Rating: 
Summary: Still Waiting
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Ha Jin's descriptive language throughout the book helped me get an image in my head. I just don't understand how one woman could give up her whole life just to wait for another woman's husband. I do give Manna credit for kepping her hopes alive and never giving up on love. I do believe that this book could have benn continued. Overall i think that this was a good book and it taught me a lot about the Chinese culture. Ha Jin is a great writer and I am glad that i got a good book to read for my book review. it kept my attention all the way through it. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading. It was a quick and easy read. Ha Jin wrote a wonderful book.
Rating: 
Summary: A deceptively simple tale
Review: After reading Ha Jin's collection of short stories ("Bridegroom"), I eagerly anticipated visiting a full novel, more to see if this writer of succinct, crystalline prose could maintain interest over the course of a complete tale. "Waiting" succeeds on every level. Not only does his clarity of vision and description of the most minute bits of beauty in his created world remain intact, he caresses his reader with simple people, simple situations, simple outcomes that make the overall effect of his novels simply heroic. The story of the ideals and frustrations of waiting for the right way only to find at the end of the day that the waiting dislodged the pleasure of what was already in place - this simple lesson is universal, tender, heartrending, and wholly understandable. Ha Jin distills life into a prism of words that reflect and refract life. What a rewarding and refreshing writer he is. The National Book Award was justly deserved!
Rating: 
Summary: Part 3
Review: I read this book in three sessions. This past summer was the first session, where I got through part 1 and most of part 2, in a weekend with Waiting as my only source of reading, I finished part 2. Two nights ago, I started Part 3 after Montaigne made my eyes hurt, and was finished by sunrise. I may have forgotten a lot of the beginning details, but I remember the laconic pace necessary to drag out the years of rejected divorces. The crowing between Lin and Manna became boring; I no longer cared whether or not they got married. I can't imagine writing the first two parts, not counting the enchanting prologue, was fun for Ha Jin. Politics is brushed past, unlike the Amazon reviewer I thought the commentary sat next to the story, we could draw our own judgements about the politics of the camp, I tried to focus on the characters, which is probably why I was often bored. Part 3 is only good because you've waited through parts 1 and 2. Instead of growing wiser with their age, Manna, Lin, and Shuyu (his embarassing village wife) remain embedded in their stubborn convictions - Manna and Lin's unconjugated love becomes as arbitrary as the descriptions of Chinese propoganda. Jin's description of Shuyu touched me and brought the book to life for me. Her simplicity made the austere love life of Lin and Manna look hedonistic. Shuyu is the character best portrayed, especially when Jin takes her from the subsistence life in the village to the more modern city compound where Lin and Manna live. Her bound feet clatter through the courtyard where everyone knows who she is. Jin often paints an abhorrent picture of Chinese people. They are so repressed they need to purge their thoughts through gossip and slander. The women all come off as petty, image-conscious, all with streaks of martyrdom.
Rating:
Summary: Very deceptive writing, I was won over and didn't even know
Review: Ha Jin has an eye for detail and the quirks of Communist China, as well as for the average human being, that makes this book read like a fable. I found myself hypnotized by his spare and economical prose, where the people and the situations they dealt with were the story, and not flowery language and metaphor. This book wasn't a metaphor for a certain life led, it was life itself. It was funny and had me rolling on the couch at times. It is a very whimsical look at a very harsh and disturbing time. He is to be commended for his accomplishment. This is realism, people. A word many readers (and writers) hate, being as it so often is identified with plotless, depressing, and dull prose. Hell, if I had to live in Red China, I sure hope I would have been able to remain vivacious about my life, if not entirely satisfied. You grab what you can, and milk life for what it is worth, which Ha Jin's characters do. Maybe it takes an author whose first language isn't English to remind us what good writing is all about. Never tell more than you need to tell, never tell less than the story demands.
Rating:
Summary: Questions the very essence of who we are and what we become.
Review: In this highly structured novel of life within the Chinese People's Liberation Army and in the very rural countryside, Ha Jin offers the reader a way to understand the culture and character of people living under repressive conditions. To Lin Kong, his wife Shuyu, and his chaste lover Manna Wu, life is a process of acceptance, not choice, a life in which there are no personal goals, other than working for the greater good of the country and its leaders. Because the concept of freedom simply does not exist here, it never enters anyone's mind. No one feels its loss or yearns for it, and an individual seeks neither happiness nor pleasure, instead finding satisfaction within the system. Lin Kong, a physician working eleven months of the year in Muji City while his wife works the farm in Goose Village, experiences the sensations of love for the first time when he is attracted to Manna Wu, a nurse at his army station. Having previously accepted an arranged marriage, he is the legal husband of an older woman whose only attraction has been the care she lavished on his sick and elderly parents. For eighteen years he endures the limbo of trying to obtain a divorce from his wife while obeying the army's requirements that he and Manna Wu remain physically chaste. Ha Jin's prose is efficient and straightforward, much like the life of his characters, and one neither expects nor misses the flights of poesy so often found in novels of China written by westerners. The chief attraction of this novel is the care with which Ha Jin recreates the atmosphere of life in Communist China, showing us how ordinary people conduct their lives under conditions which we would find intolerable. His careful choice of details to illuminate the ironies of his characters' lives give power to a narrative about people who have no individual power. He succeeds admirably in bringing to life characters whose whole concept of what it means to be a person is diametrically opposed to our own, making humans out of people who live lives of structure, not of choice.
Rating:
Summary: a quiet complexity
Review: Ha Jin has created a novel which gently leads the reader down the path of one man's life in today's China. As a young, well-educated man from a rural farm setting, Lin Kong's personal struggle to maintain his integrity while finding some personal happiness is the subject matter of this beautifully written story. His (Lin Kong's) struggle is effectively personified in the characters of his two wives and it is through their devotion to him that a somewhat ironic resolution is achieved. I enjoyed this book from the first page to the last.
Rating:
Summary: Lovely prose
Review: Ha Jin writes with such lovely, engaging prose that I was immediately drawn into this novel. His characters seem so human, their flaws so believable as to seem both slight & forgivable -- flaws of patience or foolishness that one might excuse in oneself. His portrait of masculinity is almost feminine in its description -- a gentle & unflinching look at the heart of a man. The characters seemed so true to life & the portrait of the cultural changes in China that emerges like a backdrop only serves to make the people more real, their emotions & choices more believable. The pacing of the story is as thoughtful & deliberate as a heartbeat, drawing the reader steadily through the two decades until we look back with the protagonist & wonder where the time has gone. In the preface, one wonders if he will choose to stay with the arranged marriage he keeps at a distance "in the country" or break with convention to marry the woman he works with in the city. His life & goals seem to work out as being both less & more than he expected. This is a fascinating portrait of a man who seems drawn down the path of his life by the external rules of custom & the decisions of others. This shouldn't seem like a criticism, though. I didn't mind waiting until the end of the book to find out how the opposing demands of honorable behavior would work themselves out. I enjoyed every word.
Rating:
Summary: and wasting
Review: Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
-Waiting So begins Ha Jin's aptly named novel. Lin Kong is a country born doctor now practicing at an Army
hospital in Muji City in Maoist China. There he has fallen in love with a nurse, Manna Wu, a modern
urban woman. But his country wife, Shuyu, refuses to grant him a divorce, despite the lovelessness of
their arranged marriage. The moral strictures of Communist society are sufficiently severe that Lin
Kong and Manna Wu are forced to wait until Shuyu gives her okay, which she continues to withhold
while her daughter by Lin Kong is growing up. Thus, the lovers are forced into a decades long
holding pattern, until Lin Kong compares himself to a sleepwalker and wonders if he's not more in
love with an illusion than with a real being. Though this story is sometimes maddeningly slow, it is quite beautifully told, in very direct and
stripped down language, and does develop a certain tension as we wait for Shuyu to set Lin Kong free.
Along the way Ha Jin, who was himself a Red Army soldier, provides a fascinating cultural history of
China in the 60s and 70s. But the real power of the story is allegorical. Lin Kong wants to shuck off
the traditional China (Shuyu) and embrace the new, modern, Communist China (Manna). But as the
process of attaining the new drags on, with no fulfillment in sight, he begins to question why he
wanted Manna in the first place, wonders whether he even retains the capacity to love, or whether the
continuous deferral of love and suspension of life has emotionally paralyzed him, and grows nostalgic
for Shuyu and the more traditional China of the village he grew up in. One imagines this must somewhat parallel Ha Jin's own experience, and/or that of many people he
knew in China. At any rate, he deftly takes one of the oldest of romantic plots--the dependable and
decent spouse abandoned for the sexier, but ultimately illusory, lover--and imposes the story of
Communist China upon it. It works quite well and makes up for the at times too stately pace of the
story-telling. GRADE : A-
Rating:
Summary: A Fine Look At A Strange Chinese Love Story
Review: Ha Jin's latest novel is one based on reality, told with graceful, elegant prose. Its protagonist, Lin Kong, an army doctor, is one of the least appealing heroes I've come across, yet Ha Jin does a superlative job slowly unfolding the odd love story that swirls around Lin Kong and his wives Shuyu and Manna. It is a captivating look at rural Chinese life during the 1970's and 1980's, yet its universal themes of love and betrayal transcend its setting in the People's Republic of China.
Rating: 
Summary: I really disliked this book, but read it anyway.
Review: I rarely read a book that I dislike--all the way through to the end. But this one I did--partially, because of frustration at having bought it,partially because I couldn't believe there wasn't some gem hidden in it somewhere. It was true to it's title--I WAITED, all the way through, for it to become something I would value having read. It was essentially a passionless story about a very dull life, and though it was instructive about the difficult nature of existing in post-Cultural Revolution China, it lacked any real sense of the uniqueness of the land. It was a literary white-wash, which may be of scholarly significance, but it was of no interest as a satisfying read.
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