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A Review by Dan Torday

GIST: Ha Jin, the author of the National Book Award-winning Waiting, has taken up the task of teaching his audience about life in China after the Cultural Revolution. He's armed with the necessary weapons (spry narrative, intricate knowledge of Chinese culture, and uncommon wisdom), and the twelve stories in The Bridegroom quietly disseminate the hard truth.

UPSHOT: The stories in this collection explore how oppression both constricts and defines us, how culture informs not just our beliefs but our personalities. "In the Kindergarten," a scathing parable of the ills of communism, is a story about a teacher who, in order to pay for her abortion, makes her students collect vegetables for a stew, only to give them to the man who performed the operation. A number of stories ("Saboteur," "Broken," "The Bridegroom") reveal the awful reality of living in a police state. Free of explosive language and didactic moralizing, these stories lead us to a greater understanding of not only Ha Jin's world, but our own.

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