Waiting (Vintage International) - Softcover

Jin, Ha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375706410 ISBN 13: 9780375706417

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

"In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know."--Judges' Citation, National Book Award

"Ha Jin's novel could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of characters and their situation."--The New York Times Book Review

"Subtle and complex--his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love."--The Washington Post

"A high achievement indeed."--Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books

"A portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in [Jin] intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty."--Los Angeles Times

"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers--. From the idyllic countryside to the small towns in northeast China, Jin's depictions are filled with an earthy poetic grace--. Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail."--The Chicago Tribune

"Compassionate, earthy, robust, and wise, Waiting blends provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy. The result touches and reveals, bringing to life a singular world in its spectacular intricacy."--Gish Jen, author of Who's Irish?

"A remarkable love story. Ha Jin's understanding of the human heart and the human condition transcends borders and time. Waiting is an outstanding literary achievement."--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain

About this title

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

Review:

"A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. . . . Convincing and rich in detail. . . . Filled with an earthy poetic grace." --Chicago Tribune

"Luminous. . . . Eloquent. . . . [Waiting] provides. . . a crash course in Chinese society during and since the Cultural Revolution, and a more leisurely but nonetheless compelling exploration of the less exotic terrain that is the human heart." --The New York Times Book Review

"[Ha Jin's] writing is steeped in wit, rich metaphorical underpinnings and. . . endless and wonderful detail." --The Atlanta Journal Constitution

"Extraordinary. . . . A remarkably austere love story, suffused with irony and subtlety." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Waiting has the stripped down simplicity of a fable. . . It casts a spell that doesn't break once. . . . Jin has the kind of effortless command that most writers can only dream about." --The New York Times Magazine

"Achingly beautiful. . . . Ha Jin depicts the details of social etiquette, of food, of rural family relationships and the complex yet alarmingly primitive fabric of provincial life with that absorbed passion for minutiae characteristic of Dickens and Balzac." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A vivid bit of storytelling, fluid and earthy. . . . Reminiscent of Hemingway in its scope, simplicity and precise language. . . . A graceful human allegory." --Chicago Sun-Times

"A subtle beauty. . . . A sad, poignantly funny tale." --The Boston Sunday Globe

"Impeccably deadpan. . . . Waiting turns, page by careful page, into a deliciously comic novel." --Time

"Spare but compelling. . . . Jin's craftsmanship and grasp of the universal language of the human heart make the book a worthwhile read." --USA Today

"A wry, lovely novel. . . . Unexpectedly moving. . . . So quietly and carefully told that . . . we read on patiently, pleasantly distracted, wondering when something will happen. Only when we've finished do we understand just how much has, and how much waiting can be its own painful reward." --Newsday

"Enlightening . . . a delicate rendering of the universal complications of love. . . . Ha Jin's natural storytelling quietly captures the texture of daily life in a dual Chinese culture. . . . No detail is extraneous in this sad, funny, and often wise novel." --The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Remarkable . . . compellingly ingenious . . . gorgeously cinematic." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A wonderfully ironic novel . . . complex and sad as life. . . . It captures the difficulties of love in totalitarian China with sharp prose and a convincing portrayal of human vagaries." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Subtle and complex . . . his best work to date. A moving meditation on the effects of time upon love." --The Washington Post

"[Jin] reveals some startlingly original insights on human life and love . . . in a narrative that dazzles the reader with its simplicity and grace." --The Providence Sunday Journal

"[Waiting is] a masterpiece of realism and a work of ironic allegory, its mystifying, foreign world full of characters who grow more familiar with every page. . . . Through an accumulation of small, deft brushstrokes, 20th century China is superimposed onto the landscape of an ancient, painted scroll." --The Plain Dealer

"A high achievement indeed." --The New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375706410
• ISBN 13: 9780375706417
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320