Saboteur

Ha Jin’s “Saboteur” takes on many meanings as you delve further into the context of both the setting and the author. It was written during the Cultural Revolution, a time when China was trying to enforce true communist ideology and abolish elitism. Because of that, there was a lot of hatred aimed scholars- at people like Chiu, the protagonist of our story. Chui is on vacation with his wife in Muji when police officers throw tea at their feet. Outraged, Chui speaks up and accuses the police of disrupting the public order they were supposed to uphold. He states “Comrade Police, your duty is to keep order, but you purposely tortured us common citizens. Why violate the law you are supposed to enforce?” (Jin 272). Because of this, he is arrested and held in prison until he confesses to the crime that he did not commit.

                This irony is only one example of the many in this story. Irony is the most abundant literary device. I believe this irony represents the idea that actions and consequences are arbitrary and disconnected. Chiu is arrested for trying to uphold justice when the police fail. There is disconnect between his action and the consequence. This would be counter-intuitive to the concept of true justice, which I believe this story is arguing against.

                At the beginning of the story, Chiu believes in truth and justice. He has faith that his government and communist party will abide by the idea that all people are treated equally before the law, and therefore has faith that he will not remain in jail. However, his belief in this justice fades as the story progresses. He soon learns that the system will not support him. Desperate, he turns his faith in justice to something else- to the media. He claims that he will turn to the newspapers and the press to inform the world of the injustice that has happened to him. However, that threat is not taken seriously.

                In the end, when Chui signs an acknowledgement of the crime he did not commit, his faith in true justice has vanished completely. He knows that there is nowhere he can turn in order to reprimand those who have done him an injustice. He decides to take justice into his own hands by deliberately spreading his hepatitis that has been acting up throughout the story. As a result, over 800 people are infected with 6 deaths, two of them being children. This is the most important part of the story for me. It undermines the concept of true justice. There was no way for Chui to achieve justice other than to take it into his own hands. Similarly, though we see the death of these people as unjust, it may have very well appeared just to Chiu, who had been wronged by not only the police of that town who arrested him, but by the citizens of the town who had provided eye-witness accounts of the incident.