WAITING

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor,has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. Butback in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife hisfamily chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in orderto ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancientties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discoveredby the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretchedever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wifeagrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will bedifferent. Waiting charms and startles with its depiction of a China thatremains hidden to Western eyes even as it moves with its piercing visionof the universal complications of love.