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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
This fictional tale takes the gentle vein of the Wild Swans genre - recollections of Chinese rural family life and tradition - and gives it a sly twist. The heroes are Lin Kong, a doctor who leaves Goose Village to work in a military hospital, and Manna Wu, his girlfriend who is a nurse. The author, who left China for the USA in the mid-1980s, pitches the reader into his family's predicament from the very first sentence - 'Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.' The title of his book could not be more apt. Lin is a young man when we first meet him; he has fathered a child, Hua, but regrets entering the marriage which his villager parents had arranged. The village which is his home is more than a day's journey from the hospital where he is based, and he only has 12 days' leave every year. Manna comes to his room to borrow his books, and he gets to know her. She is an orphan and has already been abandonned by her first lover, Mai Dong.Their courtship proceeds slowly and with much decorum, and each year Lin promises to legitimise their union by severing the link with Shuyu; each year the pair reach the courthouse when Shuyu, urged by her bother, proclaims that she does not really want the divorce. And so the waiting continues. The storytelling is quaint, sometimes clumsy, but in its very syntax is illustrative of an ancient and pervasive mindset - that of correctness. Lin allows his fragile passion to be crushed beneath the weight of other people's opinions, while Manna's self-esteem is ravaged, along with her body, as she ages. The story itself is sad and full of regret, but flecked with moments of humour, even bawdiness. Shuyu emerges as one of the most engaging characters, despite or perhaps because of her limited vocabulary and placid acceptance of the slow-moving state of affairs. It's the opposite of an action tale, but that doesn't make it any less readable. (Kirkus UK)
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