Rating: 
Summary: Not a box of cracker jacks
Review: This was a National Book Award Winner. It's title, "Waiting", seems to tell you what it's about, it's about patience, endurance, constancy of human spirit. Why should you read it? Were it not for the depth of the characters and the beauty of the writing, this book might bore us--after all, it's about waiting--but Ha Jin pulls it off, we stay engaged throughout, and the payoff is terrific. Even, at the end of the book, there is a surprise, when we learn that we have been reading the less important of two stories. The greater story, merely implied, has been waiting for us to discover and write it in our imaginations. But this is not a box of crackerjacks, you can't open your surprise early. The surprise is worth waiting for.Having said that, be careful which reviews you read. Some people can't keep a secret and will spoil it for you.
Rating:
Summary: Life is all about waiting for something better
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The story was quite simple and nothing dramatic happened, to some readers' disappointment. But I found that it's what life is like. We all have waited for something, and often the process of waiting turned out to be the most exciting part. When we got what we wanted, we're often not so sure it's better. In the book, Lin Kong tried to divorce his peasant wife Shuyu unsuccessfully for 18 years. Some reviewers here argued that it's actually very easy to divorce a woman in China in the 50s or 60s. But I think they are missing the point. Of course, in the book other officers divorced their wives easily. Lin clearly didn't try hard enough, because he was ambivalent towards both women. He thought he had no love for Shuyu, but he's also not sure if he really wanted a marriage with Manna, his lover. He never thought hard about his relationships. So, the court's rejections were actually his excuses for inaction. On another level, I can really identify with the characters in the story. My grandmother had bound feet, and she was a quiet, always obedient woman just like Shuyu. I also could understand Lin Kong's indecisiveness and apparent lack of emotions. He's an intellect, and it's considered superior in China to be a reserved man. But the writing is very touching and moving. These characters were just like us here, with real emotions like jealousy and fear, and their lives were plain, just like most of ours. I definitely don't think the book was written to exaggerate the conditions during cultural revolution in China, or to be exotic as to appeal to a western audience. I have read many other books that were like that, where the characters endured unimaginable sufferings and then triumphed miraculously. In this book, life is strangely familiar and similar to what we have here. I enthusiastically recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Heartbreaking...
Review: I also read this book immediately after Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha," and agree that the writing styles are in stark contrast to one another. But the point is not to be "lyrical," as the other reviewer suggests. I found myself transported, each chapter moving slowly but purposefully to the next. Although the narrative seemed to drag a bit in places, Ha Jin's light touch lends the story a subtle urging throughout. Despite the pity you feel for Lin's faithful but unloved wife, the longing between Lin and Manna is heartbreaking, lingering on for years while circumstances keep them at arm's length from one another. Some might call the ending anti-climactic, but I thought it only made the story stronger and all the more compelling.
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: What's unforgivable in Ha Jin's novel is not its historical inaccuracies obviously catered to the tastes and beliefs of a foreign audience. What's truly unfortunate is its depiction of Chinese people and society as being without some understandable passion or recognizable human emotion. Who are these aliens depicted in this novel? Real humans don't act like this. People in China during the cultural revolution certainly could not have acted like this. While reading this novel, all I could think about is how incredibly cold and uninteresting the characters are. Where is the pain and the suffering these characters supposedly endured during the cultural revolution? Yes they are Chinese, and yes they are therefore subdued, but that does not excuse the characters from their competely lack of inner struggle and psychological depth. Why should I care whether the divorce comes through or not? It's hard to give a damn when the characters don't seem to give a damn themselves.
Rating:
Summary: National Book Award???
Review: Perhaps the reason I didn't like this book is that I'm Chinese, or that I bought it after reading Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha" which I thought was lyrical. The prose style here is wooden, as if the author were trying to sound "translated". The narrative style seemed to me bureaucratic; again, this may have been the writer's intention, but it seemed ultimately clumsy. The characters were almost caricatures; given other reviews, perhaps they were exotic, but they didn't engage me at all. Even the metaphorical political and environmental ambiance seemed mechanical. National Book and PEN award winner???
Rating:
Summary: haunting
Review: I liked this book a lot. I realize that the bound feet were a bit outdated, but I see so many many stories/movies with these type of problems (I just watched the Godfather III last night, and who would believe that people would dress up as priests for hits??). I liked the characterization of the book, enjoyed the book immensely and wondered after reading it what the title referred to (exactly) -- the plot haunted me....
Rating:
Summary: Bittersweet Love in Communist China
Review: Ha Jin's Waiting is a bittersweet love story set against the backdrop of Communist China (mid '60s-'80s). While the plot seems simple enough - a young man, both physician and soldier, in love with an educated, modern woman, though married to a traditional, peasant woman - the daily, mundane decisions of an ordinary life are magnified by the dichotomy of Chinese traditional beliefs and communist philosophies. The protagonist, Lin Kong, is in a traditionally arranged marriage with a woman whom Lin finds unsatisfactory even before the marriage, though his dissatisfaction with her lies almost entirely on her physical appearances. As a doctor and soldier, Lin lives in the city where he is stationed, and returns to his rural country home annually. Lin inadvertently complicates by falling in love with an attractive nurse, who also is a soldier working at the same hospital. During the course of twenty years, Lin repeatedly requests a divorce, something traditionally frowned upon, and virtually impossible to obtain via the communist regime. Thus, the story revolves around the doctor's dilemma and the two women who inextricably complicate his entire adult life. Waiting is a love story that seems to be at the mercy of a fickle, communist regime, where trends are determined by current political interpretation and thought. Love is put on hold, sacrificed for the greater good of the State; there to stagnate, as opposed to being nurtured naturally through intimacy, trust and affection. Among the many subtle messages in this novel, Ha Jin shows us that emotions, including and perhaps especially, love, cannot be regulated as one would try to regulate and control the economy. There are forces in nature more powerful than any dictatorial force thus discovered. Finally, although love with its full complement of accompanying ambivalent feelings is the prevalent theme throughout the story, Ha Jin writes of the human condition in a communist state and intimately reveals how many Chinese survived during such senseless communist reforms as Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Rating: 
Summary: A Cheap Story
Review: Like a good commercial teaser, the plot is interesting enough to got me to buy the book. But after reading it, then I realize how empty and cheap the story is. First, to rationalize the dislike of Lin Kong to his parents arranged wife Shuyu, the author has to make Shuyu weathered and un-attractive (OK), but with Bound Feet? Come on!! Since the story was set in 60s, 70s, and earlier 80s, Shuyu's feet had to be bound the earliest in the middle of 1940. That is almost impossible, for by then the practice has been formally banned for almost half a century. If the story is set in the early 50s, there might be a remote chance of wife of bound feet. But then, the period would not be first hand with the author's own experience. Second, the main frame of divorcing process between Lin Kong and Shuyu is another trick. For anyone who is familiar with the marriage law and common practice of China during 50s and early 60s, will know that an Army Officer can easily abandon his rural wife by just declaring that "the marriage is family arranged" regardless the opinions of the wife. Countless of rural wives (mostly with unbound feet) were rightly devoiced by countless Army Officers this way, when the latter moved into the city and falls in love (seems naturally) with some middle or high school graduated girls - the so called modern women of the time. Thus, the whole story falls apart.
Rating: 
Summary: Is it really worth the wait??
Review: This was my first time reading Ha Jin's work. I was convinced to read it by the gold sticker that read Nationa Book Award Winner on its cover. I was then introduced introduced to a rather simple plot, almost predictable. There appears Lin Kong who marries his wife Shuyu to fulfill his parents' wishes. He feels that he does not love her while Shuyu remains as a faithful and loyal wife. Then there is Manna who Lin feels is the person who he meant to be with. I have to say that I liked Ha Jin's simplistic style in telling this story of Lin Kong, who sadly does not understand what he truly wants and needs. However I was not impressed with his organization of the novel in which he used two thirds of the book to explain eleven years of Lin Kong's life in detail and used the last one third as a quick resolution to the story. At times there is too much detail like Lin's first wet-dream and Manna's rape. In another occasions, it is too quick-paced, like Lin's divorce to Shuyu and marriage to Manna. There lacks a good balance. The last part of the book did not satisfy my curiosity that had built up with eleven years of uncertainties in the main characters' lives. Lin finally divorces Shuyu and marries Manna and has children. Furthermore, Ha Jin ends the book explaining the inner feelings of Lin by bringing in his inner-voice. All the explaining of what the character was feeling and realizing finally made it seem that the author was unsure of how much the reader was understanding Lin and the themes of the story; this then made the novel seem overly simple. I personally think that the book could have been stronger if it can deliver a satisfying ending to the reader who wait just as much as the characters of the story to a grand, thought provoking resolution. Simply, what Ha Jin builds initially in the book is not that worth waiting for.
Rating:
Summary: Good story, bad writing
Review: I was disappointed by this book, and surprised to see that it was a bestseller. Although the characters and plot are very well-crafted, the language is stilted and uncomfortable. If you can forgive clumsy writing in your search for character development, then give this book a try.
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