Rating: 
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: If this is all it takes to win a National Book Award . . . .
Review: I love oriental food and art, but the culture is difficult to appreciate. This book is set mainly in the 1970's Communist China -- hardly romantic. Ha Jin offers us a love story as unromantic as they come. The hero, Lin, is a spineless intellectual bore. The heroine, Manna, is a career-girl shrew who breaks up Lin's marriage to Shuyu, a good, but plain woman rooted in Chinese tradition -- bound feet and all. Lin is embarrassed by his non-intellectual wife and abandons her and their daughter while he pursues his career as a doctor in the military. He turns to Manna, an old maid by Chinese standards, whose only previous relationship resulted in her being jilted. All three characters plod through life for 18 years until Lin is able to divorce Shuyu and marry Manna. After their marriage, Manna's temper tantrums lead Lin to a revelation -- he doesn't love her. I suppose it is a triumph for Ha Jin to successfully publish such an acclaimed novel fourteen years after emigrating to the U.S. However acclaimed and successful it might be, this book left me bored and unmoved. The characters were either emotionless (which is, upon further reflection, a characteristic of Communism) or cold (yeah, Communism). Even the highly emotional Manna fell flat. It was a quick and easy read, but, I haven't gained a thing from reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting
Review: I am an avid reader who usually reads very rapidly, but I had to slog my way through this book. I am astounded that it won the National Book Award. I did not find it "well-written". In fact, I frequently found the sentence construction awkward. I agree with one reviewer who found it "bland"--I found it both bland and ponderous. There is only one likeable character in the whole book and that is Shuyu. It does provide an interesting insight on life in China in the latter part of the 20th century, but for me this book does not compare with a book such as Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden". Different books for different folks...
Rating: 
Summary: Well Written/Excellent Story
Review: After reading several negative reviews, I approached this novel with some trepidation. However, I wanted to read it for two reasons. First, it won that National Book Award. Second, I have a daughter from China and I want to read and understand as much as I can about China and the Chinese people. I took much more away from this novel than I thought I would. Ha Jin's prose flows so easy, I found myself reading through this book much faster than I anticipated. His writing has a sparseness that suggests a poetic back ground. Like poetry, it also describes the scenes in ways that really pulled me into the book. The politics of China were presented almost without comment. It is only through the actions of the characters that we really see how the regime affects their day to day lives. Despite all this, Waiting gives us something even better and more universal. Too often we are all waiting for something. Waiting for a relationship or a better job. Waiting for a vacation or a visit with a friend. We are planning for something to come. Yet, while we are waiting, our lives move by us. Isn't this really the point of the novel? Lin Kong waited eighteen years. For what? To wait some more? Stop waiting and buy this book. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A Sparkling Gem of a Novel
Review: A year ago, I stumbled upon Ha Jin's collection of short stories, "Under the Red Flag", winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1996. The stories, set in China at various times during the Cultural Revolution, were remarkable for their crystalline pure prose, realistic attention to detail and depiction of the intersection of the personal and the political in the quotidian lives of their characters. From that first reading, Ha Jin struck me as perhaps the finest prose stylist writing in English today. Ironically, Ha Jin was illiterate in his own Chinese language until his mid-teens, when he began reading voraciously while serving in the Chinese army on the Russian border. It was not until the age of twenty that Jin began studying English and, twelve years later, in 1988, began writing in English. By that time, Jin had completed graduate study at Brandeis University and, in the wake of the events at Tiananmen Square, emigrated to the United States. While Ha Jin's prose is remarkable for its austere beauty, and his themes are universal and set in the ordinary, everyday lives of his characters, the setting of his fictions remains exclusively and particularly Chinese. "Waiting", Ha Jin's second novel, tells the story of an eighteen year love triangle among Lin Kong, a doctor in Muji City, his loyal, but illiterate wife, Shuyu, and his educated and urbane mistress, the nurse Manna Wu. Kong lives and works apart from his wife, in a hospital in Muji City, where he meets Manna Wu. Each year, for eighteen years, Kong returns to the country to visit his wife and to request a divorce so he can marry Manna Wu. Each year Kong's wife, whose bound feet are a sign of her rural backwardness, refuses to consent to his request. It is a simple story told in simple prose. Set during a period from the early 1960s until the 1980s, "Waiting" is a realistic and human tale of relationships set against the backdrop of Chinese culture and society during the years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Marked by Ha Jin's remarkable attention to the details of everyday life, "Waiting" is a sparkling gem of a novel, a deserving winner of both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting and waiting...
Review: After much anticipation I finally got ahold of this book and began reading. Shortly into the story I realized it wasn't worth waiting for. What a disappointment. The main characters did not garner my sympathy for their situation, only pity for their lack of action. I thought the story boring and couldn't wait to put it back on the shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Ordinary
Review: I seem to be the only reader on earth at the moment who found this novel bland and bloodless. It does offer a rich look at China in a historical time and place, but so would a good history book. Jin's been compared to Henry James, which means that no one has read Henry James lately. Ordinary, dull sentences, wooden dialogue, and irritating characters. Certainly there were more compelling reads available to the National Book Award jury?
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Summary: Loving this novel came as a complete surprise.
Review: It really did. I bought Waiting because of the attention it had been getting, winning and being nominated for major literary awards. Because I usually read African-American literature, I usually don't have a lot of opportunity reading other literature. I have to be very selective. My discussion board was down this past week, so I stole the moment to read Waiting. I adored it. I can't say what I was expecting, but the book floored me. Beautiful, beautiful prose. Words like subtle, and graceful comes to mind. Three lives; Lin Kon, Shuyu and Manna Wu are bound together through their individual concept of love and what one has to do to obtain and keep it. Where we are use to stories in which the main characters leap head first into passionate affairs and lustful relationships, Ha Jin chose to focus on a love affair where the participants had to be patient and restraint. There are moments of great beauty and an insight into human nature. Truly a novel not to be missed.
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Summary: Spare and Elegant
Review: Waiting is a spare and elegant novel, one of quiet emotions that never threatens to overwhelm. The story centers on Lin Kong and his failed (and arranged) marriage to the plain and rustic Shuyu. Although Lin has not slept with Shuyu since the birth of their daughter years before, he must remain married to her. For without Shuyu's consent, Lin cannot obtain a divorce for eighteen years. A doctor in a medical school in a small Manchurian city, Lin goes home to Goose Village every summer to ask Shuyu for a divorce so he can marry the woman with whom he is passionately in love, the youthful and beautiful student nurse, Manna. Although very much in love, Lin and Manna eschew physical intimacy believing Lin will be expelled from the army if they are ever caught. Although Shuyu does consider giving Lin a divorce, she always changes her mind at the last minute and this is where the waiting of the title comes in. While Lin is waiting for Shuyu to grant him his freedom, he and Manna conduct their "affair" hemmed in by Party rules and regulations and the sharp tongues of the hospital gossips. Ha Jin does a wonderful job of portraying Lin's stunted emotions and drawn-out tensions, which are engendered by the pressure put upon him by both of the women in his life, Shuyu and Manna. The English-speaking public has been exposed to very little "real" Chinese fiction. Chinese literature in translation has not enjoyed the popularity of Latin American literature, Russian literature or even Japanese. There have also been no "crossover" Chinese authors such as Japan's Haruki Murakami or South America's Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa. And Chinese writers do share a penchant for the purple and the political; they tend to be melodramatic and over-the-top, something that makes them a little unpopular with English-speaking readers. Chinese writers living in the West, such as Amy Tan, Lisa See and Maxine Hong Kingston, despite their genealogical background, are really as much outsiders to China as are those with no ties to the country at all. In essence, their writing, while good, is not really "Chinese." Ha Jin manages to overcome all of the above. Although he now lives in the United States and wrote Waiting in English, he is a native of China and he manages to depict his country of birth without indulging in the romanticism, exoticism or Orientalism so prevalent among native Chinese (and Indian) writers of today. In Waiting, Ha Jin gives us a perfect look at the city and countryside of northeast China in the 1960s to the 1980s. The setting is perfectly rendered, with a beautiful eye for mundane, but telling, detail. Although Jin never stresses the deprivation of life in Communist China, it is painfully evident in this book. Fruits, vegetables and even medicines are expensive and rare; a wedding feast may consist of no more than cigarettes and candy; doctors at a medical school must live three to a dorm room and bathe in a communal bathhouse. Even the more simple pleasures are denied: one of the rules forbids unmarried men and women to meet in the hospital compound, thus preventing Lin and Manna from consummating the love they share. This novel can be said to comprise a part of the "wounded literature" (shanghen wenxue) of China's Cultural Revolution, however, compared to the denunciations, struggles, beatings, incarcerations, executions and suicides included in other novels of that period, the suffering of Ha Jin's characters can appear to be mild. But that is a surface impression only. A deeper look at this book will show an astute reader that these characters do suffer greatly; Ha Jin is simply a more quiet and restrained writer, which is much to his credit, for it is in quietness and restraint that Waiting derives much of its power. The emotional and spiritual pressure the characters endure builds slowly, it has a cumulative effect, and the reader is left wondering when and how tragedy will occur. At its heart, Waiting is a novel about the ambiguities and tensions inherent in love, a universal theme. This is a masterfully written book and one that, ultimately, evokes the joys the sorrows and the quiet desperation of an ordinary life, whether that life be lived in Goose Village, Paris or Boston. Waiting is a wonderful book and one that is wonderfully-written as well. An absolutely unbeatable combination.
Rating:
Summary: Mature look at relationship crossroads
Review: Personally, I loved the book and found it very philosophical. However, I admit it didn't end as I expected, and so therefore required much thought afterwards, such as in the choices I've made in my love affairs--when I was passive (and waited) and when I was not. I believe no matter how well-calculated decisions can be, we are never totally free from outside influences and pressures. There are no fouled-up choices, only ones that lead to opportunities for something else, hopefully something better, as this applies to love, politics, health, etc.
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