My first voyage into the storied world of Ha Jin was his Ocean of Words. I was not impressed. I found it to be truly an ocean of words, lacking that economy of language I expect in contemporary American fiction (Stephanie Meyer excluded). My major beef with Ha was that he was boring, conventional, afraid to take the risks that other Chinese writers (those in the mainland of China) were taking par for the course. Folks like Mo Yan and Yu Hua who contrive wild stories full of improbabilities. I like big messy stories.
With Ha’s novel Waiting, I humbly admit my error.
This is not to say that Ha has ramped up the story. He still does not reach the outrageous level of a Yu Hua. BUT, and this is important, he pieces together an extremely compelling human drama. One that–I am not ashamed to admit–made me tear up.
In Waiting Lin Kong is a military doctor who consents to marry a country woman who is his intellectual opposite. They have a child together, but no passion exists between them. In fact, Lin lives at the military hospital in the city, only returning to his family once a year for his one week leave.
Inevitably, Lin takes a lover more to his liking. Manna Wu is a nurse at the hospital, and although younger than Lin, she is fast approaching the age of spinsterhood.
Waitingis a romance story, the love story of Lin Kong and Manna Wu. The two live together in a chaste and friendly way for seventeen years until finally, Lin is allowed by the authorities to divorce his wife. The two finally marry. They have twin boys. They are free to love openly after seventeen years of hiding, restraining, and sublimating their desires.
And this is where the story turns sad. There is a melancholic timbre to the whole tale, but after the marriage, the Yeatsian moment when things fall apart.
Lin Kong begins a running dialogue with himself. His imagined interlocutor chides and questions Lin Kong, filling him with doubt. What was all the waiting about. You don’t even know what love is? You have only ever surrendered yourself to a mystic fate because you lack the courage to do anything different.
And the book ends on this unsteady ground.
There are still moments in Waiting when Ha Jin suffers the same problems of Ocean, Lengthy descriptions that seem unnecessary and out of place, but am a sucker for a sad ending: Negative capability, smashing that bitter grape on my pallet. Ha Jin accomplishes a feat of negative capablity in the midst of a romance, and for that I tip my hat.
