Recipient of many literary awards, Jīn Xuěfēi (more commonly known as Ha Jin), literally weaves magic with his pen.
For weeks, silly me had been postponing reading his prize-winning novel, Waiting, (Ha Jin received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for it), dismissing it each time as yet another soporific doctor-nurse romance.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Saturday night, post some intoxicating liquids, I started turning the pages of the book. And boy! Was I hooked! I was unable to put it down till I finished it – it was that compelling.
Set in Muji City, a fictitious town in China, the novel revolves around an army doctor, Lin Kong, trapped in a loveless marriage to his wife, Shuyu. Love beckons in the form of Manna Wu, an attractive single nurse at his hospital.
It doesn’t help that for the last seventeen years, each time Lin went to his native place, Goose Village, for his annual summer break, he would plead his wife for a divorce, something which the country woman would never grant him.
Communist strictures frown upon Lin Kong and Manna’s union; he needs to be officially separated from his wife before even thinking of a future with Manna.
Despite tending lovingly to Lin’s ailing parents (both of whom die in succession of each other), and bearing a child, Shuyu, the devoted daughter-in-law, wife and mother, is the very epitome of a woman wronged, a woman who was content to be at home, nursing her child(and a broken heart later), although painfully aware that her husband had taken a concubine. Unlike her husband who grimaces at her bound feet, she continues to hobble on them painfully, oblivious to the strange looks and sniggers she draws from other people.
Lin Kong has to wait for eighteen long years to finally secure a separation from Shuyu – after 18 years, a man could divorce his wife whether she gave her permission or not, and is free to marry again.
He does so, and marries the loyal Manna, who has stood by him for almost two decades.
Ironically, he “waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting.”
I'd leave it at that to fuel your curiosity.
Get hold of this novel to find out what happens to the trio eventually.
A powerful novel, Waiting spellbinds you with its simple writing style, realism, and masterful narration of emotions like love, confusion, anguish, betrayal, lust, and frustration.
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