Alpha for the Chinese world
Jonathan Mirsky
WAITING by Ha Jin Heinemann, £10, pp. 308 very summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shu Yu. Together they had appeared at the court- house in Wujia Town many times, but she had always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce.'
With those atmospheric sentences, which open Waiting, the winner of this year's US National Book Award, here comes yet another East Asian novelist living in the West. Like Kazuo Ishiguro and Chang-rae Lee, Ha Jin writes in English. Astounding- ly, he moved to the US only in 1985.
But unlike Ishiguro and Lee, Ha Jin writes about his native country where he lived until he was 29. His was a standard dreary upbringing: the army at 14, for five years; three more years on the railways. He learned English by listening to the World Service. (Note to the Foreign Office: leave this surviving British treasure alone.) After four years in the US at Brandeis University Ha Jin was about to return to China, but Tiananmen in June, 1989 convinced him to stay where he was. He is now professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Lin Kong, the not very heroic hero of Waiting, is an army doctor, kindly, well edu- cated, anguished, and cautious. He reads forbidden novels during the iconoclastic Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, but prudent- ly covers them with plain-paper wrappers. He has been married, lovelessly, to Shu Yu for 20 years. She is that rare thing in Maoist China, a youngish woman with bound feet. Plain, halting of speech, a tra- ditional country-bumpkin wife, she is devoted to her husband who sleeps in a separate room during his annual visits.
Lin falls carefully in love with Manna, a nurse, and for almost 18 years they conduct a sexless and increasingly quarrelsome affair. It is an army rule that a man can
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divorce only after 18 years of marriage and only if he can prove he has not been adul- terous. Lin and Manna are regarded as lovers by their nosy, heartless, insensitive army colleagues, who know that senior offi- cers can have any nurse they want, but in fact they are chaste and their sterile years, together but not together, wear them down and nearly out. Lin recognises that he is one of those men who lets things happen to him, who accepts the love of good women, and does little in return except feel guilty and torn. Manna tries her best to get him into bed; she becomes almost demented by Lin's indecision and sometimes accepts his stony suggestions to try another man. Fixed up with a senior commander, she is spurned because he regards her handwrit- ing — she has used an essay written for her by Lin — as undistinguished.
If novelists have three tasks — telling a story, offering us believable characters, and creating a world — Ha Jin gets an Alpha, a Beta-minus, and another Alpha. Will Lin and Manna ever get married? We keep turning the pages. Do we believe in them? They go on much as they started: he kindly but havering, she hopeful and resentful. Shu Yu is too good to be true. God, she endures!
But Alpha for the the Chinese world. It's all there, and Ha Jin doesn't stuff it down your throat. People belch, spit, and have garlicky breaths. They turn red when they drink, gabble, and can't walk. They stick out their tongues when embarrassed. Money will get them almost anything, including army promotion, even in the Maoist years. If an officer rapes a nurse it is better for the victim to keep silent, and when it gets out she is treated like dam- aged goods. Every now and again someone mouths a political slogan which is treated with merely perfunctory respect. Everyone is forever nosing into everyone else's life, ever on the lookout for sexual scandal. Quiet, almost Nineteen Eighty-Four-like desperation is the norm. And yet people manage to extract pleasure from ordinary things — well cooked food, presents, gen- erosity between friends, children.
Insanely, the blurb refers to all this ghastly but fascinating life as 'the weight of centuries of wisdom'. If ancient wisdom is what you want, don't read this book.
7 can make a reservation for tonight? Then clearly yours is not the kind of restaurant we wish to be seen in.'
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