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Waiting by Ha Jin6/27/2023 ![]() Three years after their marriage, their daughter, Hua, is born, and Lin decides to remain sexually separate from his wife, even during his annual visit. Lin sees Shuyu for only ten days each year, during his summer leave. In the twenty years that follow, Lin is so ashamed of Shuyu that he never allows her to visit him at the military hospital in Muji City where he works. Lin feels Shuyu is completely inappropriate and begs his parents to break the engagement, but they are adamant and he capitulates out of a sense of duty. As a young man in a China moving toward the Cultural Revolution, he is particularly repelled by her bound feet, an old-fashioned custom acceptable in his small village but mocked by his contemporaries in Shenyang City. ![]() Although she is a year younger than he is, she looks much older and Lin finds her singularly unattractive. ![]() When he returns home to meet Shuyu, the girl his parents have chosen, he is horrified. Waiting is a story of love in limbo and the lives it leaves on hold as Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, battles cultural forces and his own uncertain heart in a quest for love's fulfillment.Īs a twenty-seven-year old military medical student in 1962, under heavy pressure from his ailing mother and his father, Lin agrees to an arranged marriage. ![]()
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