Rating: 
Summary: Suspenseful indeed...but different!
Review: The cover of this novel boasts a suspenseful love story, which it is. However, don't let it fool you, it wasn't the same kind of suspense one would expect...yet, I still couldn't put it down! The way Ha Jin writes is so so calm, simple, nothing crude or crass. It's a story about Lin Kong, a doctor who lives in the city, who's fallen for Manna Wu, a nurse who lives in the city...but they can't get together because Lin has a wife from an arranged marriage, Shuyu, who lives in the country. This is a story spanning over 18 years, with Communist China as the setting. I liked how the description of the regime sort of paralleled Lin's story and the choices he made. On one hand, you see how the communist regime sneaks itself into the fabric of everyone's personal lives and decisions. All the while, Lin mentally commented on the idiosyncrasies of the past traditions. Yet, near the end, he started to appreciate some of the concepts that the old tradition held. I was surprised at how the writer was able to manipulate my feelings for each of these characters (or maybe I'm just easily manipulated--lol!). For a while I was sympathetic to Lin's plight, but then I was annoyed at his selfishness and lack of passion. Again, I thought Manna was a sweet woman who deserved to be with Lin, but then eventually, she seemed cold...but she had a good reason to be so, after 18 years of waiting for a man she loved, enduring some painful incidents throughout. Finally, there's Shuyu, whom I wanted out of the picture from the beginning, but could see how special she really was. I just think that Lin Kong was such an odd character. He went through life almost like a passive observer. He became frustrated when he found himself in these difficult situations, yet did little to get out of them. He looked at life like a series of events that just "fell into his lap." Fortunately, it seemed that finally he started to realize that he was, in fact, the master of his own destiny. Yet it was a bit late in life when he discovered this. Still, I'm not sure he would really make the transition to emotional maturity by the end of the novel, but at least he started to appreciate the good things he had in his life. It's a wonderful theme to which any of us can relate: Take stock in what we have. Find the beauty that surrounds us. People who want something they can't have may spend their lives reaching for it, only to have anger and bitterness in the end because they never appreciated what they already had. They wasted their lives wanting what others possessed, be it love, money, or freedom.
Rating:
Summary: Ah, the irony!
Review: In this deceptively simple story you will find much truth and wisdom about the nature of love. The title for the story is perfect. Not only does it apply to Lin, who in a pivotal moment realizes that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting," but to other characters as well, as is highlighted especially in the ironic twist at the conclusion. This is a wonderful story with excellent literary merit.
Rating: 
Summary: ???
Review: Am I the only one here who reads Lin as a gay man who can't come to terms with his sexuality and therefore deep down wants to WAIT, to keep everyone WAITING so he won't have go one step closer to facing up to the fact that he's gay? Or does everyone insist on reading Ha Jin's book as an allegory of communist failings, you know, your typical USA is number one political readings that so many arrogant and selfrighteous liberal Americans are so good at. Or better yet, a collection of vignettes of exotic China.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting
Review: Ha Jin weaves a story of love that might seem a bit flat and callous in some respect, but it properly analyzes assumptions of love.
Lin returns to his home town every year for many years to attempt to end an arranged marriage. Shiyu is not pretty and has a style which has fallen out of fashion in Maoist China and this causes him shame. In the hospital Lin works, he becomes enamored with Manna, a nurse, and enters into an affair of some sort with her, although they have no sexual relations.
Shiyu, year after year, refuses to divorce Lin but the hospital allows an automatic divorce if the couple has not been carnal in 18 years-hence the waiting.
So...Lin gets no play from either woman, is under obligation by the hospital to keep his relationship to Manna on the down low (although everyone assumes its his woman), and is miserable, since he is just not not comfortable.
What makes this book interesting is the clash between old and Revolutionary China and the casulties o love caught in the middle.
Good read..
Rating:
Summary: Be Careful What You Wish For
Review: Waiting by Ha Jin is by far one of the most truthful stories I've read in a long time. Jin's novel focuses on Lin Kong, a doctor torn between the woman he's married to and the woman he loves. Sound like a cliché? Well, in Jin's skilled prose, the story is anything but cliché. Set in a restrictive post-Cultural Revolution China, Waiting expounds against the oppressive nature of the regulations of the time, as well as the societal pressures that existed. Lin's parents chose his wife, Shuyu, a traditional woman with bound feet whom he was embarrassed to bring with him to his post at the Army Hospital in Muji City. Shuyu cared for Lin's parents until they died, and she remained in Goose Village, raising her and Lin's only daughter, Hua. Since Shuyu will not grant Lin a divorce (though he returns to the village every year to request one), he must wait until they are separated 18 years before a judge will grant him a divorce without her consent. Thus, the title of the novel refers to the long years that Lin and his true love, Manna Wu, must wait until they can finally be together. While it is a typical case of "be careful what you wish for" and "the grass is always greener on the other side", Waiting provides a very human look at the clash between our desires and reality, and the painful trade-offs we make in our lives, hoping that "this" will make us happier than "that" ever could. Waiting won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction. This is a great accomplishment for a simple story told in simple prose that carries such a great load of truth and wisdom on its pages.
Rating:
Summary: What a 'love' story!
Review: I never knew that Emory had such an incredible writer for one of its English professors when I went to law school there. Had I known, I would have audited one of his classes. I absolutely loved this book. Ha Jin's style is so simple and straight forward, yet honest and compelling. I was amazed by the depth of Lin's (main character)thoughts on love and marriage and not surprised by his inner conflict between wanting a marriage based on love and mutual respect (Manna) and comfort and peace as represented by his wife Shuyu. Lin's liberal ideas nonetheless lead him back to his parents' foregone conclusion that a wife should be someone that makes your life comfortable. There is so much detail in this book that shows where a man's heart is. So many cliches are embedded in a very subtle way and ring true even in a culture so different from ours(such as 'the way to a man's heart is through his stomach,' since Shuyu's cooking seems to represent comfort,peace and stability on Lin's visits home). Lin's inaction and passivity is at times frustrating but in any case realistic and consistent, both with respect to his love-life (or lack thereof) and his acceptance of the political ideas that surround him. Lin is such a typical character in so many ways, who's trapped in an atypical situation. Please read this book!
Rating:
Summary: A Sparkling Gem of a Novel
Review: Several years 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: simplistic beauty
Review: This is a wonderful story. It's auite a leap from typical love stories. After some reflection, I tend to think the most valid love story is not the central relationship of the book. It makes one think: What is love, really? What is it that keeps us together? How committed could "I" be to a relationship that could not be pursued for many years? Just a very quiet story. Don't miss this.
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Summary: Love Story That Transcends Cultural Barriers
Review: Ha Jin's Waiting invites readers into the post-War China where predetermined marriages still prevailed. It was the time when divorce was not even an option. Anyone who tried to divorce was labeled anti-revolution, heartless, and cruel. The court rarely granted divorce but tried its best to repair the marriage. A man abided by his parents' will and married a woman Shuyu whom he did not love and gave birth to a daughter. After finishing medical school, Lin Kong served as a physician in the Revolutionary Army. Lin was content with his tidy military life until he met and fell in love with Manna, one of the nurses at the army hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So year after year, every summer Lin Kong returned to the Goose Village to divorce his wife Shuyu. Shuyu, a woman in her forties who looked like if she was sixty, had humiliating bound leg. Her face withered. She had been attentively taking care of Lin's parents who passed away before Lin met Manna. Shuyu found favor in the eyes of villagers and the judge. Madly in love with Manna, Lin also felt trapped in a marriage that embarrassed and repelled him. Lin felt he could not bring Shuyu with him around his work. Ha Jin has encompassed a wide range of truths and attitudes about human heart-Lin's insecurity and indecisiveness; Manna's jealousy and Shuyu's faithfulness. I was completely mistaken for what the title of the book really means until the very end of the novel. The meaning of "waiting" is in fact two-fold: the 18-year wait for divorce is only the surfacing idea. The true waiting that Ha Jin refers to is that of Lin's wife Shuyu. She had waited for her husband to come to senses what he really desires and treasures in his life. For 17 years in his life, Lin had been people-pleasing: he tried to please Manna by divorcing his wife; he tried to please the fellow workers by getting a more "presentable" companion. Lin became blinded to who he really was. You have to persist to the very end when the author takes a turn and surprises you with the ending. I highly recommend this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting, Indeed!
Review:
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