Rating: 
Summary: Hopeful, but still lacking
Review: Review from a 28 year old Asian female:As a Chinese American, it is always nice to read a book written by an Asian author. What's nicer is that this book is not the usual tale about an Asian individual going to America trying to cope with cultural differences! What a relief! This book was beautifully written with a hopeful storyline, but it failed to culminate in a satisfying conclusion. I waited and waited for something that never happened. I felt betrayed, as if the author was leading me on. Overall, it was an average read. Not especially intriguing, but I was able to get through it without too much effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Harsh reality
Review: A beautifully written book describing the harsh reality of living in China in this century. Deals with love, family, repression, sex, mores, and power. A book that accelerates in its second half, and a writing style that feels Chinese. Recommend highly but be ready to be depressed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good story with a great message.
Review: I agree with one of the previous reviews, "Life is what is happening while we wait". I think Ha Jin proved that several times over in the book. I could see what was right for Lin, but he was too busy looking in the wrong direction, waiting and hoping for this exciting life when the life meant for him was passing him by. I enjoyed the story. Reading about life in China during that time period was not something I was intending to do, but I enjoyed learning about that culture. It has prompted me to read more about the culture and the people. I learned and I had fun reading a very interesting story.
Rating:
Summary: ALMOST GREAT - BUT...
Review: I found this novel extremely easy to fall into. The storyline was intriguing describing as it does Chinese societal mores through the personal struggles of one man. However, I found the conclusion to be extremely disappointing and not up to the high standards of the rest of the book. It is a 308-page book that flows nicely until about the last 50 pages where it seems to rush to a very unsatisfying conclusion. While quickly getting Lin to some personal understanding, the author simply concludes the story without ever showing us what his main character does with his new-found insight. I was all the more disappointed because this book is, for the most part, extremely well-written and appropriately paced. Though I hesitated doing so because of the uninspired conclusion, it is for the writing style that I gave it three stars.
Rating: 
Summary: No challenges here.
Review: I found this book highly disappointing, both as a result of its colorless prose and endless hammering of "truths" that, in a society obsessed with self-help, are already part of our collective consciousness. OF COURSE obstacles make romance more attractive. OF COURSE relationships begin reflexively. OF COURSE people are often unable to see themselves with enough clarity to undo self-damage. OF COURSE communism is a hypocritical construct. Waiting offers little enlightenment, no subtlety, and a complete absence of reward for the insightful reader. This text is as bland and pointless as its characters.
Rating:
Summary: A Must for the curious
Review: This is not a fast reading, or fast moving book, but so interesting as it unfolds that you hate to put it down. Much knowledge is gained about rural as well as city life in China for the past 20 years. You may think you know, but this book proves you do not. However, the book is about more than that, it is filled with deeper thought as you dwell in the mind and thoughts of a man who is waiting for a divorce to be granted to go on with his life. What unfolds is a shocking discovery of what the wait is about and an insight into this mans life. His personality, his thoughts and method of handling his situation for years is written extremely well. Very different and well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: A plain book
Review: I was a little bit disappointed after reading this award-winning book. The dilemma that the main character faces is nothing new and many China-related novels tell the similar story line. I feel that the book receives more credit than it actually deserves for. The good thing about Waiting is that the author presents his story in a smooth writing style and makes the book an easy-read. Overall, the book is still worth to check out but please do not keep the expectation too high.
Rating:
Summary: An austere, beautiful book
Review: "Waiting" shows the truth in the maxim that life is what happens when we wait for life to begin. Set in industrial Northeast China in the years before, during and just after the Cultural Revolution, the book is not overtly about politics, but rather about how individuals try to find their bit of happiness within the constraints imposed by society and character. On another level, the ambivalence the protagonist feels toward his traditional wife in the village, and the woman he loves in the city, is a proxy for China's own transition from a traditional culture to a modern, communist state -- which itself becomes weary and exhausted as the world changes around it. Ha Jin has a wonderful touch with evocative details, and brings to life a time and place that is already slipping into history.
Rating:
Summary: Trying to please everyone never works !
Review: Rarely will you find a novel like "Waiting". It is simple, yet has a powerful message in it that does not reveal itself until the very end. Lin Kong, the key character in it, endeavors to do everything to honor the Chinese political system of 1960-80's, his medical career and his first marriage. He also allows true love to wait ! "Wait" being the operative word. The result of such "waiting" is what the reader must read on for. It is not what we normally find it to be.It may make you ponder some of your own life decisions.I recommend this book for those with an interest in socio-political issues in an Asian culture.
Rating:
Summary: Spare, compelling, mysterious.
Review: I don't know why this book captivated me so. I was unable to leave it alone even when I was supposed to be doing other things(I suppose this theme of secret happiness stolen at the risk of official censure is appropriate to the book). English is a second language for the writer, and he doesn't make daring attempts at prose style. Most of the sentences seem to be about as simple as they could possible be made. At some points, where the characters experience tragic emotions, the prose is embarrassingly simple, and you feel even more moved, somehow, that their sadness hasn't even the dignity of sentences that can please in themselves. The prose is as drab as Communist interior decoration, but it is compelling. I suppose in some ways my response to the book could be seen as consistent with a racist impression of "Chineseness," equating China with inscrutability: that is, the book's surface reveals little yet one feels that there is much there. I can say, though, that this novel made the idea of life's brevity much more urgently apparent to me than any of Shakespeare's sonnets. When you're thinking about something like "When I consider everything that grows/ Holds in perfection but a little moment,/ That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows/ Whereon the stars in secret influence comment," you are so fascinated by the sentences' grammar ("shows" changing from a verb to a noun, or "everything" changing from the object of "consider" to the subject of "holds" as quickly as your eye travels over a line break)that the sadness of lost time doesn't really strike you as mournful. After all, it is the occasion of so much gorgeous writing. But in "Waiting," the ache of lost life creaks in the ungiving sentences. This novel is almost unbearable. The lack of explanation is worse than explanation, or dazzling display. The characters are so sympathetic, so dutiful and "good" according to their rules, that one wishes that they would find love; one wants them to be loved as the reader loves them. But I suppose that the book's point may be that obedience to morality and rules, which makes these characters sympathetic and deserving of love, in practice frustrates their chances to realize love. In fact, while the book is a love story, the only consummated sex scene related in any kind of detail whatsoever is a contemptible rape, as though only scoundrels have the courage to get what they want.
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