The Made him a Criminal
The story moves inexorably toward as ending as unexpected as it is ironic:
“Within a month over eight hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji. Six died of the disease, including two children. Nobody knew how the epidemic had started.”
That’s not entirely true. The reader knows. The reader knows that poor Mr. Chiu starts out being an innocent, law-abiding man accused of being a saboteur and winds up—directly as a result of the process of authoritarian law enforcement—becoming an actual saboteur who purposes becomes the Typhoid Mary of this mysterious hepatitis outbreak.
Communism Is Not Synonymous with Totalitarianism
In concert with the ironic reversal of fortune in which the system itself actually creates a criminal out of a man who not predisposed to such behavior, so is there bitter irony in the fact that Mr. Chiu is also form everything that can be gleaned about him a true believer in Maoist communism. At the time of the story, Mao is dead and China stands on the precipice of significant ideological changes form the former Chairman’s hard-line rule. Mr. Chiu is, in other words, the very ideal of what communist might be in China: loyal to the party, a deep-rooted belief in Marxist theory, well-educated, law-abiding and hard-working. His idealistic stance as a communist stands in direct opposition to his less than idealistic standing as a submissive to totalitarian authoritarianism. The totalitarianism of China has therefore ironically destroyed a model of Chinese communism.
The Bomb Inside
A particularly horrific bit of irony occurs near the end when after finally be released from his ordeal, the narrator informs the reader that Mr. Chiu felt as if he had a bomb inside his chest. This is a metaphorical analogy to his aggrieved state in light of his torturous experience, of course, but it is also ironic in the way it foreshadows that Mr. Chiu actually does have a weapon of mass destruction inhabiting his body. And he is more than prepared to detonate that literal bomb.
Kafkaesque Irony
The very crime of which Mr. Chiu is accused, arrested, interrogated about and punished is an example of political irony that would be right at home in a story by Kafka. This is a nightmare come true. Mr. Chiu is directly confronted with the charge of “disrupting public order” despite the evidence being overwhelming that he is, in fact, the victim of a disruption of the public order. This irony is doubled by virtue of the fact that he is a victim not just of that disruption, but that the disruption of the public order is committed by precisely those who have been charged with maintaining that order. This is a common ironic trope in dystopian-fueled fiction such as this story and others appropriately termed Kafkaesque.
Police Complicity
The police ignore, deny and reject Mr. Chiu’s repeated insistence that his hepatitis needs to be treated lest he die as a result of the negligence. Perhaps if he had been moved from a jail to a hospital or merely been reunited with the medicine which he had originally been carrying with him, even his concerted attempts to spread his infection might not have attained such an extreme. So by punishing him for no good reason by withholding treatment, the police ironically now also share culpability in the mysterious hepatitis outbreak.
