Waiting

Waiting is a novel by the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin, published in 1999 and the winner of the National Book Award that year.

The story begins in 1963 and covers about twenty years, and its subject is the price of ordinary decency in a system that requires everything to be filed. Lin Kong is careful, well regarded and unable to say what he wants; his wife is a village woman he has never loved and cannot quite desert; and Manna spends the years of the waiting in the same hospital, doing work she is over-qualified for and being talked about. Ha Jin wrote the book from a story his wife told him about an army doctor who had waited eighteen years to divorce his wife so that he could marry a nurse, and he keeps the novel close to the texture of that world: the paperwork, the permissions, the housing, the queues, the way a person's private life is an administrative matter. It is less interested in condemning the system than in describing how a man with no gift for strong feeling survives inside it, and the result is a portrait of a life quietly spent on something that was supposed to be a beginning.