Waiting by Ha Jin
Winner of the 1999 National Book Award

By Cai Mali

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife Shuyu." Thus begins Waiting, Ha Jin's beautiful, spare novel of love in contemporary China. Lin Kong is a principled, educated army doctor caught between the inheritance of his past - an arranged marriage to Shuyu, a simple, loyal peasant woman and model, traditional wife - and his dreams for his future - marriage to Manna Wu, a bright and pretty, modern woman who shares his life at the military hospital where they both work. Lin is unable to shed one life (family duty, and social pressures in his home village and workplace get in the way) and begin the other (his own reticence, arcane hospital rules, and fear of political and career repercussions prevent Lin and Manna from publicly acknowledging or consummating their relationship).

read our interview with Ha Jin

Readers will be quickly drawn into Lin's tragic and touching annual quest for divorce, which he carries out over the course of eighteen years. Both the good Shuyu, whose bound feet, "granny clothes" and lack of education are a source of embarrassment to Lin, and Manna, whose love for Lin carries her to near spinsterdom, show extraordinary patience while the bookish Lin attempts to follow the rules of the old world, the new socialist world and the dictates of his heart.

The efficient, matter-of-fact prose offers surprising and beautiful imagery. Ha Jin is a master of the minor detail, evoking vividly the sights, sounds and smells of Chinese food, streets and dormitories. These will ring familiar and true to people who know China well. There are also occasional details that non-Chinese readers may still find breathtaking: "In the mid-1960s... "In the mid-1960s the hospital staff had only four medical school graduates on its staff. Lin Kong was one of them. The rest of the seventy doctors had been trained by the army itself through short-term courses and experience on the battlefields." Young women's acceptance in the military nursing school at the hospital was conditional upon physical examinations proving that they were virgins. Only an officer was allowed to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, so an enlisted soldier who showed an interest in Manna was out of bounds. Chinese lives in this realist story were regulated in intrusive ways that citizens in other countries may find unimaginable.

Readers may be relieved to know, however, that this is not another tale of hardship exposing the ruinous effects on families of the Cultural Revolution. Non-fiction memoirs have well covered this territory. Though the Cultural Revolution is alluded to and touches the characters, Ha Jin does not dwell on the larger, chaotic world outside the insular hospital compound in this period. None of the characters is overtly political, but politics to a large degree limits their options and drives their decisions in this small-scale drama.

This is quintessentially a Chinese tale: millions dutifully followed the social rules of the new state while for years putting their personal desires and dreams on hold. It is also a metaphor for all of Chinese society in the past half-century: a nation in waiting, unable to sever all ties from the traditional, with the promise of socialism just beyond reach. At the same time, the central themes of this story - duty, loyalty, and love, the betrayal of friendship, and the personal dilemmas that surround them - are universal. The particulars of Lin's dilemma are Chinese, but the struggles of simultaneously serving one's social obligations and one's heart belong to everyone.