she outright defies them. By exploring the com-
plexities inherent in Korean-American adoles-
cence, and by resisting conventional definitions
of what is Korean American, An Na suggests that
perhaps Korean-American identity is not so easily
boxed in.
Bibliography
Na, An. Wait for Me. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
2006.
Sarah Park
Waiting Ha Jin (1999)
The novel that established HA JIN as a major writer,
Waiting is a tragicomic account of a curious but
complicated relationship that takes place in north-
ern China over a 20-year period, beginning in the
early 1960s. More specifically, it depicts a love tri-
angle among the protagonist, Lin Kong, and his
two wives, Shuyu Liu and Manna Wu. For 18 years,
Lin waits for his first wife, Shuyu, to agree to di-
vorce him so that he may marry his lover, Manna;
then after he finally succeeds in marrying Manna,
he waits for the death of his second wife in order to
return to the first. As Jin depicts Lin’s travails, with
the sensitivity and humor that have come to char-
acterize his work, he masterfully illustrates how
human desire and cultural traditions sometimes
conspire to subvert people by giving them precisely
what they thought they had been searching for.
Before the narrative opens, Lin has allowed his
parents to persuade him to marry Shuyu in order
that his sickly mother might have someone to take
care of her. Lin is a physician at an army hospi-
tal in Muji City, a town far from his home, Goose
Village. He is also a book lover, who owns an ex-
cellent library, with many textbooks in foreign lan-
guages and forbidden novels. In contrast, Shuyu is
illiterate, looks considerably older than Lin, and
even has bound feet. So despite her loyalty to him
and his parents, Lin never has much of a married
life with her. In fact, after she gives birth to their
daughter, Hua, they never share a bed again. Also,
even though he goes home to Goose Village for his
12-day vacation every year, he never brings Shuyu
to the hospital since he is embarrassed to be seen
in public with her. It is while working at the hospi-
tal that Lin becomes involved with Manna, a for-
mer student of his who is now a nurse. Manna is
educated, has a pleasant voice and slim figure, and
is thus more attractive to Lin. Still, almost the mo-
ment they marry, after the seemingly interminable
wait because of personal and cultural reasons, their
love for each other seems to dissipate.
Waiting is a fictional meditation on the nature
of love, desire, and social responsibility, especially
toward one’s immediate kin. Near the end of the
novel, Jin has Lin Kong conclude that he is a “su-
perfluous” or “useless” man. But this is clearly not
the case. Rather, Lin is someone torn between his
social obligations toward a homely traditional
wife he respects and even admires and his desire
for a mate closer to him intellectually but with
whom he appears to have fewer affinities than he
imagined. As is evident from his own ambivalence
about divorce, Lin is caught between two cultures.
However, it is not between China and the West, but
between the new China and the old. Waiting won
both the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making it Ha
Jin’s most acclaimed work.Bibliography
Moore, John Noell. “The Landscape of Divorce:
When Worlds Collide.” English Journal, 92, no. 2
(2002): 124–128.
Sturr, Robert D. “The Presence of Walt Whitman in
Ha Jin’s Writing.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
20, no. 1 (2002): 1–18.
Jianwu Liu and Albert BrazWang, Ping (1957– )
Born in Shanghai, Wang grew up in a naval base
on an island in the East China Sea. After three
years of farming in a mountain village before the
end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, she at-
tended Hangzhou Foreign Language School and
received her B.A. in English from Beijing Univer-
sity in 1984. In the following year, Wang came to
the United States to work on her M.A. in English308 Waiting