Waiting

Waiting is a novel by Ha Jin set in China and following a doctor caught between duty and desire. Lin Kong, a physician in the Chinese army, spends most of his life working at a military hospital in the city, far from the village where his family arranged his marriage to Shuyu, a modest and devoted woman he does not love. At the hospital he has fallen in love with Manna Wu, an educated and modern nurse. Every summer, Lin returns home to ask Shuyu for a divorce, and every year he comes back to the city to tell Manna that they must wait a little longer. Under the strict rules of his workplace and society, where an affair can ruin a career, the waiting stretches on for eighteen years. Quiet, precise and often wryly funny, the novel explores love, obligation, patience and the cost of indecision. It won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.