Waiting

Lin Kong, a military doctor, agreed to an arranged marriage while his mother lay dying. His wife, Shuyu, a modest country woman with bound feet, stays in his home village to nurse his parents and raise their daughter, while he lives in a distant army hospital compound and comes home once a year. There he grows attached to Manna Wu, an educated nurse, but Party rules forbid the affair and will not let him divorce without his wife's consent until the couple have lived apart for eighteen years. Every summer Shuyu agrees to end the marriage and then backs out, and Lin goes back to tell Manna they must wait once more. The story follows China's changes from the 1960s to the 1980s.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Love, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

China, 1960s–1980s

First published

1999 by Pantheon Books

Author's age

43 when first published

ISBN

9780375406539 (Pantheon Books, United States)

9780375706417 (Vintage, United States)

9780099287599 (Vintage, United Kingdom)

9780434009145 (Heinemann, United Kingdom)

More

Wikidata