BOOK REVIEW The Bridegroom Stories By Ha Jin Pantheon, 240 pp., $22

HA JIN EXPLORES SOULS UNDER A HEAVY THUMB

Ha Jin's characters remind me of a cousin whose mother once locked him out of the house for being bad. He was only 3 or so at the time, and when she finally let him in, he was so angry that he peed all over her sofa cushions. Then he turned the cushions over and did it again.

"The Bridegroom," Ha Jin's most recent work since his prize-winning novel, "Waiting," depicts a whole society of people whose attitudes are eerily like my cousin's, except that they're mainly adults, not children, and they're acting out not against a stressed-out housewife but an oppressive paternal regime.

One story, "In the Kindergarten," exactly mirrors my cousin's tale. It describes a little girl whose teacher promised her a portion of the tasty purslanes she had the class pick. But when the teacher keeps the whole bag for herself, this girl squats inside the bag, lifts up some of the vegetable, and pees secretly. The intellectual in "Saboteur" behaves no less childishly, but the consequences are more severe. Jailed on the trumped-up charge of sabotage against the state, he avenges his arrest by starting a hepatitis epidemic. Such is the dark genius of despair.

Anyone who thinks of Ha Jin as a merely elegant or quiet writer, make no mistake:  "The Bridegroom" is a collection of edgy, twisted stories. It presents characters - citizens of the People's Republic of China - not suffering from normal life problems but rather living in extremis, spiritually distorted and disfigured. Unable to triumph over adversity, they become experts at revenge instead.

"The Bridegroom" brilliantly portrays a state that not only locks its citizens out of what they deserve, but also intrudes upon what little they might naturally possess: their families and love lives. In "Broken," a young woman caught having an adulterous affair is asked by the court not just how many times she had intercourse but who was on top. In "Alive," the grieving survivors of an earthquake are ordered to reshuffle themselves into nuclear families, as if doing so were an arithmetic operation.

Overall, Ha Jin's portrait of China during and just after the Cultural Revolution is that of a primitive, nearly medieval place in which people struggle to survive within the confines of a rigid and impracticable ideology. It's a place where the scramble to meet basic needs supplants any loftier human goals. Husbands choose wives according to their apartment options. Virgins trade their virtue for a good meal. In a sense, the characters in "The Bridegroom" have, in their desperation, been rendered not just as children but as whores as well.

And yet, despite this dark landscape, the stories in "The Bridegroom" more closely resemble farce than tragedy. Just why this is so speaks less to historical truth than to the author's own compassion. In Ha Jin's world, no one - not even the oppressors - are purely good or evil. Unlike the totalitarian monsters of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's telling, the officials depicted here seem nearly as needy and ineffectual as their powerless comrades. Sometimes they are just too dim to be truly evil - like the important official in "Flame" who, recuperating from a gastric problem in the hospital, allows himself to be manipulated in exchange for a good fish stew.

Just as the Chinese state is not wholly evil, its citizens are not wholly good. Ha Jin depicts a fractious population largely unconscious of the forces that drive them, a hodgepodge of entrenched mores that include socialism, sexual prudishness, provincialism, superstition, and obsolescing religious beliefs. In the collection's title story, an ignorant father-in-law believes that the electric water torture inflicted upon his homosexual son-in-law will cure him of his "disease." And the jailed intellectual in "Saboteur" displays that unique cluelessness known to intellectuals the world over: "For a whole day he lay in bed, thinking about his paper on the nature of contradictions. Time and again he was overwhelmed by anger, cursing aloud, 'A bunch of thugs!' He swore that once he was out, he would write an article about this experience."

Inner conflict and frustrated desire, ignorance and blindness - such, "The Bridegroom" would remind us, are the qualities that make us human. To be free of conflict means freedom from our humanity as well, as "The Woman from New York" chillingly demonstrates.

The story recounts a mother who returns from an extended trip to the United States eager to reunite with her daughter and husband. But the daughter, bunkered with her paternal grandparents, writes to her, "Go away, bad woman! I don't want a mother like you." At the end of the story, the husband remarries a nice Chinese woman untainted by foreign travel. He grows contented and fat. The daughter, when asked if she likes the new wife, replies, "My dad found me a good mommy." The final lines leave us with this image of the daughter: "Sometimes she plays hopscotch with other children in front of the apartment building. A pair of huge butterflies, made of yellow ribbons, dangles at the ends of her braids as she capers around. Smiles widen her gazelle eyes."

"The Woman from New York," with its ideologically perfect, gutted humans, harkens back to the visionary dystopias of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Or to such horror tales as Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," in which two children continue to calmly watch their celluloid entertainment after feeding their parents to the lions. But besides displaying Ha Jin's own vision of human nature's parameters, peit also showcases his mastery of craft, the consummate restraint and nearly telegraphic objectivity with which he paints difficult truths.

Who are we humans stripped of the luxury of shame or pride? And how far can we be pressed until we turn into something else? These are the questions that unite the stories, and it's to the author's credit that he poses no one answer. Rather, the answers seem to be as varied as the characters he portrays.

In the end, "The Bridegroom" reaches beyond modern China to share in the larger story of the modern struggle. Its characters could just as easily be those of Nikolai Gogol slinking beneath the Czarist radar, or the Odessa Jews of Isaac Babel, butting heads with sanctioned anti-Semitism. They could be Charlie Chaplain, cunning his way through a modernist nightmare that threatens - but never quite succeeds - in stripping him of his humanity.

In this sense, "The Bridegroom" stands squarely among the world's best literature of oppression, but with one little twist: the guarded hope that, while the little guy might not triumph alone, someday he might prevail by sheer numbers. For, as recent events have suggested, even omnipotent-seeming regimes can be toppled. And not by armed revolutionaries, but by one too many "children" raining on their parade.