Waiting

PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novelist Ha Jin uses his in-depth understanding of modern China to produce a work of surprising depth and emotion called Waiting. This is the narrative of Lin Kong, a man living in two separate worlds, navigating the political minefields of a society built to control his every action and suppress the impulses of his deepest heart while contending with the competing demands of two very different women.

This committed and aspirational physician has been in love with Manna Wu, an intelligent, stylish, and contemporary lady, for over seventeen years. However, the modest and very devoted lady his family picked for him when he was a child still lives in the traditional environment of his native town, to whom he returns time and time again to request a divorce. Years pass, and Lin's intense love becomes more and more strained in a society where the Party's discovery of adultery may permanently destroy lives and where the age-old bonds of family and tradition still hold power. Every summer, his submissive wife says she's going to get a divorce but changes her mind. Lin says that this time will be different.

Ha Jin skillfully captures the texture of everyday life in a region where centuries' worth of customs must give way to the demands of human yearning as she follows these people through their summer of choice and beyond. Waiting affects us with its incisive view of the universal complexities of love, and it also fascinates and startles us with its portrayal of a China that is hidden from Western eyes.