In The Pond
Ha Jin
  • Published: 4 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099428169
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

In The Pond

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The stark and powerful first novel by the prize-winning author of Waiting.

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.
  • Published: 4 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099428169
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Ha Jin

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 for the USA. He is the author of six novels, including Waiting – winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2000 PEN/ Faulkner Award – In the Pond, The Crazed and his latest, Nanjing Requiem. He has also published four collections of stories and four volumes of poetry. He lives near Boston and teaches at Boston University

Also by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty
A Song Everlasting
The Banished Immortal
The Boat Rocker - A Novel
A Map of Betrayal
Nanjing Requiem
See all

Praise for In The Pond

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

New York Times Book Review

Fascinating...spare and taut... A fable about morality and power

Chicago Tribune

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

Boston Globe

Fascinating, refreshing and uncommonly subtle: Ha Jin has made China available to a new world and a world of new readers

Kirkus Reviews

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

New York Times