READERS GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Ha Jin’s National Book Award-winning novel Waiting.

Introduction

Ha Jin’s novel Waiting was the winner of the 1999 winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. This quietly poignant novel of love and repression in Communist China begins in 1966 when Lin Kong, an army doctor, falls in love with the young nurse Manna Wu during a forced military march. They would like to marry, but Lin has a wife at home, in a rural village far from his army posting. His wife, Shuyu, is an illiterate peasant with bound feet, whom he was married to by arrangement so that his parents would have a daughter-in-law to care for them in old age. Each year, Lin travels back to Goose Village to divorce Shuyu in the county court; each year he is defeated, either by the judge or by the intervention of his wife’s brother. Because adultery is forbidden by the Communist Party, the years pass slowly and Lin and Manna wait chastely for their fate to change. By the time 18 years have passed–the interim after which a man can divorce his wife even without her consent–what had begun as a sweet and passionate romance has turned into something far more complicated and more real.

Written with grace, wry humor, and an uncompromising realism, Waiting gives readers a story that puts their cherished ideals of individualism and self-fulfillment in a wholly different perspective.

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. 18. Ha Jin has not returned to China since he left in 1985; in 1990, he made a commitment to write and speak solely in English. Speaking of that decision, he says, "There was a lot of fear. It’s like changing your body, to write in a different language. And it wasn’t just a matter of finding an audience, it was a matter of survival—I have a family to support. Finally I decided to write in English, absolutely uncertain of whether I could do it. I’m still uncertain! In the end, though, every project is a risk, not just the language. And that’s true for every writer."** How would you characterize the style in which this novel is written? If you have read the work of Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, two other emigré writers who adopted English as their literary language, how would you compare Ha Jin’s use of the language?

*Atlanta Journal, 15 Nov 1999, E

2. 1.

**From "A conversation with Ha Jin," by Mary Park, amazon.com

About this Author

Ha Jin was born in 1956 in Liaoning Province in northern China. For six years, beginning at age 14, he served in the People’s Liberation Army. After his army service ended, he taught himself English while working the night shift as a railroad telegrapher. In 1977, when colleges reopened after the Cultural Revolution, he passed the entrance exams and was assigned to study English, although this was his last choice for a major. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Chinese universities, and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, supporting himself as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and as a night watchman in a factory. After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 he decided that, as a writer, he could not return to China. In 1993 he earned a Ph.D. in English from Brandeis. He has published two collections of poetry, Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996), and two collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words (1996), which received the PEN/ Hemingway award, and Under the Red Flag (1997), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award. A novella, In the Pond, appeared in 1998. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999. Ha Jin is a professor of English and writing at Emory University in Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and son.