Synopsis
Waiting is a story of long-suffering love between a dutiful married doctor, Lin Kong, and an unmarried nurse, Manna Wu, he meets while working in a Chinese army hospital. Lin wants to divorce his wife, Shuyu, and marry Manna. He approaches his wife about a divorce several times, but each time she refuses. A loophole in Chinese law will allow Lin to divorce her, without her consent, if they are separated for 18 years. The "waiting" for Lin's divorce is the focus of the story.
Jin uses spare but compelling prose to move the relationship between Lin and Manna through almost two decades. Despite the dramatic setting — comunist China in the 1960's — the political and cultural aspects of the story are secondary to the emotional architecture of Lin and Manna's relationship.
— USA Today
Publishers Weekly
Jin's quiet but absorbing second novel (after In the Pond) captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do his duty--as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents and later by the Communist Party. Reflecting the changes in Chinese communism from the '60s to the '80s, the novel focuses on Lin Kong, a military doctor who agrees, as his mother is dying, to an arranged marriage. His bride, Shuyu, turns out to be a country woman who looks far older than her 26 years and who has, to Lin's great embarrassment, lotus (bound) feet. While Shuyu remains at Lin's family home in Goose Village, nursing first his mother and then his ailing father, and bearing Lin a daughter, Lin lives far away in an army hospital compound, visiting only once a year. Caught in a loveless marriage, Lin is attacted to a nurse, Manna Wu, an attachment forbidden by communist strictures. According to local Party rules, Lin cannot divorce his wife without her permission until they have been separated for 18 years. Although Jin infuses movement and some suspense into Lin's and Manna's sometimes resigned, sometimes impatient waiting--they will not consummate their relationship until Lin is free--it is only in the novel's third section, when Lin finally secures a divorce, that the story gathers real force. Though inaction is a risky subject and the thoughts of a cautious man make for a rather deliberate prose style (the first two sections describe the moments the characters choose not to act), the final chapters are moving and deeply ironic, proving again that this poet and award-winning short story writer can deliver powerful long fiction about a world alien to most Western readers. (Oct.) FYI: Jin served six years in the People's Liberation Army, and came to the U.S. in 1985. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.