Waiting : A Novel by Jin, Ha - 2000

New York: Vintage. Fine 2000. Softcover. Marfree, acidfree fresh prtg; not marked-in, clearance or discard. Mails from NYC usually in 12 hrs. ; Vintage International Series; 8.0 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches; 308 pages; Online Rev. : "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 w/ 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 w/ered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet. ) Nevertheless, he's content w/ his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love w/ Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce w/out 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 w/ 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 eighteen 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 is 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 w/ Japanese Imperialism!" the couple holds hands & gazes 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 & pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration & 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, & in fact left his native country for the US only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence & power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-yr 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 From Publishers Weekly Jin's quiet but absorbing 2nd novel captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do his duty-- as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents & later by the Communist Party. Reflecting the changes in Chinese communism from the '60s to the '80s, the novel focuses on Lin Kong, a military doctor who agrees, as his mother is dying, to an arranged marriage. His bride, Shuyu, turns out to be a country woman who looks far older than her 26 years & who has, to Lin's great embarrassment, lotus (bound) feet. While Shuyu remains at Lin's family home in Goose Village, nursing first his mother & then his ailing father, & bearing Lin a daughter, Lin lives far away in an army hospital compound, visiting only once a year. Caught in a loveless marriage, .