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Waiting (Paperback)

by Ha Jin (Author) "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu ..." (more)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (5 Oct 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099287595
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099287599
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 107,561 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #2 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > J > Jin, Ha
    #43 in  Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards > Women's Popular Fiction
    #57 in  Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards > Popular Fiction

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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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



New York Times

‘compelling…an all too rare reminder of the reasons why someone might feel so strongly about a book’
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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Questions the very essence of who we are and what we become., 19 Jan 2003
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
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.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars a beautiful love story, 9 Dec 2000
By A Customer
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.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Tear-inducing tale exploring deep human emotions, 12 Dec 2000
By A Customer
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 each other as they do. The society that is presented in the book is worlds away form the one that we know and yet we grow so familiar with it, we are aware of it's constraints and of the effects they have on the characters. Ha Jin displays a very true and heartfelt understanding of the way the human heart (and mind) works. It is a story that stays with you long after you finish reading it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

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 3 months ago 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 Jul 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

2.0 out of 5 stars 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

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book detailing a relationship changing over time
Waiting is a captivating read. It details the changing phases of a forbidden and unconsumated love affair over almost 2 decades. Read more
Published on 11 Nov 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars uncommon love story
the setting of the story is fantastic with a very nice chinese cultural background and the use of the words is fascinating - you can really feel as if you were in the country at... Read more
Published on 7 Nov 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars Ultra-realist look at love in communist China
The Peoples Republic of China may once have been chic to Western eyes, but it has never been sexy. The prudish, hectoring tone of its public discourse and the glassy blandness of... Read more
Published on 10 Jun 2000 by cdonald@baiko.ac.jp

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