The Bridegroom (22 page)

Peter smiled at us with contempt. “Well, the earth won’t stop spinning without the five of you.”

I felt the room swaying like a lumbering bus. I never thought I could be fired so easily: Mr. Shapiro just said a word and my job was no more. The previous fall I had quit my position in a coal yard in order to work here. Now I was a total loser, and people would laugh at me.

The five of us were terribly distressed. Before we parted company on the street, I asked Manyou to spell for me the word Mr. Shapiro had used. With his fountain pen he wrote on my forearm, “Terminated!” There was no need for an exclamation mark.

At home I looked up the word in my pocket dictionary; it says “finished.” My anger flamed up. That damned capitalist believed he was finished with us, but he was mistaken. We were far from terminated—the struggle was still going on. I would ask my elder brother to cut the restaurant’s electricity first thing the next morning. Baisha said she’d have one of her boyfriends create some problems in Cowboy Chicken’s mail delivery. Manyou would visit his friends at the garbage center and ask them not to pick up trash at the restaurant. Jinglin declared, “I’ll blow up Peter’s Victorian!” Feilan hadn’t decided what to do yet.

This was just the beginning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of two books of poetry; two previous collections of stories,
Ocean of Words,
which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and
Under the Red Flag,
which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and two novels,
In the Pond
and
Waiting,
which won both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives near Atlanta, where he is Young J. Allen Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

ALSO BY HA JIN

FICTION

Under the Red Flag

Ocean of Words

In the Pond

Waiting

POETRY

Between Silences

Facing Shadows

Copyright © 2000 by Ha Jin

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Pantheon Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

The stories in this collection have been previously published, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following:
“Saboteur” has appeared in
The Antioch Review;
republished in
The Best American Short Stories
(1997); • “Alive” in
AGNI;
• “In the Kindergarten” in
Five Points;
republished in
The Best American Short Stories
(1999); • “A Tiger-Fighter Is Hard to Find” in
The Oxford American;
• “Broken” in
Columbia;
• “The Bridegroom” in
Harper’s;
republished in
The Best American Short Stories
(2000); • “An Entrepreneur’s Story” in
Witness;
• “Flame” in
Missouri Review;
• “A Bad Joke” in
Manoa;
• “An Official Reply” in
Shenandoah;
• “The Woman from New York” in
The Boston Book Review;
• “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town” in
TriQuarterly.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jin, Ha, 1956–
The bridegroom: stories / Ha Jin.
p.     cm.
Contents: Saboteur—Flame—In the kindergarten—A tiger-fighter is
hard to find—Broken—The bridegroom—An entrepreneur’s story—
Alive—A bad joke—An official reply—The woman from
New York—After Cowboy Chicken came to town.
I.
 China—Social life and customs—1976—Fiction.     I.   Title.

PS
3560.16
Q
54 2000    813´.54—dc21     00-028405
Random House Web Address:
www.randomhouse.com

eISBN:
978-0-375-42120-4
v3.0