WARD FOUR: A Novel of Wartime China
By BA JIN
Translated by Haili Kong and Howard Goldblatt. San Francisco: China Books & Periodicals, 1999. 208 pages, $14.95 (paperback)

Tony Giffone

While no Chinese writers of the twentieth century have attained wide recognition in the West, those most likely to be known, such as Lao She and Lu Xun, are from the early decades of the century. This is, in part, because those authors employ literary methods accessible to Western readers. Lao She's Dickensian portrait of economic hardship in old Beijing and Lu Xun's satiric dissection of the Chinese personality are both of their time and place as well as universal. There has also recently been interest in writers from the post-Cultural Revolution period: in their confessional memoirs (often referred to as "wound literature"), they bear witness to the horrors of more recent Chinese history. Surely it is not a coincidence that the Chinese writers most likely to be read in the West are those who have written during periods when China has been more or less open to the West.

Less accessible and more forgotten are the writers of the middle decades of the twentieth century-Ding Ling, Sun Li, Mao Dun, Yei Shangtao, Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian, and Ba Jin. Why? The answer is probably a mixture of both the political and the aesthetic. First is the general unavailability of texts, many of which only exist in Gladys Yang's translations and are more easily found in the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Beijing than in the United States. (Ba Jin's Ward Four was originally published in China in 1946, but is only now available in English for the first time, thanks to the efforts of translators Haili Kong and Howard Goldblatt.) Another reason for their obscurity is their subject matter. The Japanese invasion of China, the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, and the agrarian land reform movement of the 1950s are not of great interest to a wide range of Western readers, and the sentiments expressed are unlikely to coincide with Western political views. Perhaps the most important reason, though, is that their treatment of these subjects is rendered in a style out of favor in Western literary circles: the works are written with sincerity rather than irony; action is heroic rather than tragic; characters are flat rather than rounded; and there is an emphasis on social realism (sometimes socialist realism). These writers' optimism in the individual's ability to triumph over adversity strikes most Western readers as skirting the complexity of human experience. That the writers seem to wear their heart on their sleeve often makes their works seem to be tinged with propaganda. That Ding Ling's novel The Sun Shines over Sangan River won the Stalin Prize in 1951 surely didn't help its reputation in the West. However, Western readers willing to put aside their own literary expectations will gain a glimpse into Chinese culture and society from these novels, just as Hollywood movies, even when they don't measure up to the highest artistic standards, can provide insights into American society.
Ba Jin's Ward Four, which describes the eighteen-day hospital stay of a twenty-two-year-old former bank worker who is now unemployed and in need of a gallbladder operation, has its genesis in the writer's actual stay in a hospital in Guiyang in 1944. Written in diary form, the novel chronicles vignettes of human suffering as they register themselves on the consciousness of the narrator. The powerful effect of the book, an expos¨¦ of the paltry conditions in the hospital, is dependent on the accumulation of details. But Ward Four moves beyond journalistic reporting in its use of the hospital as a metaphor for the conditions of the nation. News of the outside world-mostly reports of food shortages in Hunan-creeps into the hospital; the suffering inside the hospital is meant as a mirror of the suffering outside its walls. While part of what Ba Jin chronicles is simply part of the worries of anyone who is in a hospital (i.e., the safety of surgery), there is no doubt that for many of the novel's characters, medical conditions are exacerbated by social conditions. As one character says of his seriously ill father, "If times weren't so hard, he'd never had gotten so bad. He let it go unattended at first in order to save money, then, even when he couldn't put it off any longer he still wasn't willing to spend the money necessary to get a good doctor." Concerns about medical costs permeate the novel as various characters are forced to borrow money from friends or sell family possessions in order to afford medical care. In a climactic revelation, the narrator sees how different the treatment is for patients in the first-class wing of the hospital.
The novel dramatizes how individuals are robbed of their humanity by the treatment they receive in the institution; patients are generally referred to only by their bed number, suggesting the dehumanizing effect of institutions on individuals. The patients often internalize this lack of humanity, at one point becoming reluctant to protest on behalf of a dying patient who, because he is poor, is looked down on by the staff. And they often joke around with one another as a way of keeping their sanity.

The hospital is so poor that patients with infectious diseases are not isolated in a separate ward; the conditions lead Dr. Yang, a sympathetic female doctor, to wish that she had never studied medicine. An idealized character, it is Dr. Yang who expresses the author's belief that the goal of life is to be useful to others.
At one point, Ba Jin elevates the novel to the level of an absurdist fable when the narrator's gallbladder is not removed-all his suffering has been in vain. It's a moment worthy of such twentieth-century absurdists as Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller, writers who otherwise bear no resemblance to Ba Jin. But Ba Jin retreats from such pessimism when the narrator, who has been exposed to a widening sphere of humanity's ills and suffering throughout the novel, concludes, "Before I entered the hospital, I believed in nothing but myself. I thought that humans lived only for themselves. Now I know that the human heart is larger than I'd imagined. In a place like this where there's so much pain and suffering, there are still people coming to the aid of their fellow human beings."
Ba Jin's humanitarian vision provides readers with a portrait of inhumane conditions. In retrospect, the most interesting passage of the novel may be the one in which a patient wonders if one should change hospitals; by extension, it is a question of whether one should change governments. The fear that "one has to start all over again" is counterbalanced by the thought that "one wouldn't mind it if the doctors were better." After reading Ward Four, the reader may realize why so many Chinese in the 1940s decided to change governments even though it meant starting all over again.

Tony Giffone, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, has taught English at Hebei University and is a consultant to the Chinese American Education Exchange.