Use of Irony in the Book Waiting by Ha Jin

¶ … Irony of Waiting

The central irony of Ha Jin's novel Waiting, is that the protagonist Lin Kong, a doctor in the ostensibly progressive communist Chinese Army, is bound to his peasant wife in the Goose Village because of this supposedly traditional woman's refusal to divorce her husband. Lin Kong promises his dying mother that he will enter an arranged marriage because it is her deathbed request. But the woman Shuyu, looks and behaves far older than her twenty-six years, as if she belongs to a China of the far past. Lin Kong is initially disgusted with the peasant woman's bound feet and country manners. He sees this as unbefitting to someone of his status in the modern, urban army.

However, the doctor's pride in his education and culture is of course, quite aristocratic and at its heart quite anti-egalitarian, despite his professions to be broad-minded at heart, as is befitting a servant of the party. The doctor becomes bound to a woman with traditionally bound feet, because of a promise made as a traditionally loyal Chinese son to a traditional Chinese mother. Despite his belief in the freedom his education and status ought to bring, Lin Kong cannot escape old ways, any more than his gift of medicine can prevent his mother's demise. Lin Kong's old-fashioned wife Shuyu in turn uses the new status given to women under the communist Chinese regime to bind her husband to her, and to prohibit Ling Kong from marrying a younger, more learned, and more beautiful woman by choice. The regime that promised to create a new China simply empowers those with bound feet from the old world.

Manna Wu, the nurse in the hospital whom Lin Kong is enamored with, begins the novel as a young, fresh, and lovely creature -- quite unlike the wrinkled, withered, face and form of Kong's wife. But according to local Party rules, Lin cannot divorce his wife without her permission until they have been separated for eighteen years, unless Shuyu freely grants him a divorce, which she refuses to do. Over the years, gradually, all the participants in the drama age like the world around them. Lin Kong meets Manna at a rally against Japanese imperialism, and by the end of the book, a new flush of capitalism and desire for wealth has gripped China -- the old slogans are forgotten. However, the lover's status, unlike their land, has remained unchanged, even while their bodies grow as wrinkled and old as the body of the woman Lin originally was repulsed by and forced to marry.