Sabotage!

Revenge is an easy theme to which a person can relate. No matter how “good” a person is, retribution is always in the back of people’s minds. For example, in “Saboteur,” an educated professor in China is wrongfully arrested for exclaiming that an officer spilled tea on his new shoes (on his honeymoon, no less).

Mr. Chiu opens the story with a sort of mellow air; he eats unhurriedly and speaks of exhaustion. He and his wife are coming to the end of their two-week long vacation, and Chiu is actually glad to be returning home. He believes that his hepatitis may flare up soon and is ready for a rest. The setting is generally gloomy; the air smells of rotten melon and flies buzz around people’s lunches. Even the description of Chiu’s new bride is sickly; beads of sweat collect on her pale cheeks as she kneads the “root of her nose with her fingertips.”

After the scuffle with the police officers, Chiu realizes that resistance is futile. He tells his wife to go ahead on the train and to send someone if he does not follow within a day. The protagonist, Mr. Chiu, is forcefully taken by the policemen and is locked in a cell.

Later that day, Mr. Chiu is taken out to be interrogated. He notices that in only a few hours, the police “had accumulated a smile pile of writing about him” even though he technically lived three hundred miles away and it was his first time in this particular city.

As a communist citizen in a communist country, Mr. Chiu is actually supposed to be punished more for failing “to be a model for the masses.” They charge him with sabotage just for basically asking for an apology. The chief throws all of Mr. Chiu’s defenses back at him, like the witnesses at the train station. Apparently there were several who signed papers saying that Chiu was at fault, and not the officers. The fact that the officer had hit Chiu’s hand also could not prove that Chiu’s feet were wet from the policemen’s doing.

Chiu is told that the only way he would be let off easily is to sign a paper stating that he was at fault and that he would not disrupt the public order again. Chiu resists, stating that he is innocent and should be let go immediately with a letter explaining why he is late to his university appointment. Instead, the chief locks him up over the weekend. The dutiful wife ends up sending an old student (who later became a lawyer) to fetch Chiu, but he proves to be more of a bother than help. The policemen just claim that he is a fraud and chain him in the backyard outside. The only way that the officers will allow the two to be free is if Chiu signs self-criticism.

Annoyed and tired of the abuse of the men at the station, Chiu signs to the lies and frees the man who was sent to save him. Before returning home, however, Chiu stops at several restaurants near the police station. He orders a bowl or two of food at each one, mumbling all the while about how he wished he could “kill all the bastards.” The ex-student is completely mystified by his behavior. The states that it is the first time he ever thinks “of Mr. Chiu as an ugly man,” with his jaundiced face and puckered skin.

The story closes with simple facts: over eigh hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji. Six die of the disease, including two children.

The passive-aggressive approach Mr. Chiu takes against the police officers was mildly humorous to me, although the outcome was obviously not positive. The injustice brought upon Chiu was clearly uncalled for, but so was the revenge. It almost reminded me of how ridiculous Montresor was in “The Cask of Amontillado”; was murder necessary as payback? It was also interesting to see how even seemingly nice people are capable of atrocious acts. Surely Chiu was not thinking about all of the people he would eventually affect from the spreading of his hepatitis, but just knowing that an educated individual would stoop to low levels to spread revenge is interesting. In the end, Chiu truly commits the crime for which he was originally punished: sabotage.