Waiting
by Ha Jin
Summary
Every summer for eighteen years, Lin Kong, an army doctor at a hospital in the Manchurian city of Muji, takes his leave, travels home to Goose Village, and asks his wife Shuyu for a divorce. Every year she agrees, and every year, at the county courthouse, she changes her mind or a judge refuses, and Lin returns to the city for another year of the arrangement that has structured his adult life: a wife he never chose and cannot love, kept decently at a distance, and Manna Wu, the nurse he does love, waiting.
The marriage was his parents' doing, to a kind, illiterate country woman with bound feet, a fact that embarrasses him in the new China; the courtship with Manna is conducted under army regulations so complete that in two decades the couple are never once alone outside hospital grounds, their romance a matter of walks in public view and rationed conversation. Ha Jin renders the decades of the Cultural Revolution and after not as pageant but as procedure: the rules, the dossiers, the meetings, the way an entire society's patience gets internalised until waiting is no longer imposed but is simply what a person is.
The eighteenth year arrives, the law's own statute delivers the divorce, and the novel springs its quiet, terrible irony: Lin gets everything he waited for, and discovers what the waiting made of him, and of both women.
Around three hundred pages, told in prose of deliberate plainness.
Best for readers who want a love triangle with history as the fourth party, and an ending that reframes every page before it.
Historical Context & Significance
Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a Pulitzer finalist; before Jin, the fiction prize had gone to only two writers who learned English as another language, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosinski. Ha Jin, born Jin Xuefei, grew up in the Cultural Revolution, served six years in the People's Liberation Army from age thirteen, and was a graduate student in America in 1989 when Tiananmen convinced him not to return; he wrote his way into English deliberately, Conrad and Nabokov his cited precedents.
The story was found, not invented: on a visit to his wife's family, whose compound adjoined an army hospital, he heard of a doctor who had waited eighteen years for exactly this divorce. Chinese publishers dropped plans to translate the novel after a denunciation in the official press, and no sanctioned Chinese edition followed even as the book collected America's prizes.
Ha Jin's later work, War Trash above all, extended the method, plain surfaces over state machinery, and Waiting remains the modern classic of the Chinese everyday in English.