Picture a teenager in a suburban Southern California Costco, lingering by the books tables while her parents shopped. There, between the boxed vacuums and party-size clamshells of croissants, I first encountered the writing of Ha Jin. His short story, “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” had been included in The Best American Short Stories 2001, edited by Barbara Kingsolver. In Jin’s story, a Western fast food chain opens in Northern China. East–West clashes and hilarity ensue. I adored the story. Here was a writer who was Chinese, like I was. Secretly, I imagined myself as a writer, despite lacking models in my immigrant Malaysian Chinese family. I knew I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how a person—let alone a person like me—went about becoming one.
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In another part of the country, several months before I read “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” Jin was asked, in an interview by Asia Society, “What’s the most important kernel of advice you can give young writers?” Jin responded, “Be patient. Patience is everything.” Was I patient? I’m not sure. Whether I was or I wasn’t, the years passed anyway. Here I am, reading his advice twenty-three years later, knowing that, second by second, the present is becoming the past.
“Patient” is a word that pairs well with Waiting. What can I say about this novel to readers of the future? Waiting is a novel that captures a time, and people of that time. In whatever time you are discovering it, it’s the right time. It’s the rare novel that is timeless and urgent all at once.
In Waiting, the country betrays its ordinary people…no one is spared.
Waiting begins like this: “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.”
With this remarkable sentence, we are inside a remarkable novel. Waiting is a novel about a man, Lin Kong, who is torn between the past and the future. He is waiting to divorce his wife, Shuyu, so he can marry his nurse friend, Manna Wu. Waiting is about the effects of trauma. It is about what is both lost and gained in a transition to a more modern life. Waiting is also about two women, and a tumultuous era in a nation. The novel spans the years 1963 to 1985, and time—“Patience is everything”—is a character, too.
Though set entirely in Northeast China, in the years before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, Waiting could only have been written by an immigrant. Being an immigrant requires imagination: an immigrant must imagine life in another country. In that new country, an immigrant cannot help but picture what their life might have been, had they not left. Ingrained in the experience of being an immigrant is the question of what if? The alternate lives one might have led had one decision been made, instead of another. At times the immigrant will regret a choice that has been made. Or will regret not making any decisions at all, as is the case with Waiting’s protagonist, Lin Kong.
That Ha Jin is an acclaimed American novelist is itself an imaginative stretch. Jin Xuefei was born in 1956 in Jinzhou, in Liaoning Province in Northeast China. In 1966, the year Lin Kong and Manna Wu marched four hundred miles and commenced their entanglement, and the year Mao’s Cultural Revolution began, Jin Xuefei was ten years old, and not yet Ha Jin. At fourteen, to avoid being sent to the countryside, he lied and claimed he was sixteen, in order to join the People’s Liberation Army. During his tenure, stationed on the frigid northeastern border between China and Russia, he encountered a Chinese translation of War and Peace. (It was as accidental as a suburban teenager coming across “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town.”)
Along with his compatriots, he’d been steeling for a Russian attack. Yet Tolstoy’s novel made apparent that Russians were as human as he was. Jin happened across other forbidden texts, Leaves of Grass and Don Quixote among them. (Let’s linger on the fact, here, that these—along with other Western works—were prohibited. Had Jin never stumbled across them, he might never have become the writer, Ha Jin.) After being discharged at nineteen, he worked as a railway telegraph operator, learning bits of English over the radio. When universities reopened, in 1977, he listed as his possible fields of study: philosophy, classics, world history, library science, and finally, English—in that order. Despite scoring poorly on the English exam, he was assigned to study English at Heilongjiang University in Harbin, China.
The story that became Waiting began as an offhand remark. Jin and his wife Lisha were visiting his in-laws at the army hospital where they served. They noticed a man standing outside the hospital, and Lisha mentioned that he was an army doctor who had waited eighteen years to divorce his wife. Jin joked that this would be a good premise for a novel. But he didn’t write it right away. Instead, he carried this story with him on a plane to Boston in 1985. He was traveling alone to study at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, leaving Lisha and their son, Wen, behind. He took poetry classes with Frank Bidart, who helped him place his first English poem, “The Dead Soldier’s Talk,” in The Paris Review. He entered the MFA program at Boston University. He later sent for his wife, then his son. When the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in 1989, Jin realized that he could not return home. In 1994, as a professor at Emory University, under pressure to publish or perish, he began to write Waiting. In 1999, this novel you are holding in your hands won the National Book Award for fiction.
Listed out this way, the leaps appear comprehensible—even tidy. The years seem so short. But how does it happen, that a barely literate fourteen-year-old, struggling through Leaves of Grass, eventually writes a novel like this one—evocative and efficient, deadpan and wry, devastating and moving—in a language that is not his first?
In an interview in The Paris Review in 2009, Sarah Fay asked him, “What would you have done if you’d stayed in China?”
Jin: I would have become a translator. That’s clear. Maybe I would have worked my way up to be an English professor.
Fay: Would you have written?
Jin: No, no, no.
How do we change? How do we become who we become? It’s mysterious, and yet there is nothing more quotidian than the reality: it happens day by day.
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. That life proceeds only forward should not come as a surprise: we know this fact of physics. And yet Lin Kong arrives at this realization only after too much time has passed, after it is far too late. Having made no decision, he regrets everything. “What a mess he had made of his life and the lives of others!” he thinks to himself.
Jin captures the details and textures and minutiae of days. A new year’s dinner is described in detail: “a cabbage salad mixed with cellophane noodles, a plate of stewed chicken, a small basket of fried pies made of glutinous-rice flour, and a casserole of sauerkraut and pork and tiny shrimps.” And yet we cannot cling to each moment, try as we might. The women’s labor—innumerable, abundant home-cooked meals—vanishes into memory. Each of these particular, daily details disappears into the past. Lin “tried to recall the holidays in recent years and found himself at a loss—not a single one of them was distinguishable from the rest.”
Time manifests visibly in other people. As Manna ages, Lin notices her physical changes (“Her face was no longer that youthful. Thin rings appeared around her eyes when she smiled, and her complexion had grown pasty and less firm. He felt bad for her, realizing that a young woman could lose her looks so easily and that however little the loss was, it was always irretrievable.”) He comprehends her aging more readily than he does his own. Lacking perspective, we are less capable of seeing what damage the years have done to us. Inevitably, though, it strikes us too: the fact of our age, the irrevocability of our lives. In a series of realizations it occurs to Lin, regretfully: “I’m a superfluous man”…“I’m a bad, bad man…”
*
Throughout the novel, insects and birds are heard and seen. “Around his head a few midges were flitting. A pair of magpies clamored in a tall elm, tossing their mottled tails.” Birds travel without constraint, and their flapping wings make me think of the Butterfly Effect—that if a bird had flapped its wings differently, Lin Kong’s life might have gone in another direction, and history might have been otherwise.
In Waiting, the birds are free, but the people are not. We’re reminded of how arbitrary borders are, and how arbitrary it is that we are born in one place and not another—how that place and that time then determines, to greater and lesser degrees, our lives.
When they first meet, Lin and Manna are not permitted to walk around together outside the hospital wall. Ran Su, the vice-director of the hospital’s Political Department, makes an invasive request of Lin: “‘Promise me then that you and Manna Wu will have no abnormal relationship unless you have divorced your wife and married her.’ By ‘abnormal’ he meant ‘sexual.’” Eighteen years later, it no longer matters: “It occurred to [Lin] that the rule that prohibited two people of opposite sex from walking together outside the wall had been almost abandoned in the past year. Few leaders would now bother to criticize young men and women who walked in pairs outside the compound. He had heard that some nurses had even gone into the woods with their patients. Yet somehow to him and Manna, there still seemed to be a wall around them. They had never walked together outside the hospital since they were married, and Manna still could not ride a bicycle.” These arbitrary rules have lasting effects on ordinary lives—on Lin’s, on Manna’s, on Shuyu’s lives.
After years of deprivation, Manna and Lin watch a featured report on TV called “To Get Rich Is Glorious.” China is changing again. The Party now encourages capitalist tendencies, instead of shunning them. It’s another arbitrary about-face that will have consequences for the lives of ordinary people.
*
In Waiting, it is the women who yearn, who weep, who experience heartbreak and violence. In the women characters, especially, we see how both a state’s arbitrary rules and regulations and cultural conventions do their damage to human lives.
Shuyu is Lin’s hardworking and devoted wife. Her body keeps a record of its own oppression: she has bound feet, only four inches long. For centuries in China, girls’ feet were painfully shaped from childhood because tiny feet were a beauty standard, meant to attract a future husband. But Lin considers Shuyu’s feet an embarrassment—a vestige of the past. “This was the New China; who would look up to a young woman with bound feet?” he wonders. He never once considers the suffering Shuyu went through in order to have these tiny bound feet. (The tragedy, confessed later, is that though Shuyu’s feet are meant solely for her husband, Lin has never seen them, these feet she endured years of pain for.)
When we first meet Manna in the fall of 1964, we learn that she “was an energetic young woman at the time.” “At the time” is a weighty phrase, foreshadowing how the years that follow will diminish her. Despite being a younger, more modern alternative to Shuyu, Manna’s life, too, is dictated by patriarchal, Confucian beliefs, and by the authoritarian state. Manna is among the nurses who have had their virginity verified: “Every young woman recruited had to go through a physical exam that eliminated those with a broken hymen.” In 1964, binding feet is seen as old-fashioned, where this invasive checking of hymens is accepted as standard practice. From our perspective, years later, it is horrifying.
*
Lin is a man torn between two women, and two worlds. Ha Jin, too, straddles two worlds, writing in English instead of Chinese. He has viewed this as a betrayal on his part. In an essay called “The Language of Betrayal” from The Writer as Migrant, Jin writes, “the ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language. No matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative energy to another language. This linguistic betrayal is the ultimate step the migrant writer dares to take; after this, any other act of estrangement amounts to a trifle.” In China his work would be censored. In his interview with The Paris Review, Jin said, “I wanted to separate myself from Chinese state power. The Chinese language has a lot of political jargon.”
Jin nevertheless writes about China beautifully, in English that feels Chinese, English inflected with a Chinese sensibility. Both the countryside and the city of a quarter million are evoked vividly yet straightforwardly. In Goose Village, vulgarity and natural beauty exist hand in hand. Lin’s hospital, in contrast, is sterile and orderly. Jin presents both ways of living matter-of-factly, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. To choose one way of living means closing the door to another.
An author torn between two languages must choose one, and Jin has made his choice. Yet the city and country can’t stay wholly segregated. Having lived in one place informs one’s life in another. When Lin’s twins have health issues, modern medicine is of no use. It’s Shuyu’s folk remedy of taro, egg yolk, and sugar that cures them. Ha Jin’s Chinese life brings perspective to his American one.
*
Waiting also asks: What is the use of books? It’s a playful proposition within a text itself. Books must matter. Don’t they? But in Goose Village, at the novel’s start, Lin reflects that books are useless in a place where physical labor is paramount. (“Shuyu doesn’t know how to take care of books. Maybe I should give them to my nephews. These books are of no use to me anymore,” Lin thinks.) In Muji City, he keeps the books even though they are contraband. In an early scene, Lin and Manna tenderly wrap his books in paper. Keeping these books might be the biggest risk that Lin ever takes.
Toward the end of the novel, Lin wonders if his books have led to his emotional disability: “Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love…Maybe I’ve read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I’m too rational, better educated. I’m a scientist by training—knowledge chills your blood.” Where are people living their lives? Waiting describes the paradox of reading a book, which enriches your experience at the same time it means you aren’t taking action, or living your actual life. Books can reflect life, can inform life, but they also aren’t life. Lin is well versed in stories about “legendary heroes, knights, swordsmen, beauties, kung fu masters,” yet unable to fully feel emotion in his own life.
A tension exists between living and reading, familiar to any young bookworm who has opted to read indoors rather than play outdoors. Reading makes up for some of the life we have lost, but perhaps not all of it. Life experienced only through books simply isn’t enough. Lin Kong does not exercise his own imagination until it is too late. “If only he had had enough passion and energy left in him so that he could learn how to love devotedly and start his life afresh.”
It’s a familiar, perhaps inevitable feeling for anyone who has ever grown older and found doors closed, regrets accumulated like pens in a drawer. Imagination can be a salve: “He couldn’t help forming imaginary plans—withdrawing all the 900 yuan from his savings account, sneaking away at night to the train station, using an alias from now on, restarting his life in a remote town where no one knew him. Ideally he’d like to work as a librarian.”
Each of us is at the mercy of arbitrary occurrences—some that cause lasting damage and trauma, others that shape our lives for the better.
He wishes he could trade places with his twins: “Lin felt weak and aged; he was unsure whether he cared for the twins and whether he would be able to love them devotedly. Watching their covered faces, somehow he began to imagine trading places with them, having his life start afresh. If only he himself had been carried by someone like this now; then he would have led his life differently.”
“If only” is an especially striking and heart-breaking phrase, especially coming at the end of the novel, in Lin’s later years. Waiting stresses the limitations of our lives—the fact we only get to lead one. Again, a familiar concept to an immigrant. An immigrant’s life requires both imagination and an acceptance of one’s limitations—of the reality, which is that we only get to live one life. Books supplement one’s limited, only life with imagined ones. Imagination isn’t frivolous, but the opposite: it is vital.
*
Despite its accolades in the States (a National Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award), Waiting has never been celebrated or honored by China itself. Jin considers himself a writer in exile. In The Writer as Migrant, he writes, “Historically, it has always been the individual who is accused of betraying his country. Why shouldn’t we turn the tables by accusing a country of betraying the individual?” In Waiting, the country betrays its ordinary people: Lin Kong, Shuyu, Manna—no one is spared.
The Cultural Revolution is a period that China prefers not to speak about. It is an embarrassment, an era like a mound of unsightly dust, best swept under the rug. As a country, China wants to pretend the past did not exist, it wants to forge only into the future. In Waiting, Manna lives for the hope of the future.
There is a danger to this, of course. When the future comes, it is not all she’d hoped for. Her health begins to fail. The future is diminished, because time has diminished her.
Ignoring the past, China wants to say, Look at us now. It’s a Chinese feeling that even I, ignorant about life lived in China, feel in my own life—epigenetically, maybe. The desire to save face, to say that the past does not matter.
And yet Jin cannot simply forget the past. He sees the role of a writer as a preserver: “Yes, to preserve is the key function of literature, which, to combat historical amnesia, must be predicated on the autonomy and integrity of literary works inviolable by time,” Jin writes. “The writer should be not just a chronicler but also a shaper, an alchemist, of historical experiences.”
It is impossible to make sense of historical experiences as we’re living through them. In fiction, shape can be made, and a seemingly meaningless experience can be transformed. In Waiting, Jin calls attention to the lives of ordinary people. Though we can make out the shapes of these characters’ lives and see the arc of them, we can’t help but wonder about the arbitrary demands and strictures placed on these individuals: What was it all for?
Under the thumb of the state, so much imagination is wasted. How could the lives of these ordinary people have been different, if they hadn’t been subjected to authoritarian rule?
Waiting itself is an imaginative exercise that we are all fortunate exists. Ha Jin’s overactive immigrant imagination has given us this incredible novel. Though we may only get to live one life, we can experience other lives imaginatively, through books. Reading Waiting, we multiply our own lives. We are able to feel what it might have been like to lead these ordinary lives: Shuyu’s life, Manna’s life, Lin’s life. Each of them a product of its time, of its circumstances. Each of them ordinary, each of them bounded by time and place, but each of them as real as mine or yours.
Each of us is at the mercy of arbitrary occurrences—some that cause lasting damage and trauma, others that shape our lives for the better. Picking up a book is one random event that can turn someone into a writer. “Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing,” Jin says in his Paris Review interview. “In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.”
Imagining a different way of being can be a step toward being different; imagination is necessary for both selves and political structures to change. Not suddenly, but slowly. At some future date, you might look back with regret, or with amazement.
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Adapted from Waiting by Ha Jin, with an introduction by Rachel Khong. Copyright © 2024 by Rachel Khong. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
