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 would never pass california safety emissions test, and not just because their mufflers are made of duct tape. it's fascinating. and scary. you can't survive there long without help. i'm guessing that's why they made khao san road.khao san road is like... it's like... well, it's "civilization". at least that's what an australian kid once told me over a beer on the street. i think he got it pretty right. it's like a mecca for weary travelers in southeast asia, smack dab in the middle of the city, with hostels every two feet, nice old women offering to do your laundry for ridiculously cheap prices, massage parlors, restaurants with food you can pronounce in your native tongue (they try so hard, but still, what's with the corn on my pizza? no one eats corn on their pizza, guys). it's like "safe bangkok". when you stumble into khao san road after 2 weeks off the map in cambodia, you could almost weep for joy. "civilization", you see? everyone there is on their way to somewhere or recovering from somewhere. khao san isn't a place you go just to visit, it's a place you go after visiting somewhere else. and it's crazy. especially when things get dark.black market goods. fake watches. hair braiding. ping pong ball shows? street performers. i mean, you can get all this in other places in asia, probably with more variety and less chance of being kidnapped into slavery. but there's something about the relief in being back in "civilization" that makes people go crazy. it might have something to do with the children running around in the streets, offering to sell you cocktails mixed in beach buckets. no actually it probably has a lot to do with the beach buckets.see after traveling in crazy places, keeping your guard up, trying not to get malaria, or lost, or eaten by wild animals, it's nice to have a safe zone filled with other tourists. logically, the first thing you do when you get to this zone is find a beer and try to one up someone else with a story of how you almost got malaria, or lost, or eaten by wild animals.this was my plan, anyway. so i settle down with a pad thai and a watermelon shake, under the glow of the chelsea game (thanks satellite) at a nice little pub. the bar opens out into the street. it's a hot night, but the fans are going. a stream of humanity trickles by me in slow motion. and that's when, out of nowhere, a wild animal actually tried to eat me. yes, at the bar. it was large and growly, with terrifying eyes that glistened under the table. kind of. i mean it hadn't been cuddled in awhile, so it's hair was kind of tufty. and it WAS on the larger side, for most kittens. i totally made up the part about the eyes.it thought i was offering it some shrimp. which, i wasn't. i was going to throw the shrimp across the floor of the bar so it could run after it. and stop sitting on my flip flop. unfortunately, the kitty was faster than my puny human reflexes, and whilst nabbing the shrimp from my hand, it also kind of bit me.when you get bit by a loner cat in thailand, nobody cares. which is cool. turns out, when you get bit by a cat in thailand and then casually mention it to your travel physician in an email, ya know, because you want to make sure the tetanus shot kicked in before you left, well... people go crazy. important people. like county department of health people. they want you to come home so you can do boring stuff like be safe, and get a post-exposure rabies vaccine. blaaaaah. boring.which is exactly what i was expecting the 16 hour plane flights back home to be. hella boring. so i found this book, "waiting" (you were just WAITING to see what this review had to do with it, huh?! huh?? haha puns!) and tucked it into my bag to stave off the craziness. (not the rabies-crazy, that doesn't kick in for 2 weeks. the "i can't stand to watch another korean soap opera on this 3x3 inch screen while a small japanese child throws hello kitty jelly beans at me for the next 12 hours" crazy).well, it sucked. the book that is. about three dozen people have said this already, and way more succinctly than me... you spend this book waiting for it to get good. and then it doesn't. i don't need my literature to have a point, an ending, or even, sometimes, a plot. but i do like it to have interesting characters and at least one satisfying moment of decent prose. this novel, i can honestly say, had none.so i thought, if all these people came to this page on goodreads to read a review of the book, angry that they had wasted their time with such a long and unfufilling narrative like "waiting"... i might as well give them a story that at least TRIES to be 1/10th as good as "waiting". since none of us can get our money back. or the fake silver watch we traded for it. ya know, whatever.ps. did you know you have to get FOUR freaking shots to stave off the rabies? srsly. i'm not even going to tell you where either.
Everyone is waiting for something or someone in Waiting.Lin Kong is waiting to divorce his wife.Manna Wu is waiting for Lin Kong to divorce his wife and marry her.Shuyu is waiting for the time when Lin Kong will succeed in divorcing her.Hua is waiting for her father to decide if he will divorce her mother.Waiting is an oddly austere love story where the demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom. Lin is a doctor in the Chinese Army. He's a quiet, peaceful, bookish man. Nothing seems to really move him. His life is like a calm pool with no tides or waves of feeling. His parents arranged his marriage to Shuyu, a village girl with bound feet. The couple see each other for 10 days once a year and have led separate lives ever since the birth of their daughter Hua.Shuyu is humble and touchingly loyal despite the fact that Lin clearly does not care about her. She loves her husband in a very steadfast, quiet fashion. Their home may be simple and rural and Shuyu does everything in her power to ensure Lin's comfort when he is there. For the rest of the year she leaves him alone and asks nothing of him, either for her or their daughter.In the city hospital, Lin gets involved with Manna Wu. I say involved because it would not be right to say that he'd fallen in love. The relationship is something he has drifted into. He does not do anything to move it forward but neither does he do anything to end it. Manna on the other hand, does see, to have fallen in love. She wants the relationship to go somewhere. So every year, Lin goes back to the village and tries to get a divorce. Every year Shuyu agrees in principle but breaks down when they get to the court. Every year he comes back and tells Manna she has to wait.In the midst of all this waiting Manna becomes angry and frustrated. The rules of the time demand that they can do nothing about their relationship without jeopardising their future. They cannot hold hands, they cannot be seen together in public and they certainly cannot sleep together. Lin is not one to take any chances whatsoever. He's content to wait and see. The longer they wait, the more difficult it becomes for Manna to meet anyone else. Everyone in the hospital treats her like Lin's woman and she's getting older every year. Once Lin even tries to set her up with his cousin but this fails. A part of him is relieved but the other part is not as this means Manna is still his problem. An attempt by the Party to get hooked up with a General also fails. All these come to pass we see Manna change from a happy, carefree woman in her twenties to a pale, sullen, anxious woman in her forties. Lin goes through all this relatively unchanged. Everything flows over him.Finally after trying and failing to divorce Shuyu for 17 years, Lin succeeds by default in the eighteenth year. The rule is that if a couple have lived separate lives for 18 years, they can automatically divorce. This time there is nothing Shuyu can do. The divorce goes through. Lin however, does arrange for Shuyu to live in the city and for his daughter to be given a job. He will pay alimony.The waiting has now ended for everyone, or has it.Shuyu and Hua are very happy together without Lin. Hua earns a decent income and combined with the alimony from Lin, both mother and daughter live in relative comfort.Manna and Lin marry and become parents to twin sons. Life with Manna is nothing like life with Shuyu. Manna is weak and sickly. They discover that she has a problem with her heart that technology is China cannot remedy. Lin has to help with the babies and the housework. He has to deal with an unhappy, temperamental wife. He still has to cope with his duties as a doctor. Now his minds keeps going back to the home Shuyu kept for him and so perhaps he's waiting again.
What do You think about Waiting (2000)?
Back in the day--way back, say twelfth century back. Before the invention of the novel--poets in the courtly love tradition liked to compete over who could put their lovers in more difficult circumstances and draw out an affair. In one example, there was a wealthy landowner whose daughter was allowed to appear in public only at Sunday mass, and thiat under heavy chaperonage. At the communion rail, her lover sighed, "Alas." The next week the maiden asked "For What?" The next week he answered "For Love." And things went on from there for months and months before there was even a tryst, let alone a seduction.Well Ha Jin outstrips all those guys with his Waiting. The book was short-listed for the pulitzer, and I'd have been happier to see it win than The Goldfinch. even though I think it falls a step short of Pulitzer material. Nevertheless, Waiting is a remarkable novel.You can read it almost as a study on how life in a totalitarian society creates depression and hopelessness. You can also read it as a love story so completely beyond anything in the modern western world that you have to struggle to join the situation. Here's what I mean.It's the sixties. Lin enters into an arranged marriage in his mid-teens. His wife, Shuyuh, has strict, old-style parents who actually bound her feet, a fashion quite uncommon. Lin resents the coercion that forced him into the union, doesn't love Shuyuh, is embarrassed by her awkward gait and homely looks, never appreciating the advantages the marriage brought to his family. There is a consummation and a subsequent daughter, but no sex after that.Lin gets out of his little village and away to a Shanghai suburb as soon as he can. He becomes a doctor in the army. Apparently, everyone is connected with the army one way or another. He's based in a compound where movement is restricted and opportunities for forming relationships fall considerably short of the odds on Match.com.Nevertheless, he and nurse Manna Hu, fall in love. However, they have little or no opportunity for consummation, and are both so fearful of the consequences that they hold off... and hold off . . . and hold off. . . .Lin sends Shuyu a monthly allowance and is granted leave to visit her annually. He agrees with Manna Hu to ask for a divorce. Such an act requires the approval of a village official, and the whole village sees Lin's request as abandonment of his matrimonial obligations in general and of his wife and daughter in particular. Not to mention his interfering brother in law who stirs up the villages agains Lin. This whole ritual goes on for 18--that's EIGHTEEN--years, which is the soonest a divorce can be granted without the wife's approval. Shuyuh has agreed to the divorce every year, but each time withdrawn her consent in court under her brother's influence.But, finally, the divorce comes, and Manna Hu and Lin are married and have to come to terms with a relationship that has been suspended while they each grew in different ways, side by side, but never touching. Lin is incredibly passive and insecure, always second-guessing himself, finding it almost impossible to take the initiative in any difficult situation. He accepts his lot. Truth be told, he's not such a lusty lad either, or he would have had more than one wet dream in thirty years and would have had a much harder time resisting physical contact with his one and only.Manna Hu, pretty much realizes these character weaknesses early on, but in her late twenties, she's already an old maid, is seen as attached to Lin even though they aren't married or even engaged, so she's trapped herself into unavailability by connecting with him. It's worse than Hawthorne's Salem. She doesn't have to don the scarlet letter to be branded, and she doesn't even get to have sex or a daughter to be condemned. So even though she's much less diffident than Lin, she's done for in the romance department before she even gets started.Despite the difficulties of getting us to suspend our disbelief in this extreme circumstance, Jin pulls it off. We agonize for these two, partially because Jin takes inside their hearts and lets us see how weak and bewildered they are. Weak, anyhow, in relation to their circumstances. By the ambiguous ending, we've reached a life-affirming place in the tale, though subsequent events may prove that seeming affirmation false. But the possibility for happiness and even nobility of the human spirit in the worst of environments shines through.
—Carl Brush
Ha Jin's Waitingcouldn't have been more aptly titled. You see, I picked it up while waiting for what we thought would be a quick fix of our car. (Boy! I couldn't have been more grateful that we stopped at the bookstore first.) While waiting, I knocked out about a 100 pages which turned out to be a good thing because I don't think I would have finished the book if I hadn't gotten so far into it. You see, its not a story with a whole lot of action, plot, and I never felt any emotional attachment to any of the characters, although I did feel pity for Shuyu. There's not any breathtaking storytelling going on, nor a lot to learn about the culture (or at least not compared to a book like Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. What one does learn is how the Mao-ist rule really played havoc with families. In this case, Doctor Lin Kong of a small village worked in Muji, a larger city some distance from his home. Enough distance that he came home only once a year. Between the pressure he received from co-workers, Communist rules and fear of reprisal, loss of status within the party, the distance from home and his own weakness of will, nearly ruins his life and does hurt others. I found the ending an improvement on the whole book, although it isn't a picture perfect conclusion. Ha Jin's writing is easy to read, although not a catchy style or beautiful prose. It wasn't bad or boring, but not good or exceptionally interesting. For that I'm still Waiting...What else could I give it? 3 stars - average. Its no reading slump ending book.
—Judy
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 I felt like one of the characters in the book, waiting for something to happen that would make me interested in their story. But it never happened.
—Derek
