He also guesses that “her calmness means she despises me” (125). He recalls a story he heard in which a man “slept with both his wife and her mother in the same bed to revenge his humiliation” (125), and in the final sentence of the story, says, “I wish I could do the same to my old bitch of a mother-in-law, but for the time being I must work harder on giving Manshan a baby” (125). Such details and vengeful fantasies contradict the narrator’s claim that becoming rich has changed the way his wife and mother-in-law see him. Ironically, it seems that becoming rich and achieving his dream of marrying Manshan has only increased the animosity between the narrator and Mrs. Pan, while at the same time, there is little sign that Manshan’s low opinion of the narrator has changed much at all.
In “Flame,” Nimei hopes to stage a scene in which she can make her mother see that Hsu Peng would have been a better match than Jiang Bang. To prepare for Hsu Peng’s arrival, Nimei enlists her husband’s help to pave the front yard with bricks, and has her husband prepare expensive fish soups for an influential patient at the hospital who can help install Jiang Bang in a higher-ranking position. In his diligent submission to Nimei’s wishes, Jiang Bang ironically demonstrates the opposite of what Nimei is trying to prove. That is, while Nimei hopes to prove that Jiang Bang was a poor match of a husband, his diligence in the projects she assigns him suggests that he might in fact be a competent spouse. Meanwhile, Hsu Peng, who Nimei hopes to show as the superior to Jiang Bang, fails to keep his appointment, and Nimei must wonder if Hsu Peng had any other motivation than to humiliate her. A subtle irony to all of this is that Nimei’s mother might have been right in the first place to demand that she marry Jiang Bang instead of Hsu Peng.
As in the first story, “Saboteur,” the title of the story, “A Bad Joke,” refers to several different threads in the narrative. For one, it refers to the joke that the culprits supposedly told about chairman Deng Xiaoping. The title might also refer to a surprising moment towards the end of the story, when Chairman Lou berates one of the suspects while standing in a chair. Finally, there is also a reading in which Ha Jin plays the joke in question on the police, who now seem like fools by their need to find a culprit for a crime which has none. In this last reading, it is possible that the two suspects are not in fact witty pranksters, pretending not to have heard of Chairman Deng Xiaoping in order to escape punishment, but are in fact who they say they are: simple-minded peasants out of touch with the times. If this is the case, then the “bad joke” is that even those who display a sincere commitment to the ideals and customs of the Communist Party might still end up victims of its archaic mechanisms of control.
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By Ha Jin
