“Waiting’ is impeccably written, in a sober prose that does nothing to call attention to itself and yet capably delivers images, characters, sensations, feelings, and even, in a basically oppressive and static situation, bits of comedy and glimpses of natural beauty. The very modesty of the tone strengthens the reader’s belief that this is how private lives were conducted amid the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, as ancient customs worked with a fear-ridden Communist bureaucracy to stifle normal human appetites. Every simple, bleak detail has the fascination of the hitherto unknown; not a word of Ha Jin’s hard-won English seems out of place or wasted.” —John Updike, The New Yorker (2007)
“‘Despite the distance of an ocean and a continent, he could feel China’s pulse,’ Ha Jin writes, ‘which beat irregularly, racing feverishly, as though he could at last grasp intimately his vast homeland in its entirety.’” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Ha Jin’s characters are almost emblematic: they are people beginning in America, creating a new self in a new country. This gives them an importance that can be suggested between the lines, allowing them to be small in their hopes and experiences but large in their implications and political resonance.” —Colm Toibin, The New York Times
