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What a peculiar book Ha Jin has written: awkward but assured, clunky and compelling, way too long yet curiously hard to put down.
A Free Life chronicles the Americanization of the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and young son Taotao. After the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, the Wus cannot return to China because of politically suspect remarks that Wu has made, so now they are “trapped” in the United States. Nan had been working toward a Ph.D in political science, but in a fit of discontent he abandons his academic quest and the family must re-invent itself. After some time in Massachusetts and New York, the Wus move to the suburbs of Atlanta, purchase a Chinese restaurant, and settle in for a long-term struggle toward financial independence.
Over the next decade Nan and Pingping will work long hours, hire help, fire help, meet friends, lose friends, earn money, lose money, all the while struggling with the unfamiliar legal, financial, and education systems of their adopted country. China, the mother-country, always looms in the background [as the standard of comparison for all facets of life].
Nan Wu sees himself as one of the “weed people,” a “mere immigrant” whose actions are of no concern to the Chinese authorities – or anyone else, for that matter. He dreams of abandoning his self-described dreary life and realizing his ambition of being a poet. Yet he knows that the measure of “freedom” he has found here does not grant him that type of latitude. He watches as other Chinese friends, unencumbered by family concerns, begin to make names for themselves as writers and artists back in China, though he finds most of their work mediocre and lacking courage. Flipping through a Chinese book on American life, filled with starry personal success stories, Nan wonders, “Who will speak for the failures?”
Nan’s emotions oscillate constantly between restlessness and contentment. When he and Pingping pay off the mortgage on their home in the Atlanta suburbs, Nan feels disappointed over how easy it is to succeed in the United States. “In just a few years he’d gone through the journey that often took most immigrants a whole lifetime.” On the other hand, Nan learns to savor the day-to-day pleasures of his improbable new circumstances. “He felt that a good life should be uneventful, having few dramatic moments; instead it should be filled with small delights, each of which should be appreciated and enjoyed like a gift.”
I suspect there are more than a few emotional parallels between the fictional Nan Wu and his creator, the National Book Award-winning Jin. Both men came to the U.S. in the mid-1980s, and both have spent their adult lives in deepening engagement with this country. Jin has written eight books of fiction in English, but A Free Life is his first set in the United States, and his first to articulate an American experience.
Jin is a fine writer; he knows what he’s doing. His previous book, War Trash, was a masterly account of a Chinese prisoner of war held by the Americans during the Korean War. But in A Free Life, his quiet, compact style sometimes fails to convey his characters’ complexity. Again and again, as Jin reaches to describe Nan’s storm of emotions, his words fall short. Nan Wu is a struggling poet, but Jin has purposely – perhaps stubbornly – written a book that pointedly lacks poetry. The story spirals on and on with dogged determination, neither to shape the events in Nan’s life nor to highlight their significance. There are even a few tin-ear notes, such as when a parking attendant is described as a “short black fellow.”
A Free Life is a symphony written by a composer who has suddenly developed tone-deafness. At the same time, the novel remains fascinating to read, if only for the extraordinary window it opens on the lives of Chinese newcomers to this country: the divided loyalties of an immigrant family, the internecine rivalries of an expatriate community, the mind and body-numbing work of running a restaurant, and the fears of parents for their children (who as always grow up too fast). Jin’s prose seldom sings, but I believe he gets all the details right.
And on a slightly different subject ... Has anyone else noticed a decline in the standards of book production? A Free Life is the second new hardcover I’ve encountered recently whose binding split apart in the course of reading. Coincidence? Or another sign of the Apocalypse? |
