BOOK REVIEWS

Ha Jin, Waiting

Waiting is a well-titled book. It is the story of Lin Kong, who waits for eighteen years to divorce his wife and marry his girlfriend Manna. His marriage had been arranged for him by his ailing parents with a simple and illiterate peasant woman from his hometown so that she could take care of them. Lin Kong, on the other hand, is one of the very few doctors in the city hospital where he works who was trained in medical school rather than apprenticed in the army. This incompatibility leads to a loveless, though cordial, marriage and their extended separation (Lin Kong gets one vacation a year to return to his hometown and see his wife and daughter) certainly does not help. Not to mention Lin Kong’s friendship with an intelligent and urbane young nurse, Manna, which blossoms into passion. Their love, however, remains platonic until after eighteen years he can finally get a divorce and marry her.

The tale spans the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a time when the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath raged across China. Waiting, however, does not give us a turbid narration of Red Guard destruction, the violence of struggle meetings, or the fervour of Mao Zedong idolisation. Instead we get accounts of everyday life, steering a course through long lines for basic foodstuffs, as well as furtive calculations of the political effects of actions. For example there is the scene in which Lin Kong and Manna make covers for his books, many of which were banned, foreign novels. Even though the danger of being denounced for owning these books was very real, Lin Kong would rather hide them than turn them in.

Waiting itself has come in for some of this very same censorship. China’s official press has called it “dishonest” and accused it of “uglifying” China on behalf of the United States and promoting old stereotypes of the Chinese people (1). Because of these accusations, plans to translate and publish the novel in China have been scrapped, despite the fact that it was awarded the National Book Award last year. It seems that what the Chinese authorities disapprove of is not simply the book’s clear description of the absolute regime enforced by the Party and the People’s Liberation Army, but more importantly the equally clear depiction of the characters’ desire to be free of those shackles, as the example above of covering the books shows.

One suspects, however, that what really rubs the censors up the wrong way is the picture of sexual prudery drawn in the novel. That is, the Party and army’s control extends into the personal lives of individuals to such an extent that Lin Kong can not even have a platonic relationship with a woman without his superiors calling him into their offices. Not to mention the fact that he could be stationed so far from his wife in the first place. In fact fear of the repercussions alone keep Lin Kong and Manna away from a physical relationship, despite their clear desire for one, until a divorce can finally be attained. Regardless of the fact that everyone knows Lin Kong does not love his wife, even their superiors who enforce the rules, his relationship with Manna is not allowed to flourish. The true irony of this censorship, however, is that the Cultural Revolution claimed to embody the final destruction of traditional Chinese culture, especially the Confucian patriarchy which, according to the communists, enforced arranged marriages and stifled love. Yet the book portrays, at least in the realm of sexual mores, a Party and an army that extend and amplify these very practices. Indeed, the fact that Lin Kong shares Confucius’ surname adds a further layer of satire. It is this description not of the violent political excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which are allowed and sometimes encouraged by the censors, but rather of the subtle political excesses that has brought the censors down on Waiting and led them to accuse it of immorality.

Having said that, Waiting is not a passionate romance, although the focus is on love. Ha Jin keeps the tone remarkably calm and even-keeled as he traces the eighteen years of this love affair. Over that span of time he asks the difficult questions: What is love? Why do we get married? and why do we get divorced? Sometimes, the answers are given to us in the form of Lin Kong’s conscience, but the novel works best when it makes us seek the answers ourselves in the events of the story. The book walks a tightrope poised above despair:

How we’re each sequestered in our own suffering! (p. 304)

Yet it consistently maintains an air of optimism. In the end, Lin Kong finds that the love for which he was willing to wait eighteen years was never really what he thought it was, yet it was always love. In the midst of death and decay, the book ends with renewal and rejuvenation in the birth of twins and these lines:

Outside, Manna was cheerfully wishing ‘Happy Spring Festival’ to someone passing by. She sounded so pleasant that Lin noticed her voice was still resonant with life. (p. 308)

Few of us have the patience or focus required to write a novel in our native tongue, let alone a second language. Ha Jin’s accomplishment on this front, composing a novel of this calibre in his adopted language is formidable. However, he is not yet a Conrad or Nabokov; there are moments when his English breaks down and the flow of the narrative stumbles as a result. Moreover, Jin’s habit of putting the Chinese surname last, in the Western fashion, rather than first, as it would be in Chinese, is unnatural and distracting. In the same vein, certain translations of Chinese phrases or concepts seem to be over-simplified and dumbed-down for the Western reader, which disrupt the story’s progression. Nevertheless, there is a touch of Hemingway in his prose:

The sun was directly overhead, and Lin was panting slightly when he arrived at the larch woods. Some cocklebur seeds had stuck to his trouser legs, and his shoes were ringed with dark mud. Mosquitoes were humming around hungrily while a few white-breasted swallows were darting back and forth, up and down, catching them. His parents’ graves were well kept, covered with fresh earth. Beyond them, wormwood was yellow-green and rushes were reddish, all shiny in the sunlight. (p. 93)

Passages like this of such pastoral beauty are not uncommon in the novel, and they have a certain rhythm to them which Jin conducts like a maestro.

It is precisely this compelling vision of human needs and desires that makes Waiting a success. Ha Jin’s honesty in his exploration of Lin Kong’s relationships with his wife, his girlfriend and his daughter transcends the specificity of China in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. There is a clarity and fullness to Ha Jin’s characters that puts them in stark contrast to the exoticised caricatures that populate most novels about China in English. The villains don’t get what’s coming to them; nor do the heroes get their rewards. But then they seldom do in reality, and it is this sharp eye that Ha Jin demonstrates for the real that bears out his final reaffirmation of life.