Author Ha Jin on the Rewards of Waiting
Emory University professor talks about his novel
By Kim Chun

Waiting may be the hardest part, but it’s worked for author Ha Jin. In a publishing environment fueled by trends and a world that seems to be accelerating ever faster, the China native’s first novel, Waiting, hearkens back to the days when readers could take the time to delve into a resonant and graceful story, well-told.

And readers apparently have been, ahem, waiting for a book like this to come along. Pantheon Books quickly snapped it up, and the judges of the National Book Awards recently bestowed its 1999 fiction prize on the 43-year-old Emory University professor.

But waiting has played a part in Jin’s life in more ways than one. The writer waited for years to tell the story of a cultured army doctor who spends decades of frustration trying to divorce his peasant wife: In fact, Jin’s wife told him a similar real-life tale more than 15 years ago. “I knew it was good material for a novel,” the author recalls in a telephone interview from his home outside Atlanta.

“But I didn’t have the ability to write a book like that,” he continues, “because love stories are always the most difficult to write.”

Waiting tells a different kind of love story. Set in 1960s China, Lin Kong, a bookish, married doctor, falls in love with a single nurse, Manna Wu, at their army hospital. The political and moral restrictions of the Cultural Revolution and equally oppressive pressures of tradition prevent the couple from consummating their relationship or even walking together outside of the compound walls. So Lin travels back to his small village every year for 17 years to sever his arranged marriage to his compliant wife, Shuyu. But every year, she backs out at the last minute or circumstances, such as meddling brother-in-law, interfere. And every year, Lin promises Manna it will be different. After 18 years of separation, he can divorce without Shuyu’s consent.

As Jin puts it: “As time slipped by, people grew oblivious to the origin of the rule, as though it were a sacred decree whose authenticity no one would dare question. Year after year, more gray hair appeared on Lin’s and Manna’s heads; their bodies grew thicker and their limbs heavier; more little wrinkles marked their faces.”

The couple waits, and Lin Kong’s desire -- for the divorce, love and freedom -- takes on comic, Kafka esque proportions. This love story is both horrifically prolonged and nipped in the bud by the emotional paralysis and social-climbing of the protagonist, ever conscious of the need to save face.

Readers such as author Gish Jen have pointed out the novel’s blend of “provocative allegory with all-too-human comedy.” Indeed, Lin Kong at times seems like a symbol of a Chinese every man driven to inertia by irresistible forces, both modern and ancient.

“I wanted to tell a love story,” Jin says. “But in this story, a man, Lin Kong, a decent man in most ways, a good-hearted man, is not capable of loving others. So, of course, allegorically this may, in a way, sum up a sort of internal psychological damage to the Chinese [after the Cultural Revolution]. I think one of the major tasks of the Revolution was to disable people so they can’t love others -- disable emotions, so that psychological energy, sexual energy or creative energy could be focused on the revolutionary cause.”

The author experienced the hardship caused by the Revolution first hand. He grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning Province, where his father was an officer in the People’s Liberation Army but his mother was considered part of the enemy class because her father was a small landowner.

“My mother especially suffered a lot for that, so it was kind of a miserable period. I was divided. Later in retrospect, it was just crazy, a lot of loss, random loss,” he recalls. His mother was publicly denounced and was later sent to the countryside to work.

The writer entered the army at age 14 and was stationed at the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union, where he saw some action as an artillery man.

At 19, he left the army to become telegrapher at a railroad company in the Jiamusi, a city on the northeastern frontier, where he learned English from a radio program.

When the colleges reopened in 1977, Jin passed the entrance exams and was accepted to Heilongjiang University in Harbin. He was assigned to study English, although it was his last choice for a major.

He received his B.A. in 1984 and later earned his M.A. in American literature from Shandong University. A scholarship to study modern British and American poetry at Brandeis University followed. Jin intended to return to China after he got his Ph.D.

But in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the author decided to remain in the United States with his wife, Lisha Bian, and his son, Wen Jin, now 16. “I think I was outraged. I never thought it would happen. I’m still outraged. I wouldn’t serve a government like that,” Jin says. “That was the initial response and, of course, gradually I had to figure out what I could do in the United States. Mentally and psychologically, I wasn’t prepared for the transition.”

He finally decided he had to write exclusively in English, since unlike most established exiled writers, he had no audience in China.

“I don’t have and still don’t have any degrees in Chinese, so that made it impossible for me to find any job related to Chinese, for instance, translation, journalism and teaching Chinese,” Jin recalls. “English was the only way. So that’s the major reason: the desire for survival.”

He had written poetry in China, including what he calls some “propaganda” pieces. Later, he published a volume of poetry, Between Silences (University of Chicago Press, 1990).

He began to study fiction writing at Boston University, which was also a way for him to keep his family’s medical insurance. He admits with a chuckle: “I told my wife after eight or nine years after another two or three books I might find a decent job. And she agreed to wait.”

A year later, Emory hired him as a poet, but again, Jin says, he felt the pressure -- this time to publish another book to keep his job. So in 1994 he started a novella that became Waiting, which was initially intended to accompany the poems that were published in Facing Shadows (Hanging Loose Press, 1996). During the next three years, he expanded Waiting from 11 to 36 chapters and adding myriad details and shifts in tone.

At the same time, he felt that he was ready to tackle a love story. “There aren’t many good love stories in contemporary literature. There is a saying that the love story is dead, and we know that in the history of literature, the great novels are love stories: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary -- those are difficult books, very hard books to write,” he says. “In other words, it’s very hard to say something new about love. But I think I tried to understand the material differently.”

With influences such as Chekov, Tolstoy and Gogol, Jin’s spare, lucid writing and his Chinese subject matter resemble nothing else in American literature. And the author has garnered his share of acclaim from the literary community. In her New York Times review, novelist Francine Prose described Waiting as “luminous” and “compelling,” and the New Yorker called the book a “suspenseful and bracingly tough-minded love story.” His short story collections, Ocean of Words (Zoland Books, 1996) and Under the Red Flag (University of Georgia Press, 1997), have received the PEN Hemingway Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction respectively. A novella, In the Pond (Zoland Books, 1998), was selected the best fiction book of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune.

Now that Waiting is going into its fourth printing in less than two months, Jin is working on new short stories and a novel. The wait is over -- he has arrived. “I was worried when the book came out,” he says, “that the publisher might lose money. But now I think it’s doing fine.”