Others have found the characters stilted and the situations unbelievable. Anything that is not encouraged or at least condoned by the Party is interpreted as disease and must be cut down at source. And that is the environment of the love affair of Lin Kong and Manna Wu.

Perhaps they meant that she didn't let things hold her back? But in the hospital, sterility is enforced. As in the country, plants bloom, and so did Shuyu despite having the, by now, archaic, bound feet. Life in the country was more relaxed all around, the extreme rigidity of the Party not even extending to consistently enforcing the one-child policy.

The only character who is decidedly different and more likeable than the others is the protagonist's peasant wife. The lack of adjectives serve another purpose - they depersonalise the characters outwardly, just as the Communist regime reduced everyone to similarly-dressed workers. Because the writing is so good, the characters and situations are clearly seen and it is the reader's imagination, interpretation, that supplies the descriptions and adjectives. It reads clean and tight - each word moves the story and characters along without any padding. What is so special about the writing is its very sparing use of adjectives. It is hard to imagine that the superb use of language is by someone who learned English, a second language. 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. 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. This time, Lin promises, will be different. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. 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. 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. 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.įor more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. 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.

Waiting is not easy book