Rating: 
Summary: One of the greatest prose writers alive....still............
Review: This guy is good. His words are stunning. Just opening the book and looking at them on the page...simply goregous. But I must agree with some others, the story drags, the plot is flat, and it is a galatical bore at certain points. But if you are looking to study the craft of modern literature in its finest form, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: A little bit boring, but an engaging read.
Review: I enjoyed the book, except the almost very end where Lin started to feel discontented with his second marriage life. The ongoing voice in his head was just a bit overstated for me. Other than that I enjoyed the story. The simple language easily helped forming the scenery, environment and the characters in my mind. I especially enjoyed the developing of the story to the point that I found myself reading it straight through for several hours three nights in a row. In some way Ha Jin was able to keep me engaging in the book to find out what'd happen next. As an Asian I realized that the characters portrayed in the book do exist in real life. The wife's loyalty towards their husbands, the double standard upon women, the well and long kept thoughts and feeling inside the characters. All these things were based on reality.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't keep from putting it down...
Review: I'd read a bit of this book, get bored, put it down, pick it
up. It's taken me nearly six months to get through. It
has its lovely points- and the historical context is fascinating
to one who has no reference points with modern China.
I learned from it. As beautiful as the imagery and the
language sometimes is, it is also, on some levels, a
colossal bore. It reminds me of the beautiful film, "The
Scent of Green Papaya." Nothing much happens, but at
the end you do feel you've watched a magical vision unfold.
Rating:
Summary: bittersweet, like life
Review: This is a wonderful realistic book that imperfect people can relate to. It takes us through the ups and downs of two relationships shared by 3 people, with self doubt, love, lust, growth and change. It's touching and simple, but the story lingers in your heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique
Review: This book is quite a different read. The author uses too much uncommon words, too descriptive which are unneccessary but fun. I like the story though but it just shows that Lin Kong is a very weak character, incapable of sacrifice and risk, but one who wants an easy way out to life always. In the end, Love conquers it all.
Rating:
Summary: Who's really waiting???
Review: A suppose to be bittersweet 18 years romance between Lin Kong(a Chinese Army doctor) and Manna(head-nurse).Lin Kong waited 18 years to get a divorce to come through..actually he did apply for it every year but his wife Shuyu, a simple and devoted wife always disappoint him at the court house.
Lin Kong is a highly-educated modern man and yearned for free love and true romance, he met a beautiful young nurse and decided to give up his wife and daughter but unwillingly to be a heartless man, therefore year after year he hope and wait for his wife to say yes and part peacefully. Lin's hope finally materialised after 18 years because according to their law he can automatically divorce his wife after 18 years of separation. He quickly marry Manna and regretted soon after....
Actually after so much hardship and long wait,Lin and Manna should be really happy ever after!! The answer is rather ironical. All those years of waiting and waiting...In the end it's not Lin's waiting for true love but his wife and daughter waiting for him to turn back that's touches my heart and that's a real waiting.
Rating:
Summary: Spare, original, surprising. A fast read.
Review: This is spare writing, the kind Mark Twain had in mind when he apologized to an audience by saying he'd have written a shorter speech if only he'd had time to write one. A highly disciplined writer, Ha Jin only gives us the words that matter. Despite the lean, elegant prose, the story and characters are down to earth and richly understood. They are as real and complex and endearing and frustrating as your friends and family, but we know them better because Jin lets us spend time inside their heads. And despite Hemingway-esque word and sentence lengths, the lingering effect isn't cynicism and emotional sterility. Kindness and warmth underly most of the warped relationships here. What's most original about this book is the plot structure. How does Jin manage to keep us moving forward when we already know how the story turns out? I want to re-read the book to figure that one out; all I know is he kept me going. Oh, but don't get me wrong -- there are intriguing twists ... all the way up to the last page. Only one plot line struck me as implausible and devoid of truth-like detail, but I don't want to give that away. (It's a trauma that falls to Manna Wu.) An added bonus: The backdrop for the story is China's cultural revolution, a fascinating study in change and human nature. This "insider's view" personalizes history for us, fleshing out the emotional content within one of the world's greatest political experiments. Our book club (six people) gave this a thumbs up, though we were divided in our degree of enthusiasm. Raves came from those of us who particularly admire understated beauty. Others in our group merely enjoyed the book and felt they'd learned some things about China.
Rating: 
Summary: waiting...and waiting....and waiting.......
Review: I picked up this book in an airport because the cover not only showed the National Book Award seal, but it promised "a suspenseful and bracingly tough-minded love story." What a disappointment! There was nothing tough-minded about any of the main characters, and the only suspense I experienced was whether the plot would ever pick up and whether I'd be able to finish the book. The plot finally picked up in the last fourth of the book, but at that point the characters were so dislikable and I was so tired of waiting myself...waiting for something to happen...waiting for some suspense...waiting for at least one character to become likable (Shuyu did for a while, but at the end she disappointed me) ...waiting to finish this book so I could start a new one. I was also disappointed in the writing style;I felt it was written at a 6th-grade reading level and was annoyed by the overuse of the phrase "How come..." Unlike the other readers, I didn't find this book particularly rich in its setting of the Cultural Revolution. I think the book _Becoming Madame Mao_ accomplished this much better.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting . . . for Lin to grow up!
Review: This book is truly about waiting. Waiting for Lin to grow up and appreciate all that he has. Waiting for Manna to grow up and realize that there are better men out there then Lin. Waiting for plot to develop. Waiting for Shuyu to realize that she's better off without him. Waiting for it to be more than predictable. I gave 3 stars because I didn't feel it was a COMPLETE waste of my time reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: "A Bitter Love"
Review: This novel is set in China during the Cultural Revolution of the late twentieth century. The three main characters are Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, Shuyu, his wife through an arranged marriage and the product of a traditionalist upbringing (i.e. with bound feet) and Mannu Wu an educated, mordern nurse that Lin plans to marry. Under military law, Lin must wait 18 years before he may secure a divorce without the consent of his wife. The story operates on multiple levels. It is in part a story which explores the nature of love -- what does it mean to love someone and how does one know when he or she is in love? The story also works as a political allegory of the Communist regime in China. Closely related to the latter, it is a fable about a traditional way of life coming into contact with modernity and industrialisation (communist or not). On all levels, the story shows the ambiguity of the human heart and the difficulty of self-knowledge. These are basic difficulties in being human, and their understanding is basic to human love, politics and change. The story shows both how hard it is for people to know their own hearts and also how difficult it is to pursue any ends without bringing, in some way, harm to another person. The story is told in an eloquent, minimalist prose. The writing is simple and beautiful. I found theprimary characters and a host of secondary characters well, if suggestively and sparely, presented and developed. This book reminded me of another highly acclaimed book: Disgrace by J,M. Coetzee. Both books are written in a restrained prose. Both are about repressive political societies (South Africa and China) in an uncertain state of transition. And both present situations fraught with moral ambiguity which seem to point beyond themselves for understanding. This is a thoughtful and sad story about what a party leader accurately describes at an important moment of the book as "a bitter love".
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