Waiting is the first novel written in English by the Chinese-American author Ha Jin, published in the United States in 1999 under the title Waiting. It won the National Book Award that year and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2000, the first Chinese work to win both major American literary prizes. The novel tells the story of military doctor Kong Lin: married by his parents' arrangement to a country woman, Shuyu, he lives apart from her for years with little affection between them; while working at an army hospital, he falls in love with head nurse Wu Manna. Regulations of the time required a cadre to live apart from a spouse for eighteen years before he could unilaterally file for divorce, so every summer Kong Lin returns to Goose Village to discuss divorce with his wife, and year after year comes back with the same marriage certificate. Over those eighteen years, Shuyu's hesitation and compliance, Wu Manna's waiting and torment, and Kong Lin's own guilt and indecision become entwined. When the divorce is finally granted and he forms a new family with Wu Manna, life is not as fulfilling as imagined; daily chores and trivialities wear away passion, and he begins pacing between memory and reality, waiting for another kind of life. In spare, meticulous prose almost free of lyrical ornament, Ha Jin writes of a love stretched out by institutions and custom, and of ordinary people's wear and endurance through endless waiting. The Chinese edition was translated by Jin Liang; this edition was published by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House in June 2015.
Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House is a professional literary and art publishing institution. It mainly publishes books on contemporary and modern literature, foreign literature, poetry and prose, music and art, and literary theory. Judging from the books in the database, the house places considerable emphasis on classic works and foreign literature. Representative titles include Lu Xun's Call to Arms and Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, Lao She's Camel Xiangzi, Xiao Hong's The Story of Hulan River, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Its translator resources include Deng Jiawan, Shi Zhongge, Du Yunci, and Zhu Shenghao. Common categories include social fiction, classic works, foreign literature, world classics, literary appreciation, and classical poetry, reflecting a publishing profile that balances Chinese and foreign literary classics with literary appreciation.
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