But for that a divorce is necessary, and divorce is the one request that Shuyu doesn-t want to grant her husband.

Lin has fallen in love with Manna Wu, a nurse assigned to his hospital, and the two wish to marry. Eventually, though, the charade wears thin. The situation is helped somewhat by Lin’s army career, which keeps him posted at great distances from home and allows him only 12 days furlough a year. From the very start, Lin’s heart is never in the marriage, and after the birth of their only child, Lin and Shuyu sleep apart. While a medical student in the early 1960s, Lin is pressured into an arranged marriage by his elderly parents, who choose Shuyu, an illiterate village girl who’s as plain as she is good-natured and who devotes herself wholeheartedly to providing every possible comfort for Lin and his parents. The focus of misery here is Lin Kong, a Chinese physician who serves as an officer in the Revolutionary Army.

Starred-crossed lovers are the meat of tragedy the world over, and when political upheaval is thrown into the same pot, you-re almost guaranteed a pretty substantial stew. Zhivago about a married army doctor who falls in love with a nurse during the Cultural Revolution, by Chinese exile Ha Jin (In the Pond, 1998, etc.). It is through investigating all of these tensions that students can gain an understanding of Lin as a tragic character in the center of a complex situation in China.A kind of Chinese Dr. The protagonist of the story, Lin Kong, struggles with his loyalties to two women, while China simultaneously struggles with tensions between old and new, rural and urban, communism and capitalism. In order to understand the degree to which the setting impacts the novel, students will read paired passages on such topics as the Cultural Revolution, foot-binding, and Confucian values. While Ha Jin’s story is a universally human tale that asks its readers to consider the meaning of true love and happiness, it is also a story whose plot and characters are greatly affected by the time and place in which it is set.

In addition to extending their investigation of these themes, students will also explore ideas of love, loyalty, and fate as they read both the novel and the short story “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov. This unit serves as a follow-up to the Things Fall Apart unit earlier this year. The themes of identity and the tensions between old and new that were traced in the prior novel will also be developed by Ha Jin in his novel Waiting.

Waiting by Ha Jin