Sleepwalker

“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” That first sentence promises well: We scent a witty social comedy ahead. Yet seldom have expectations been more systematically frustrated. “Waiting” is, after all, set in Communist China, and the marriage of Lin and Shuyu goes back as far as the iconoclastic activities of the Red Guards and the Gang of Four.

Lin, an improbable army doctor--we don’t see him in action and he’s squeamish at the sight of blood--spends almost two decades halfheartedly trying to divorce the unappetizing wife wished on him by his parents, while at the same time conducting an equally halfhearted (and never consummated) affair with Manna, a hospital nurse. Communist bureaucracy, which decrees that no officer can divorce his wife without her agreement until 18 years have passed, is reinforced by an underlying bedrock of mean gossip, censorious peasant morality and village family values.

Ha Jin’s story is well-titled; Lin’s whole life is spent waiting. We are fed his foggy thoughts about life and love, eye the dog-eared medical texts he no longer reads, adrift in a world where literature means Marx’s theory of surplus value and the prettiest things a woman can collect are Chairman Mao buttons. Buildings are ugly, food is greasy, the emotional and spiritual dimension has been excised from life as though by hysterectomy.

Jin, who left China for the United States in 1985 and is now a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., has drawn a portrait of Chinese provincial life that terrifies with its emptiness even more than with its all-pervasive vulgarity. The poet in him intersperses these human scenes with achingly beautiful vignettes of natural beauty: dew on the morning leaves, the fragrance of chrysanthemums, moonlight among trees, a toad “croaking like a broken horn from a distant ditch.” The party can’t regulate or ruin the countryside. (In industrial Eastern Europe, of course, it was another matter.)

Jin is also a dab hand at symbolism. Shuyu, surprisingly in the new China, had her feet bound as a child. We get a really nauseating account of the rotting flesh and dripping pus that this process induces if rigorously carried out in pursuit of the ideal 4-inch foot. But, of course, what it also brings to mind is the equally nauseating constriction of the human mind: emotional rot, infection and stunted growth.

Nothing, Jin is saying, has really changed between new and old China: It’s just gotten nastier and, well, yes, more materialistic. Local party commissars who have never heard of Li Po read (when they read at all) texts like Mao’s “On Contradiction”; angle for cars, stereos and washing machines as the perks of office; and, instead of writing haiku, go all teary-eyed at ghastly North Korean propaganda movies about exploited peasants.

Lin Kong’s life invites, and to some extent deserves, compassion. But Jin, with good reason, doesn’t by any means let him escape all responsibility. Here, near the end of the novel, is Lin’s inner voice unloading a few home truths on him: “All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others’ opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized.” The system may treat you like a child from the cradle to the grave, but it’s your business to remember that the will is free. Sadly, Lin wakes up to this too late, when he’s at long last received his divorce and married Manna and finds himself too old and exhausted to satisfy her long-frustrated sexual needs. What he’s waited for all those years turns out to be a mirage, “so tedious, so chaotic, and so exhausting.” When we leave him, it looks very much as though he’ll return to Shuyu and domestic peace.

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There is a great deal to ponder in this novel. It contains one of the most horrifying rape scenes I have ever read. Ha Jin depicts the details of social etiquette (or the lack of it), of food (so joltingly unlike Western notions of Chinese cuisine), of rural family relationships (little changed despite the party) and the complex yet alarmingly primitive fabric of provincial life with that absorbed passion for minutiae characteristic of Dickens and Balzac.

Yet at the same time, the particular society he’s portraying confronts him with a classic literary dilemma: the risk that if you spend your whole time dealing with miserable people in a gray, depressing world, your novel might turn out miserable, gray and depressing. Despite those moments of sunlight glinting on boulders, the singing of orioles or tree trunks crusted with ice, this is a pitfall that Jin doesn’t altogether avoid. Life here is poor, nasty, brutish, short: Hobbes was right.