WAITING
By HA JIN
New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. 308 pages, $24

Timothy Tung

Waiting is an unmistakably Chinese tale, recounted in deceptively simple, elegant prose, beguiling to Western readers for an exoticism that blends traditional Chinese ways and modern revolutionary modes. Reading it, we learn of a society in which the new, the socialist, seems forever entangled with the old, the feudal. In the end, even the most loyal to the new order goes back to find solace in the old.

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu," thus begins the novel, so simple a sentence yet so intriguing its implications that we are compelled to want to know more. Divorce is not a simple matter in Communist China, much less in an organism known as the People's Liberation Army, which sets the specific rule that a person must wait for eighteen years to be free if his or her spouse refuses to consent to dissolving the marriage. So every summer Lin Kong, an army physician, goes on leave from his post and dutifully returns to his village to divorce his wife, a simple farm woman who invariably says no in court after first having agreed to separate.
This, then, is the waiting for Lin Kong, an upright, kindhearted army man who lives strictly by the rules. He does not love the illiterate woman to whom marriage was arranged by his aging, ailing parents so they would have a daughter-in-law to care for them while he was away. Even after his parents have died, Lin Kong refuses to bring Shuyu to live with him at the army post. He is embarrassed by her lack of sophistication and by her bound feet. Besides, he has fallen in love with a nurse named Manna. Army rules proscribe any "abnormal relationship" between men and women who are not married to one another, which means no sex. So, for the many years Lin Kong and Manna are in love with each other, they never sleep together. The rules also forbid male doctors and female nurses, unless married to each other, to be seen together outside of the hospital compound.
In the meantime, Manna and Lin Kong grow older. Manna, tired of waiting and anxious to get married and bear children, is proposed to by Lin's widowed cousin, courted by a senior party officer, and raped by a retired army officer, so that by the time she and Lin marry, she is no longer a virgin. After they are wed, although twin sons are born to them, Lin Kong is not happy. The details of the novel raise a number of questions. Almost two decades after the Communist triumph, arranged marriages are still prevalent; talk of child brides is still commonplace, even among Mao-quoting party members; in some parts of the country centuries-old foot-binding practices for young girls continue; and a retired senior army officer can rape a nurse in the hospital compound and get away with it. What ever happened to Chairman Mao's slogan "Women uphold half of the sky?" In short, has communist revolution for an egalitarian, just society failed?
Waiting is a heart-wrenching love story that may test the credulity of Western readers. Through the years of waiting, when Lin and Manna take their daily walks within the hospital compound-their only private moments together-they have intimate conversations but do not touch each other. The one exception is at the very beginning of their relationship when Manna invites Lin to attend an opera performance. Seated next to Lin in the darkened theater, Manna boldly reaches for his hand and holds it. In describing that very intimate moment, the writing is most effective, but the scene leaves one to wonder why such tenderness is not developed later into a stolen kiss or a furtive embrace.
The contrast between Lin's self-restraint and Manna's forwardness is evidenced in another passage when, during a National Day celebration banquet, Manna gets drunk, follows the alarmed, disgusted Lin out to the darkened open field, and begs him to deflower her because she does not want to become an old maid. Such boldness only shocks the regulation-abiding Lin. Yet one's sympathy lies with Manna, who is simply a victim of the system. Long after the retired army officer has violated her, one evening while caring for her babies Manna sees the image of this villain on television, being interviewed on a program called To Get Rich Is Glorious. He is now the richest man in the county. She flies into a rage and screams, "It's unfair, unfair!"

Lin's responds, "Life's always like this, ridiculous-a monster thrives for a thousand years, while the good suffer and die before their time." A devout Communist has turned a fatalist in the end. He goes to visit Shuyu and their grown daughter in desperation. There he finds some sort of comfort. As the novel comes to a close, all three, Lin, Manna, and Shuyu, are again waiting.
One of the most amazing aspects of Waiting is that English is not the author's mother tongue. Ha Jin, who was born in Liaoning Province in 1956, served in the People's Liberation Army on the Soviet border for five years and draws from that experience in his fiction. After earning a master's degree in American literature at a Chinese university, he came to the United States to study at Brandeis University in 1985. Within two years of his arrival, he began publishing poetry in English, and in another two years, short stories. Waiting, which was awarded the 1999 National Book Award, is the culmination of his brief literary career in America.

Timothy Tung, former research professor (retired), China specialist, City College, City University of New York, writes for both American and Chinese publications.