For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in his traditional home village lives the humble, loyal wife his family chose for him years ago. Every summer, he returns to ask her for a divorce and every summer his compliant wife agrees but then backs out. This time, after eighteen years' waiting, Lin promises it will be different. (20000912)
Waiting
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"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 18 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 are 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 gaze 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 US 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Beautiful and compelling" (Daily Mail )
"Dreamy and beautifully written... Reading it will take you into a different world altogether" (Marie Claire )
"A deliciously comic novel" (The Times )
"Imagine if Romeo and Juliet had been made to stretch out their passion for 18 years, without consummating their love. Now imagine them in China during the crazy bureaucracy of Mao's Cultural Revolution, unable to talk in private let alone kiss...the insights into Chinese culture and the complexities of human longing are beautiful and compelling" (Daily Mail )
"A classic folktale...an extraordinary novel" (Independent )
"Dreamy and beautifully written... Reading it will take you into a different world altogether" (Marie Claire )
"A deliciously comic novel" (The Times )
"Imagine if Romeo and Juliet had been made to stretch out their passion for 18 years, without consummating their love. Now imagine them in China during the crazy bureaucracy of Mao's Cultural Revolution, unable to talk in private let alone kiss...the insights into Chinese culture and the complexities of human longing are beautiful and compelling" (Daily Mail )
"A classic folktale...an extraordinary novel" (Independent )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this highly structured novel of life within the Chinese People's Liberation Army and in the very rural countryside, Ha Jin offers the reader a way to understand the culture and character of people living under repressive conditions. To Lin Kong, his wife Shuyu, and his chaste lover Manna Wu, life is a process of acceptance, not choice, a life in which there are no personal goals, other than working for the greater good of the country and its leaders. Because the concept of freedom simply does not exist here, it never enters anyone's mind. No one feels its loss or yearns for it, and an individual seeks neither happiness nor pleasure, instead finding satisfaction within the system.
Lin Kong, a physician working eleven months of the year in Muji City while his wife works the farm in Goose Village, experiences the sensations of love for the first time when he is attracted to Manna Wu, a nurse at his army station. Having previously accepted an arranged marriage, he is the legal husband of an older woman whose only attraction has been the care she lavished on his sick and elderly parents. For eighteen years he endures the limbo of trying to obtain a divorce from his wife while obeying the army's requirements that he and Manna Wu remain physically chaste.
Ha Jin's prose is efficient and straightforward, much like the life of his characters, and one neither expects nor misses the flights of poesy so often found in novels of China written by westerners. The chief attraction of this novel is the care with which Ha Jin recreates the atmosphere of life in Communist China, showing us how ordinary people conduct their lives under conditions which we would find intolerable. His careful choice of details to illuminate the ironies of his characters' lives give power to a narrative about people who have no individual power. He succeeds admirably in bringing to life characters whose whole concept of what it means to be a person is diametrically opposed to our own, making humans out of people who live lives of structure, not of choice.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Waiting is a captivating read. It details the changing phases of a forbidden and unconsumated love affair over almost 2 decades. Over time the centre of the relationship becomes the waiting rather than their love which leads to a hollow and empty union. The details of Chinese culture are fascinating and unforced.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ha Chin's novel "Waiting" is set in China during the Cultural Revolution of the late twentieth century. The three main characters are Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, Shuyu, his wife through an arranged marriage and the product of a traditionalist upbringing (i.e. with bound feet) and Mannu Wu an educated, mordern nurse that Lin plans to marry. Under military law, Lin must wait 18 years before he may secure a divorce without the consent of his wife.
The story operates on multiple levels. It is in part a story which explores the nature of love -- what does it mean to love someone and how does one know when he or she is in love? The story also works as a political allegory of the Communist regime in China. Closely related to the latter, it is a fable about a traditional way of life coming into contact with modernity and industrialisation (communist or not).
On all levels, the story shows the ambiguity of the human heart and the difficulty of self-knowledge. These are basic difficulties in being human. Recognition of these dificulties is basic to human love, politics and change. The story shows both how hard it is for people to know their own hearts and also how difficult it is to pursue any ends without bringing, in some way, harm to another person.
The story is told in an eloquent, minimalist prose. The writing is simple and beautiful. The primary characters and a host of secondary characters are well, if suggestively and sparely, presented and developed.
This book reminded me of another highly acclaimed novel: J,M. Coetzee's "Disgrace". Both "Disgrace" and "Waiting" are written in a restrained prose. Both are about repressive political societies (South Africa and China) in an uncertain state of transition. And both present situations fraught with moral ambiguity which seem to point beyond themselves for understanding.
This book tells a thoughtful and sad story about what a party leader accurately describes at an important moment of story as "a bitter love".
Robin Friedman
The story operates on multiple levels. It is in part a story which explores the nature of love -- what does it mean to love someone and how does one know when he or she is in love? The story also works as a political allegory of the Communist regime in China. Closely related to the latter, it is a fable about a traditional way of life coming into contact with modernity and industrialisation (communist or not).
On all levels, the story shows the ambiguity of the human heart and the difficulty of self-knowledge. These are basic difficulties in being human. Recognition of these dificulties is basic to human love, politics and change. The story shows both how hard it is for people to know their own hearts and also how difficult it is to pursue any ends without bringing, in some way, harm to another person.
The story is told in an eloquent, minimalist prose. The writing is simple and beautiful. The primary characters and a host of secondary characters are well, if suggestively and sparely, presented and developed.
This book reminded me of another highly acclaimed novel: J,M. Coetzee's "Disgrace". Both "Disgrace" and "Waiting" are written in a restrained prose. Both are about repressive political societies (South Africa and China) in an uncertain state of transition. And both present situations fraught with moral ambiguity which seem to point beyond themselves for understanding.
This book tells a thoughtful and sad story about what a party leader accurately describes at an important moment of story as "a bitter love".
Robin Friedman
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i am still waiting for the product to arrive????? how can i get in touch to let you know that i have been waiting so long and it still hasnt arrived!
Published 2 months ago by Kash
4.0 out of 5 stars
A man who comes to know himself
I have known people who strive to do right at all costs even though they lack the confidence and self-knowledge to deal with moral dilemmas. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Catherine
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not your star crossed lovers but mature, imperfect people.
This novel gripped me straight away, a man who returns home to his village from the city hospital were he works, every year to Goose Village to divorce his wife so he can marry his... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Charlie&Molly
4.0 out of 5 stars
Waiting
I often read books translated from other languages, but it was on the second page that I realised I'd never read anything by a Chinese author. Read more
Published 15 months ago by David Brookes
4.0 out of 5 stars
Above all, a most evocative (if thinly disguised) pocketbook...
I don't know what happens with this book. It reads fine three quarters in, and then the last quarter implodes the whole thing with too much explanation. Read more
Published 19 months ago by alda
4.0 out of 5 stars
Patience rewarded
Ha Jin's Waiting essentially illustrates the saying that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Read more
Published 22 months ago by reader 451
5.0 out of 5 stars
The seller
This book was in great condition, hardly obviously used. It arrived very quickly. I was very impressed with the seller. Read more
Published on 19 Oct 2010 by morosepc
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read every bit of this captivating novel
Waiting is one of a few books that I've read from beginning to end without skipping bits. I couldn't put it down and read it every night before going to bed for 3 weeks. Read more
Published on 22 July 2009 by Ms. Lillian Avon
3.0 out of 5 stars
Still left waiting
This book is 'okay' and for me not much more. It is a very simple read, which is a plus as I felt the plot was lacking. Read more
Published on 13 July 2007 by SJSmith
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the Wait
Like Miso soup, subtle but fulfilling. Ha Jin keeps you waiting, playingon your patience for what you hope will be a closure at the end of thenovel. Of course that never comes. Read more
Published on 23 April 2004 by A. Davis
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