Jin, now 43, soon quit to become a factory night watchman, which gave him more time to learn from the Western classics. By 1996 Jin was turning out stories based on his youth as a People’s Liberation Army soldier and telegraph operator on China’s western frontier (where he had only four years of formal education, and picked up his first English words from the radio). Jin’s dryly funny tales of sex and love in China inspired critical comparisons to Nabokov and other masters of English as a second language. Honors began flowing in, capped last week by the National Book Award for his first novel, “Waiting.” No one is more awed than Robert Leonard, Jin’s old boss at the steakhouse. “I’m just flabbergasted you’re telling me this,” he says. “He was a really nice guy, but he was having a seriously hard time with English, and that was just over 10 years ago. I’ll have to pick up a copy of his book.”
Jin’s opening line was an instant classic: “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” Frustrated by his arranged marriage to an ungainly peasant, embarrassed by the backwardness of her tiny bound feet, Lin falls for a brassy young nurse at the military hospital where he works as a doctor, far from home. But rules laid down by communist bureaucrats and village busybodies conspire to block him from either leaving his loveless marriage or consummating his affair, until he has been separated for 18 years. By the time Lin is done dutifully waiting, happiness has tragically eluded everyone.
The author says he could not have written this story in China. After the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Jin abandoned plans to return to China, and now keeps in touch with his parents only by phone. “I exist now only in English,” says Jin. He is an associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, all his works are in English and America has given him a critical, “distant” perspective on China. Although Lin, the character, comes to see how communism has made him an emotional “sleepwalker,” few real-life Chinese reach such an understanding, says Jin. Despite the sexual revolution that has swept China since Jin left, he believes the Chinese still must neuter their passions to endure communism. His future novels will examine the immigrant experience, which was tougher than anything he faced in the Chinese Army. America is not about endless waiting, says Jin; it is about scrambling to survive.
