Waiting: Summary and book reviews of Waiting by Ha Jin, plus links to an excerpt from Waiting and a biography of Ha Jin.

In Waiting, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Ha Jin draws on his intimate knowledge of contemporary China to create a novel of unexpected richness and feeling. This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart. For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young--a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different. Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom. Waiting charms and startles us with its depiction of a China that remains hidden to Western eyes even as it moves us with its piercing vision of the universal complications of love. Waiting won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.

Media Reviews

New York Times Book Review Luminous [and] 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.   Chicago Tribune A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. Convincing and rich in detail, [it is] filled with an earthy poetic grace.   The New Yorker [A] suspenseful and bracingly tough-minded love story. Poignantly allegorical.   Chicago Sun-Times Extraordinary. A remarkably austere love story, suffused with irony and subtlety. Reminiscent of Hemingway in its scope, simplicity and precise language. A vivid bit of storytelling, fluid and earthy, [it is] a graceful human allegory.   Los Angeles Times Book Review 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.   New York Review of Books A high achievement indeed.   New York Times Magazine 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.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by charlotte
great..
The novel was great! Some of the conflicts happen today... I can relate.

Rated of 5 by jpj
One of the best books I've read in years. Ending is fantastic. This book came out around the same time The Hours came out and I can't remember a thing about The Hours, but this book is burned into my brain.

A young man gets married in an...   Read More

Rated of 5 by mayfield secondary school
my class did not enjoy this!

Rated of 5 by Véronique from Switzerland
I just loved it! Beautiful story in a China between modern and ancient tradition. A transition of History in wich love help passing through ages.

Just read it!

Véronique from Switzerland

Rated of 5 by christina
excellent book, showing the consequences of long term waiting

Rated of 5 by L. Suh
The title was apt. I was waiting for characters I could empathize with, waiting for a plot to develop...waiting for this book to end. The misogyny was the only consistent theme; the women were described with more emphasis on facial aging defects...   Read More

...2 More Reader Reviews

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