Ha Jin “Saboteur”

After reading this short story from Ha Jin, I was pretty astonished at the events that took place within the reading. Mr. Chiu was arrested early in the story when two policemen seemed to “throw” tea onto the feet of himself and his bride, which I thought was extremely odd. Mr. Chiu and his bride were doing nothing but minding their own business, and for two policemen of all people to throw tea on them was just weird. This short story definitely gave the reader a sense of some sort of discrimination towards Mr. Chiu and ultimately his old student who had attempted to rescue him from imprisonment. It seems the policemen targeted Mr. Chiu from the beginning, and then after refusing to accept the false statement, Mr. Chiu was kept in a prison cell for over two days which just seemed absolutely ridiculous. As another classmate already noted, this was not an event that took place very long ago. That is shocking in and of itself. I also found the police to act very brutally, especially towards Mr. Chiu’s rescuer. He was handcuffed to a tree in the middle of a very hot day and was slapped by the policemen and had water thrown on him so he “would avoid heatstroke” as the policemen stated. There have been some present cases of police brutality here in the United States, and its very fascinating to make some connections between the different law enforcements between cultures. Unfortunately, I think both the United States police and Chinese police face backlash from incidents such as these and this creates tension between the people and law enforcement as we have seen in the recent years with the Ferguson riots and so on. Lastly, I was kind of confused on the ending of this short story. It provided that Mr. Chiu went around to many different restaurants before getting onto the train home. It was stated that he ate very briefly at each restaurant before going to the next and his student was curious as to why he didn’t just eat his fill at one restaurant. Then, at the very end, it stated that there were 800 cases of hepatitis, which was a disease that Mr. Chiu had. Did Mr. Chiu’s hatred of the Muji policemen really cause him to attempt to spread his disease around the city? This seems a bit far fetched, but an intriguing thought!