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Jan 05, 2008

Ernest rated it:

The onslaught of awards and critical acclaim this book has garnered (including the biggie, The National Book Award of 1999) epitomizes the most lamentable trend in such current practices: pandering political correctness.

Despite featuring wooden dialogue spoken by boring characters I could care less about and descriptions that rival phone book listings in their vividness, Waiting DOES conform to pre-existing, fetishized Western notions of Chinese culture. Thus, delighted progressive More...

3 comments like (18 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lorraine rated it:

I enjoyed my second reading of this book by Ha Jin much more than the first. Perhaps it was timing or my still-maturing literary consciousness, but for me, the book has ripened significantly in the 7 or 8 years since my first perusal. While I cannot say that I admire the characters of Lin or Manna any more than I originally did, Shuyu stood out to me as a shining example of "blooming where you're planted". She managed to be happy, productive and capable of growth and forgiveness, in More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 03, 2008

Lisa rated it:

I enjoyed many things about this book: its clear, simple language; its deceptive simplicity (it's got the rhythm of a folk tale or fable but is layered with meaning and feeling); its quiet, deliberate pace; the rich detail, particularly in descriptions of natural settings which shine with poetry.

I have some complaints as well. The dialogue is often stilted and strange ("bye-bye now") or peppered with odd phrases that distract ("by hook or by crook," "shilly s More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 19, 2008

Preeta rated it:

This book did make me feel like I was waiting, so maybe it did what it set out to do. But it wasn't a good kind of waiting. It was the kind of waiting I used to do when I would have to go to some government office with my parents and they would make me sit still and behave myself, and I would feel a terrible physical ache in unmentionable parts of my body from having to contain so much desire to fidget. Actually, that sounds a lot more exciting than this book was.

4 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 24, 2008

Krys rated it:

What Waiting reveals about chinese culture and the effects of the Cultural Revolution on (recently) contemporary China is fascinating. And to be sure, this book is steeped in such information from the mind-boggling ways in which politics enter into the most non-political facets of everyday life to details of cuisine that westerners would never guess were edible (jellyfish!!!). For this alone, the book is worth a read.

But sadly, the protagonist is not only unsympathetic, he he boring More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

alan rated it:

the main thing which sticks out to me about this book (apart from the culture shock-ness of 70s China, sounding more like the turn of the 20th century until we are given some dates and clues further on in the novel) is that nobody is perfect.

in fact, hardly any of the characters are likeable - not that you find yourself disliking them too much either. Lin, the main character, is very weak willed and lives a dispassionate life - however, he goes through a lot with respect to his diff More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2008

stephanie rated it:

i first came across this book in 2004. i have to admit that the politics alluded me, the history of communist china isnt exactly my thing, but what i got out of this book when i read it was the universality of the concept of “waiting”. when you think about it, we are all waiting…for something. we will spend our entire lives waiting for one thing or another, and each time we acquire what we were waiting for, we find something else to be waiting for. we always think that what we are waiting for is More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Oct 28, 2007

Zheng rated it:

As someone who grew up in China, I found the characters very real. I read many reviews about this book talking about how none of characters are likable, except for the simple peasant ex-wife of Lin's.

But I think that is what the author was trying to tell us-that the system reduced every individual's humanity and individuality to the extent no one was a complete person anymore. The only reason that the simple peasant wife Shuyu seems to be more likable is because she was more huma More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jun 06, 2007

Rachael rated it:

Good winter read. Walks you through the emotional details of a man's life as he struggles with choosing between his life in the rural Chinese countryside and his work at a military base in a large city. He spends 11 years agonizing over whether to leave his simple wife and child behind for a more modern life with a military nurse. Ha Jin is a master at making you feel the magnitude of the decision by building sympathy with each character. At the same time, his detailed account of everyday li More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Emily rated it:

I couldn't decide if I wanted to give this book one or two stars, but ultimately decided to go with two because it kept my attention and was a fast read. That being said however, I hated almost everything about this book, particularly the main characters. There were times when I thought the strength of my burning hatred for the main character would be enough to ignite the book into flames. But if you like books about weak, self absorbed, indecisive, and passionless characters who are not even re More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 14, 2010

Nate rated it:

Reading this story of lives left in limbo by the repressive social circumstances of Cultural Revolution China, I began to get that sensation of frustration that I normally feel when I sense my emotions being manipulated for melodramatic effect. Except that I don't think that this book was especially manipulative; rather it's a quiet, likely truthful account. Still, I kept wanting to yell at the characters to break out of their stifling society, even though I know that this would realistically ne More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 19, 2011

Oi Yee rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 17, 2008

Becky rated it:

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0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 16, 2008

Derek rated it:

I so wanted to like this book. It won some awards and I had heard good things about it. But I found that I had no interest in the characters and really hated the time that I spent with them. I was happy for the book to end. I think that it was the author's intent for me to be frustrated with the characters and the title "Waiting" seemed to refer to the lives of these people, who could just never act or do the thing that they thought would make them happy. But the more I read, the more More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 27, 2008

Danimal rated it:

I am not sure why this book won anything - a relay race, a pie-eating contest, let alone a National Book Award. It's got a good theme to it - how the communist Chinese government's totalitarian ways caused great unhappiness - but the writing was so dull that I couldn't deal. I was just Waiting for it to end. It went something like this:

"I had only 12 more years before I could divorce my wife and marry Manna."

A bird flew by the window. A leaf fell from a tree. Th More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 14, 2009

Chana rated it:

This man Lin is a lucky man who has no idea of his good fortune, takes his wife and their home for granted and thinks he wants something else in life. He wants a different woman who is better looking, more urbane. The sad thing is, he is always trying to do the right thing, be a good man. I recognize his personality type, he wants to be good all the time, he botches things up like mad and is sad and tormented about it, but at the center of all that is selfishness that he isn't even aware of. More...

0 comments like

Sep 06, 2011

Vicky rated it:

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1 comment like

Dec 04, 2010

Danica rated it:

What a drab little book. And how ironic that, on its back cover, Lisa See offers up a plaudit about the purportedly "tremendous love story" enclosed in its covers. That is a much more simplistic conception of this novel than Ha Jin probably intends for us to take away. In fact, it's not just simplistic. It's entirely wrong. This story isn't a love story. It's a character study about a decent man whose indecisiveness and dispassionate nature nevertheless lead him to waste his life away, More...

0 comments like

Aug 15, 2010

Harmonybites rated it:

The writing seems very spare. It's not a translation by the way, but by a man whose native language is Chinese writing in English.

The characters often exasperated me with their varieties of passivity: Lin in not insisting on divorce or letting Manna go; his wife Shuyu in her submissiveness and passive-aggressive refusal to divorce; Manna in her--waiting. That's very much the plot and theme for two-thirds of the book--waiting. And the last third... well. That would be a spoiler, but n More...

0 comments like

Jun 18, 2010

Aban (Aby) rated it:

My thanks to Alexis for recommending this book. It's the story of Lin, an army doctor, living on a military base somewhere in China. He has lived for many years away from his wife and daughter who farm in the country. Lin has been in love with Manna, an army nurse, for seventeen years. During that time he has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, tried to obtain a divorce from Shuyu, his gentle peasant wife, so that he can marry Manna.

There is very little action in the book. All the action More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Apr 13, 2010

Windy2go rated it:

On vacation, I read “Waiting” by Ha Jin, winner of the 2000 Pen/Faulkner Award. It is a meditative book, pensive as the title implies. It tells the story of a Chinese doctor, Lin, and his love interest, Manna, a nurse in the army hospital where he is assigned in the 1960s. Lin is already married, but it was an arranged marriage and he is ashamed of his uneducated, peasant wife. He leaves her behind in the country where she cares for both of his parents and has one daughter. He does not love More...

0 comments like

Apr 04, 2010

Beatles24 rated it:

My first foray into any sort of literary effort from China. Ha Jin writes easy prose with an eye for detail and a yen for describing in minute detail the physical and mental landscapes of the places and people in them respectively. The story is set in the fictional town of Muji City amid the backdrop of Mao's cultural revolution in the middle of the last century. The unbelievable megalomania of a stridently bureaucratic and freakishly omnipotent communist regime is displayed in a rather under More...

0 comments like

Jan 10, 2010

mellyana rated it:

Siapa sih yang suka menunggu? Rasanya, banyak orang mencantumkan kata "menunggu" di kolom "hal yang paling tidak disukai/ dibenci. Menunggu, mau hanya 5 menit, atau bahkan 1 menit membuat orang tersiksa, kesal dan marah. Mau menunggu orang ngasih amplop gaji atau orang nagih hutang, tetap saja kesal.

Jadi, coba deh bayangkan kalau harus menunggu selama hampir 20 tahun! Seorang lelaki: Lin, berjanji pada pacarnya: Manna untuk meninggalkan istrinya: Shuyu. Itulah Waiting y More...

0 comments like

Jan 05, 2010

Erin added it

ok, so here's how i got rabies. true story.

i'm in thailand. thailand is pretty much awesome, i like going there a lot, as long as you stay away from touristy places like phuket and don't go to bangkok. people get sucked into bangkok and never return.

so, i'm in bangkok (of course) and it's hard not to get sucked into a place like that, you know? fifty bajillion people stacked on top of each other like sardines, zipping around on highly unsafe wheeled vehicles that woul More...

9 comments like (21 people liked it)

Oct 03, 2009

Dayna rated it:

I wasn't understanding the merit of this book even 3/4 of the way through. I even checked the cover to see if this wasn't a translation from Chinese because the writing seemed amateur. But the fact that I've recently taken on the advice that a book may only fairly be judged after reading its entirety made me trudge on. I'm glad I did. The book finally turned and became substantial. It begins with Lin Kong traveling home from the city to his home village to divorce his wife Shinyu, free himse More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 28, 2009

Jee rated it:

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu," so begins the Prologue to Ha Jin's novel Waiting (1999). The beginning must rank as one of the most striking openings in English-language fiction. Persuaded by his parents, Lin married Shuyu so that she could look after them in the country. But the army doctor working in the city falls in love with Manna Wu, a nurse, who returns his feelings, and so condemns herself to wait for the divorce. The novel traces w More...

0 comments like

Aug 23, 2009

Colleen rated it:

What the book is about, according to amazon.com: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without More...

0 comments like

Jun 16, 2009

Rauan rated it:

This is in many ways a very bad book. Much of the writing, for example, feels like bad translation. And the descriptions of landscapes, ducks and caterpillars etc are interjected and executed completely programmatically. blah, blah,...O, well,....

Two questions:

1) why didn't i quit after 20-30 pages (or sooner)? well, i do quit a lot of books and frequently walk out of movies. But, these days I've been needing some soft boring afternoon entertainment. I've been writing in More...

0 comments like

Jun 09, 2009

Ethan rated it:

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife.

That's the intriguing first sentence in Waiting. In a novel, the value of a high-quality opening line cannot be underestimated. Great introductory sentences, like one finds in the works of Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel Marquez, grab the reader immediately and lock in his engagement for the remainder of the book. Ha Jin's opening sets the tone for what's to come, alerts the reader early that he's dealing with an unusually More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 21, 2011

David rated it:

This book offers a fresh, rare look at life deep inside Communist China. There are no formulas for the plot: it's original and the self-effacing perspective of the narrator intrigued me. Waiting is a book without ego. At first the narrative style seemed to read like a translation. But I realized that the author's technique was really an extension of the cultural distinctions about which he described in the novel. He made the culture of Mao inside China come alive for me. The characters were roun More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)