L'ECRIVAIN COMME MIGRANT

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters"hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts,"Down with Japanese Imperialism!"the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled"To Get Rich Is Glorious,"after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear: Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. 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. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace. Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park

Médecin militaire à l'hôpital de Muji en Mandchourie, Lin Kong est tiraillé entre deux femmes incarnant deux mondes diamétralement opposés: Shuyu, l'épouse que ses parents lui ont choisie jadis, une humble paysanne aux pieds bandés qui tient sa maison et élève leur fille dans son village natal, et Manna Wu, une jeune collègue infirmière éduquée et moderne qui lui inspire un amour passionnel. Mais il doit réprimer les élans de son coeur, puisque le respect des traditions lui impose de préserver son mariage sans amour et qu'un adultère découvert par les cadres du Parti briserait sa carrière. En conscience, il décide finalement d'aller demander le divorce à son épouse à l'occasion de sa permission estivale. Pendant dix-sept longues années, à chaque retour au village, Lin Kong renouvellera en vain sa demande... Avec pour toile de fond, de 1966 à 1983, une Chine attachée à ses traditions séculaires autant qu'opprimée par la bureaucratie communiste, "La Longue Attente" explore par les touches délicates les affres des amours contrariés face à l'impitoyable marche du temps.

Né en Chine en 1956, Ha Jin a servi six ans dans l'armée populaire de libération avant de quitter sa Chine natale pour les Etats-Unis en 1985 grâce à une bourse. Fait remarquable: après des études à Brandeis University, il a choisi la langue anglaise pour écrire deux volumes de poèmes, trois recueils de nouvelles et trois romans remarqués. Le deuxième, La longue attente (Seuil, 2002), couronné par le National Book Award, le PEN/Faulkner Award, finaliste du Pulitzer Prize, fait l'objet d'une adaptation cinématographique par Peter Chan (cf Tigre et Dragon et Le roi et moi). Le Seuil publie simultanément son premier roman, La mare, et son troisième, La démence du sage. Ha Jin vit dans le Massachusetts et enseigne l'anglais à l'université de Boston.