Word: jin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WAITING by Ha Jin. A doctor in the Chinese army wants to divorce his wife, who lives back in his native village, and marry a nurse. Years and years pass, and the doctor gets no closer to his heart's desire. The author's gently comic rendering of this ordeal won him, deservedly, a 1999 National Book Award...
Although there is nothing inherently funny about two people being romantically thwarted for nearly two decades, Waiting turns, page by careful page, into a deliciously comic novel. Ha Jin, who left his native China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and then remained in the U.S., tells this tale in an impeccably deadpan manner. He casts a wise, rather than a cold, eye on his characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China...
...Kong, the hero of Ha Jin's Waiting (Pantheon; 308 pages; $24), is hardly the first man, in or outside of fiction, to wish to end his first marriage and wed the woman he now loves. But rarely, if ever, has such a fellow been bedeviled by the array of obstacles Lin must confront. Not only is he scrupulously moral and thus vulnerable to all the guilty pangs of wayward husbandhood, but Lin's travails occur in a place--Communist China--and during a time--the early 1960s to the early '80s--when literally all occasions conspire against the quest...
...mass atheism--in distant second place. That's why there's such a complex struggle with religion. China's leaders think a little faith can help the country grow--by serving as a bulwark against social unrest and the ennui Chinese call huise wenhua, or gray culture. Says Bishop Jin Luxian, 83, leader of Shanghai's Catholics: "The Communist Party realizes that religion has a good side and can contribute to the welfare of the people." Jin, who is an eighth-generation Chinese Catholic, has waited for that epiphany a long time--including 27 years spent in Chinese prisons...
...seminary." In 1982 China's constitution was amended to permit freedom of religion. But that's not the same as freedom of belief or freedom from government interference. Thus while China has officially produced 1,000 Catholic clerics in the past 18 years, all government-certified Catholics--including Bishop Jin of Shanghai--must forswear allegiance to the Roman Pontiff. Those who refuse must worship underground, ministered to by fugitive priests. Beijing has little patience with those who say the Kingdom of Heaven has precedence over the rulers of the Middle Kingdom. Peter Xu Yongze, an underground Protestant minister, has been...