Saboteur

Saboteur
-  Ha Jin

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 last small paragraph was probably my most favorite to have read throughout the entire story.  Upon reading through the first few pages of Ha Jin's Saboteur, I couldn't help but start to feel a small sense of anger in the pits of my stomach.  The prejudice that ran through the pages had me grow even more mad.  "Stop bluffing us...We have seen a lot of your kind.  We can easily prove you are guilty"  (Jin 275).  "We can easily prove"?  The corruption of the system had me thinking the entire time that the crooked cops were the ones to have been the "saboteurs".  It wasn't until the end of the story where I read the the last paragraph as shown above that I realized the title is in fact about Mr. Chiu.  He couldn't do anything to get the time that was taken from him back, the money he lost for the expired ticket they caused, or an apology for the wrongfulness they had done to him.  Before I had gotten to the end of the story I had asked myself, "What is he going to do?  He can't just leave and live with the lie that they forced him to sign about himself."  And then it was like, but what could he do that wouldn't get him put back in jail and others he cared for in danger too?  His disease.   It was probably one of the most clever things anyone could have ever done without even being noticed.  "If I could only kill those bastards!"  (Jin 280).  Do I think this was the right thing to do?  I'm not sure, it questions everything I believe and goes against my morals.  Would I have done this if this had happened to me?  Absolutely without a doubt.  So was he a criminal at the end?  My question remains unanswered being that the author addressed him "teacher" on page 280 and criminal on page 275.  Would that make me a criminal for indirectly committing something that widely affects people that surround me?  I think the saboteur of the story is not the corrupted police man, but quite possibly Mr. Chiu himself.