Waiting

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.　　Waiting charms and startles with its depiction of a China that remains hidden to Western eyes even as it moves with its piercing vision of the universal complications of love.　　作者简介：　　Ha Jin was born in 1956 in Liaoning,China,and spent six years serving in the People's Liberation Army.Hhe left China in 1985 for the United States,where he earned a PhD at Brandeis University.He is the author of three volumes of peotry,three collections of stories and four novels.