A life is measured, in part, by how many ambitions one can achieve in the short span of a human life.
In Ha Jin’s prize-winning novel Waiting (1999, 2024), Lin Kong is an army physician. He has a wife in their home town, Goose Village, Shuyu, who is mother to their daughter, Hua. Their marriage was arranged when both were children, and their families and social pressure did not enable Kong and Shuyu to escape that passionless marriage. Her bound feet, while considered culturally erotic, to a modern man like Lin Kong, evokes her backwardness. Illiterate, she is not fit for presentation:
But despite accepting Shuyu as his bride, he believed she was absolutely unpresentable outside his home village. That was why, after they were married the next summer, for two decades he had ever let her visit him at the army hospital.
So it has been 20 years of marriage, 17 of them celibate, for Kong and Shuyu. While Kong has lived in the (fictional) city of Muji, in Liaoning Province, he has fallen in love with a young head nurse, Manna Wu. She has waited for his divorce for many years, but Shuyu has held fast against the divorce. The rules are that a divorce will not be sustained against an unwilling party until 18 years of separation, which will occur in the next year for Kong and Shuyu.
[A note: Ha Jin’s novel has Shuyu caught between vestige practices of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912) and the new Communist rulers of China in the time period of the Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). The timing does not make historical sense since the practice of binding feet was outlawed in China in the early 20th century. Perhaps readers are to suspend disbelief given the fictional village name and the sense that it is so backward that it has been left untouched by time, but Communist apparatus arose from rural areas and reached deep into village life. The concept that women held up half the sky would belie a Shuyu just running her own family farm in a subsistence way. Or perhaps this was meant to be allegorical and to only borrow bits and pieces from historical reality?]
The novel backtracks to describe the nascent love between Lin Kong and Wu Manna. It catches up to the era of Deng (opening to the world, harnessing human initiative, enabling profit and bits of capitalistic practice) and the fate of the principals. The scope broadens out to a wider aperture to include Hua as she comes of age to date and potentially marry.
Why didn’t Lin Kong try to bribe the judge to get his way, given the prevalence of bribery in so much of modern Chinese life? Why didn’t any of the principals in the relationship logjam not make a move to change facts on the ground? Make a new equilibrium? How real could such a “horns of a dilemma” be?
While the core story may be evocative, the characters come across as phlegmatic and passive. Some of the described episodes do not ring true. For example, in modern China, would a trained young physician use an undisinfected sewing needle and human hair to puncture blisters to help a fatigued comrade with blisters on her feet from hiking?
Lin Kong perhaps discovers something of the limits of his affections in regards to women:
His mind shifted from holidays to love, which perplexed him more because he had never spent a day with a woman he loved wholeheartedly—no, there had not been such a woman in his life and that emotion had been alien to him. Yet one thing he was certain about now: between love and peace of mind he would choose the latter. He would prefer a peaceful home. What was better than a place where you could sit down comfortably, read a book, and have a good meal and an unbroken sleep? Deep in his heart he knew this was merely wishful thinking…
As an older man, he starts to indulge in a forever guilt.
Rachel Khong, in the introduction, writes:
Waiting is the rare text that illuminates both the length of days and the brevity of years. As in life, the passage of time appears harmless, until—suddenly—it is devastating. The possibilities of youth—which once seemed so boundless—narrow and narrow to a point.
Time is inexorable and unforgiving. And yet, there is some redemption, too, in how people’s lives can unfold.
Ha Jin’s novel Waiting captures something of the human condition, about the inherency of struggle in being. There is ever-present hope and disappointment. What seems like an advance may be less than that. Human loyalties are fickle. People suppress the ambitions of those closest to them, in dysfunctional relationships. A dispassionate government can put forth edicts that trickle down to individuals’ lives in ways that are contrary to common sense.
The novelist Ha Jin (Xuefei Jin, b. 1956) attended Heilongjiang University (in a province where this reviewer worked for several years). He currently teaches at Boston University in the U.S.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
