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Summary: Waiting for the rest of his life to begin ¿
Review: This is one of these rare books that through reading you enter a whole different world with very different rules. It is an exceptionally well-written novel, with a great deal of details on life during and after the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This is a work of creativity and sensitivity. It is the story of an army doctor, a man who worked his way out of an essentially peasant background through the help of his family. As tradition in China dictates, he needed to take a wife to care for his aging parents. An arranged marriage addresses the problem of the care of the elderly superbly but leaves him totally unfulfilled. Ha Jin portrays a sensitive, caring, weak and often frightened man, who is a victim of events and insecurities; and an ignorant loving peasant wife who accepts what the husbands offers and does not ask for more. As a reader you are tortured by the couple's blind adherence to custom. The main couple in the story though is the Doctor and the nurse girl friend. Unable to consummate their love they wait and wait and wait. Here you are more tormented by their total adherence to army and Cultural Revolution rules, mandates and norms, which are often at odds with the traditional Chinese culture. So here you have our great army doctor obliged to the wife through traditional values with no complaints, unable to marry the girl friend, but also due to army rules he's unable to have an affair with her and unable to divorce the peasant wife. Ha Jin's Waiting takes us to a whole different world, every time you pick it up, you travel across cultural and time zones; first to China and then on to the Cultural Revolution days. This is a truly wonderful work, not a novel of fast paced events; the main character is portrayed in very realistic terms, not necessarily sympathetically. For me I appreciated the slow, meandering movement of events, it made it far more realistic and transformed me totally to this fascinating culture at its most peculiar of times. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: A slice of Chinese life.
Review: This novel takes place in China during the Cultural Revolution and afterwards, but it is a social, not a political novel. Its protagonist is a military doctor assigned to a hospital in a small city, with a peasant wife living in a rural village, and a long standing relationship with a nurse at the hospital. The doctor entered his marriage out of respect for his parents who needed a daughter-in-law to help them, and he is not allowed to divorce for 18 years. Ha Jin tells a quiet, unadorned story, which is mostly interesting and occasionally dull. For the most part, the characters are colorless, perhaps reflective of their situation. The doctor is a well developed character, a moral, competent, yet passive human being. His wife is drawn broadly, but with sympathy and appreciation. The reason to read this book is to experience a slice of Chinese life of the period, a time and culture when a small degree of freedom and material comfort went a long way.
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Summary: The Grass is Greener...
Review: This well-written novel, which takes place in 1960s and 1970s China, tells the story of Lin Kong, a doctor, Shuyu, his wife, and Manna Wu, a nurse who Kong has feelings for. This story, told over many years time, is interesting but depressing at the same time. Lin believes that he is not happy in his marriage to Shuyu and divorces her in order to marry Manna. Once he marries Manna he believes that he will be happy but finds he is not. Much of the story revolves around his attempting to divorce Shuyu and the problems that he and Manna encounter, but the larger idea that can be taken from this is that there is not one thing in the world that can make you a happier person. The grass will always be greener somewhere else.
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Summary: A great book!
Review: well...i'm from mexico and i read this book and i just wanna tell you "it's great", it kept me readin' and readin' is a great and different history and a love novel where they have to fight against many things the protaginists are facing to be together, althought, at the end this history gave me a surprise... read it and you'll know what i'm talkin' 'bout
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Summary: Is patience a virtue?
Review: What makes this 20th century Chinese fable so memorable is its subtle portrayal of time. The portrayal of time's passage in a life we see as "not fully-lived" and marked by restraint, is told so elegantly and richly that moments lost to the characters are transformed into those which are the best lived, and truest (certainly the most innocent) of their lives.
It may strike readers as a fairy tale or fable for the ending, when the illusions that were bound up in the doctor's years of waiting for his sweetheart are unleashed. Then the reader must question the years he waited, following the law. What were they for? Was his commitment to a woman in the world or to waiting itself? The allure of the unattainable is perhaps a universal human weakness, but you cannot ask for a more beautiful portrayal of it than in this fine book. His epiphany on love at the end of the novel still does not ultimately change his character, one in which the act of waiting for something is almost his very own reflection.
Historically, this is an excellent portrayal of both interior life as it existed under Chinese communism, and the interference of public onto private life found in any society.
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