Book Review: Waiting by Ha Jin

Life is consistently and habitually measured by numbers; anniversaries with a partner, months left until the New Year, weeks until payday, days of work, hours spent on sleeping, heartbeats per minute and seconds that could be the difference between life and death. Concepts of living and time are almost indistinguishable, feasible but cumbersome to determine one from the other except for their exclusive feats.

     

Time is depicted by numbers—an endless counting, dying of boredom from such a simple, but unpalatable, task is highly probable. While living your life is permitting time to unsuccessfully attempt and foolishly exhaust itself until its existence would only matter when you pause—and take the brave gesture of looking back to the things that were and the you that was.

     

Cliché statements would depict “Living your life” in all the forms of achieving elation and doing jovial actions. There is no argument about the presence of the harrowing weight on the other end of the scale. It is a dilemma to say some or most, but probably all, of us, are dealing or have dealt with the difficulties of living our lives.

     

Perhaps the virtue of hindsight would be the most rueful virtue to possess—when you are rendered incapable and compelled to admit that you’ve lived your life not the way you intended to, and time had gone by, waiting.

     

This is the message effectively conveyed and nonchalantly depicted in Ha Jin’s Waiting. Lin Kong, an almost-perfect husband-to-be, has flaws that decided how the years of his life will be spent. Shuyu, probably one of the saddest characters I have ever encountered, has been consistently, year-in and year-out like some gloomy tradition, brought to court to be divorced. And each and every year, the verdict is the same, making Lin Kong and Manna Wu, Lin Kong’s ‘true love’ and blatantly but unofficially his mistress, wait for another year.

     

Ha Jin’s storytelling prowess is to bring this repetitive and ingeniously simple plot out of brooding boredom. Probably the reason why it won the National Book Award for Fiction, is its delivery. The plot was plain, and the climax is unusually placed just a few pages away from the middle of the storyline—or maybe what I considered as climactic for the simplicity of the story is maintained to the very end.

     

And even the end is auspiciously simplistic, unexpectedly casual and creatively inadvertent. Indeed, less is more. 

It’s not a book that you can’t put down. It doesn’t have that quality. Starting to read threateningly translates to not finishing it, at least during the first few chapters, but once you get to feel and understand the characters, you know that you’ll just have to know how it ends. Its end is notable and satisfying. Ha Jin ended the book well, and I respect its finality not because I liked how it ended but because of its brilliant delivery.

     

Yet given all those, it’s not something that you would want to read again. It’s one of those books that you’re glad to finish, absorbed the moral, and the immoral, but just satisfied to have it lay on the bookshelf. The next time you touch it is when you recommend it to another reader.

image courtesy: www.amazon.com