Indeed, individuals live under oppression and they are like a prisoner who is suffering from being judged and punished by totalitarian regimes and dominant society. Thus, this paper discovers how Ha Jin’s novel challenges communist ideologies and totalitarian rules by illuminating social disorder and loses of sense of humanity. By engaging with cultural studies, this paper investigates how Jin’s Waiting challenges Maoist ideology by both celebrating and critiquing the idea of capitalism, which likely perpetuates communism. As a result, Lin loses his senses of humans, such as love and empathy, and lives with selfishness and ignorance as to the way the Maoist discourse teaches him through Mao’s red book. The Maoist regime successfully establishes “normalizing power” in a society to lead the protagonist to believe that the goal of his life is mainly for working hard for the military institution and the regime, instead of establishing his freedom.

With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, he vividly reveals the complexities and subtleties of a world and a people we desperately need to know.This paper examines how Ha Jin’s Waiting challenges the Maoist communist regime by depicting the protagonist, Lin, as struggling to fight for his rights to live freely. “Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. This year, he promises will be different. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two utterly different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years.

But each time Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in acclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. From the widely acclaimed National Book Award-winning author-a rich and atmospheric novel about a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women.

Waiting by Ha Jin