For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Mannu Wu. But, back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different. Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of wisdom.
"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."
There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters' hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts, "Down with Japanese Imperialism!" the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled "To Get Rich Is Glorious," after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear:
Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.
Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Perfect Novel About the Chimera That Never Leaves You:
A man convinces himself that he is unhappy with his marriage, waits forever for the Chinese bureaucracy to grant him a divorce so he can marry the woman he is infatuated with. Without giving up plot specifics, let me say this novel is a fable that underscores George Bernard Shaw's famous quote: "There are two tragedies in life. Not getting what you want and getting it." This novel is both emotionally felt and brutal of its examination of the ironies born from self-delusion. I read the novel 8... more info
Dull:
Jin has been called a `realist' by less perceptive critics, but `realism' is not to be equated with dullness. A great writer knows how to highlight those `realistic' moments that catch a snippet of the transcendent, and juxtapose them with other elements to create a poetry of the real. Jin, however, writes dully on dull events and people, content to let the PC trappings of the exotic do the heavy lifting a strong narrative should accomplish. Much of his prose seems to bear out the fact that English is not... more info
simple story elegantly written:
Hard to say what I liked about this. Very simple story about people that are very believable. Ha Jin does a good job of getting the reader to care about the characters.
An enjoyable and memorable quick read:
This book is Ha Jin's flagship work, despite not necessarily being his best or most important. It is his flagship work because it is a quick read on topics that he knows well. One feels like one knows Ha Jin somewhat after reading this book, and you may either sympathize with him or dislike him. It depends on your personal views. Generally, he shows his ability to be an emotionally-affecting writer. The book gives a good presentation of bottom-up history of a communist nation, with references... more info
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