Another character, a woman of 31, is considering marriage to an unattractive academic whose wife has recently run off with an American lecturer. Jian Wan is himself attracted to this women, but he thinks her proposed action is anyway ridiculous. She, however, is under pressure from a local party official and feels it may be wise to comply.
Additional erotico-political complications develop in the second half of the book -- the fiancee is not, for instance, as innocent as she seems -- together with new revelations about the professor's past. This is perhaps Ha Jin's lesson for Westerners, many of whom tend to think that under a totalitarian system emotional attachments for some reason no longer occur. He doesn't so much give us the human face of communism as the humanity it attempts to eradicate under its repressive heel.
This, then, is a multi-layered novel about university life in China at the end of the 1980s. It ends with scenes on the street and in a hospital after the Tiananmen massacre -- Jian Wan has finally decided to go to Beijing to take part in the demonstrations, but his university's small contingent only arrives in time to witness the tanks advancing.
It's hard not to succumb to the feeling that someone suggested to Ha Jin that he wrote a novel involving the Tiananmen events of 1989, but that he found it hard to do so -- after all, he left China for the US in 1985. So he compromised by writing this story of Chinese college life, which of course he has had plenty of experience of, and included, albeit somewhat briefly, the putting down of the student revolt at the end.
This novel's strength lies in its combination of the serious and the comic.
The professor's ramblings are comic, as are most of the parts about relations with party officials. But the love interest is serious and sensitively done -- in fact, these passages are the best things in the book.
And the ending is serious too, and indeed shocking.
This, then, is a good novel, though some people may consider it to lack the in-depth psychological insight and claustrophobic narrative tension that Waiting exhibited. As for which of the characters really constitutes "the crazed," that's left for the reader to judge.
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