Category Archives: book reviews

The Monday Book: WAITING by Ha Jin

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I read this on holiday at a friend’s house, so of course I had to read quickly in order to leave it there. What struck me about the book was how it made you feel you could see inside a China that is usually invisible to guests and visitors, the one that runs on paperwork and bribes. And yet, at the same time, it made you feel like issues surrounding love and human hearts are the same the world over: when you’ve got what you want, you want something else.

WAITING is about a man in an arranged marriage to a woman from his former village. He now works as a doctor in the city, and wants to divorce her and marry a nurse from his hospital. It has elements of rural/urban divisions as well as cultural divides within China.

Some people might find this a depressing read, but I found the buoyant bits between the “well, that didn’t work” parts satisfying. Also, the prose is… stiff, but in a positive way. You don’t notice how Ha Jin writes so much as the story he is telling; the words don’t get in the way. I actually thought it had been translated at first; it had that feel, but he writes and teaches in English – in Georgia.

If Iago is your favorite Shakespearean villain, if you’re interested in other cultures, if you like to read about women’s lives in China, if you plain like good storytelling, this is a good book for you. If you like a lot of zip and action and stiff prose bothers you, you won’t like it.

I loved it, enough to stay up late and finish it the night before we flew out of our friend Jane’s place.

Author Humiliation Contest Winning Entries

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Our first winner is Suzan D. Herskowitz, an attorney from Winchester, VA.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I was asked to speak about my scintillating book, on writing your own will (yeah, I know, didn’t even make the top 1 million list for non-fiction). I showed up at a mega-bookstore that is still in business somewhere in South Florida and 1 person showed up…and it was my mother.

Thanks for letting me share.

And in equal first place is Steven Friedman, of San Rafael, California, whose entry is titled

Infamy

My first (and only) book was published in 2000 by a small press in South Carolina, owned by a bigger concern in England. Their marketing and sales team arranged for the book to be sold in a few large bookstores and even one notable big box store. But the responsibility for promoting Golden Memories of the San Francisco Bay Area was largely mine.

So I arranged a speaking engagement at a national book chain in Berkeley, CA, on December 7, a perfect day of history and infamy to showcase a book of oral histories from nine Bay area elders of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds.

It was a Thursday evening, rain slashing outside, as I arrived at the store. There was a 20×30 poster with a photograph of me on it, advertising my book talk, and I heard someone announce over the loudspeaker that tonight’s event was going to start in 30 minutes. I felt the chill of excitement.

There were probably ten rows of chairs and a podium in front. At 7 PM, there were two men, who I guessed to be homeless, dressed in torn overcoats, warming themselves away from the frigid late autumn air, seated in the middle of the room.

I had a copy of my book, which was filled with several yellow post-its, so I could read a few passages. I’d picked one from Berenice, who’d been a civilian during WWII, about how she’d kissed her then boyfriend, an officer, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. And I’d picked a second story from a Japanese-American woman whose family owned a hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Her husband had later served in the Army after Pearl Harbor and after being forced into an internment camp.

So I was ready to share history and discuss history on a day when we remember such a tragic time in America’s past.

I started talking with Karen, the author-events coordinator. She was, like me at the time, the parent of a toddler, so we exchanged war stories.

By 7:30, the two homeless guys had left and the room was empty. Karen and I kept talking and talking and talking. Until 8:30 when I decided to drive home. So I ambled out there door, carrying the poster of my ‘book talk’, and returned to my wife and sleeping son.

I was bummed out for sure, but I realized or rationalized later that why would anyone go out on a Thursday evening, a school and work night, in a downpour to hear an unknown author?

I’ve passed that bookstore in Northern California many times and have even been in there with family and friends. And I always tell them about my day of not actual infamy when I gave a book talk and nobody came. And they chuckle a bit, and so do I. But it still stings, too, even after 14 years.