- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd; First Edition edition (4 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0434009148
- ISBN-13: 978-0434009145
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,037,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Waiting
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
"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
New York Times
‘compelling…an all too rare reminder of the reasons why someone might feel so strongly about a book’
--This text refers to the
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First Sentence
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 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.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I thought this was going to be too slow for me as a reader of mostly crime and thrillers,but what unfolded was one of the most beautiful love stories set in the amazing chinese culture that I became captivated and read and readit was slow moving ,sensitive and drew the reader into another world. Iwould thoroughly recommend reading this.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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 1 month ago by Charlie&Molly
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 3 months ago by David Brookes
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 7 months ago by alda
Patience rewarded
Ha Jin's Waiting essentially illustrates the saying that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Read more
Published 10 months ago by reader 451
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 19 months ago by morosepc
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
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
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
It left me standing on the side
I was unmoved by this book. Contrary to what I expected, this book does not reveal the emotions of the people involved, and leave you watching the story unfold without being able... Read more
Published on 13 Feb 2001
Tear-inducing tale exploring deep human emotions
I found this book very difficult to put down. From the first page, we are coaxed into understanding the characters and realising why they have no choice but to wait helplessly for... Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2000
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