Free Life by Ha Jin

The Barnes & Noble Review

Over the course of his seven prior works of fiction, Ha Jin has provided his Western readers with a window into the contradictions of Communist China. In A Free Life, he has at last offered up his own contribution to the annals of the immigrant experience in American literature. Jin tracks the personal odyssey of the Wu family as they make their way from the Chinese province of Harbin to Boston, New York, and, ultimately, the Atlanta suburbs. It is at once a tale that follows a recognizable template -- that arc of alienation, assimilation, and generational conflict that accompanies any cultural diaspora -- and a singular recounting of one family's effort to navigate these challenges.

Jin's point of fascination -- most notably in the illuminating stories of Under the Red Flag -- has long been the strange collision of old-world China with the dictates of the Communist Party. The saga of the Wu family adds yet another layer to Jin's account of a transitioning China, and the shift to this larger global canvas serves him well. His eye for the human face behind the sweep of history feeds off of the new surfeit of detail that American life provides, from the suburban strip mall where Nan Wu and his steadfast wife, Pingping, start a Chinese restaurant to the immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn. (Perhaps it is this sensory overabundance that leads Jin to nearly triple his usual page count.) With a backyard "flanked by two steel fences, and a flock of Canada geese perched on the edge of the lake," the Wus' house outside Atlanta is an idyllic counterpoint to the regimented chaos of life in provincial China that is the author's customary subject.

Readers of Jin's work will find in Nan Wu, the novel's protagonist and moral anchor, a recognizable prototype. Like Lin Kong, hero of Jin's National Book Award–winning novel Waiting, Nan is a character gripped by stasis. Where Lin Kong spent nearly two decades in an unconsummated romance with a co-worker, Nan Wu struggles with a similarly unconsummated, if more abstract, relationship to his unrealized dreams of becoming a poet. What separates A Free Life from the conventional immigrant narrative is precisely this undercurrent of artistic longing. From the outset, Nan's self-image is wrapped up in his writerly ambition and its attendant failures. "I wish I had more anger so that I could write genuine poetry," he announces to a friend early in the novel. Unlike his nationality, which he dismissively purports to wear "like a coat," Nan's desire to write poetry provides the cornerstone of his identity.

Nan's quest for creative fulfillment amplifies the inevitable questions of identity and nationality, his status as an immigrant underscoring that timeless quandary of art's relationship to class. "How could it be possible for an unfettered genius to rise from a tribe of coolies who were frightened, exhausted, mistreated, wretched, and possessed by the instinct for survival?" Nan exclaims in frustration. "Without leisure, how can art thrive?" Meanwhile, As Nan's son Taotao become increasingly Americanized, he grows "simmering, angry" about the "awkward English" of his parents, the generational divide enforcing the fact that even as Nan refuses to fully identify himself as Chinese, neither can he truly claim his adopted nation as his own. This familiar rendering of immigrant frustration would feel more tired if it weren't so unquestionably true.

Yet a novel that advances a theory of art, or, at the very least, takes the struggle of the artist as its centerpiece, must know that it invites especially scrupulous attention to its own aesthetic, and it is in its execution, rather than in its vision, that Jin's novel begins to falter. At moments, Jin's prose is elegant in its simplicity, but more frequently this simplicity takes on a discomfiting naiveté. For instance, consider the following passage, in which Nan grapples with his failure to muster a genuine love for his wife, whom he married to escape from the specter of an earlier romance: "How he wished he could work up more emotion to reciprocate her love. If only he weren't so exhausted and so sick at heart. If only he hadn't been wounded so deeply by that fox Beina." While a certain amount of the overbearing earnestness in the language on display here may fall within the bounds of the character -- Nan is, after all, meant to embody a sort of uprightness in the face of hardship-it seems to indicate a hesitation of the part of Jin to truly inhabit the consciousness of his subjects. Such declamatory constructions, which Jin employs unfailingly when attempting to inhabit Nan's perspective, appear with an anaphoral insistence that can grow grating.

To some degree, this lapse is forgivable: there is an inherent linguistic slippage in trying to convey in English the internal workings of a character whose thoughts are unfolding in Chinese. With the new geography of A Free Life comes a new set of questions about how best to confront this narrative bind, and the ways in which Nan's language systematically fails to capture the depth of his feelings may well represent Jin's stab at exposing the scope of Nan's alienation. Jin's language has always relied on a certain understated spareness to access his subjects with honesty, unadorned by the frills of stylistic excess; however, his decision to let Nan's expressive limitations inflect the very cadence of his prose (if that is in fact the logic governing his often stilted sentence structure) sells his readers short. It is well-conceived theoretical exercise gone practically awry.

This misstep would be less apparent were the novel not so visibly preoccupied with language's natural imprint on the emotive range of the mind, but because Jin constantly draws the issue of language to the fore, it is hard not to notice when the language is what founders. Nan's decision to attempt poetry in English is what finally frees him from the paralysis that has marked his experience of America. "The truth," Jin reveals, "was that he had been frightened by the overwhelming odds against writing in English artistically, against claiming his existence in this new land, and against becoming a truly independent man who followed nothing but his own heart." For Jin, coming into language and coming into identity are, to some extent, one and the same-fitting, perhaps, for a writer who is himself writing in an adopted tongue.

It is interesting, then, that in the novel's epilogue, when we are finally given Nan's unmediated voice, Jin's prose seems to find its stride. The extracts from Nan's journal that mark the final pages (along with some specimens of his decidedly mediocre poetry) capture the rhythms of his consciousness with a depth of feeling previously withheld. "I don't believe in the 'art' of poetry," Nan writes. "For me it's just a craft…a kind of work that can keep me emotionally balanced and functioning better as a human being. So I write only because I have to." This notion of art as an existential act of survival helps to bury the issue of Jin's often muted style beneath the urgency of Nan's having claimed a language at all. As an editor who has rejected Nan's work advises, "the main function of prose is to tell a story. But poets should have a different kind of ambition, i.e., to enter into the language they use." It seems safe to say that Jin, perhaps unconsciously, shares this sentiment. Only in these ruminations on poetry does his prose truly come to life. --Amelia Atlas

Amelia Atlas's reviews have appeared in the New York Sun, 02138, and the Harvard Book Review.

From the Publisher

From the award-winning author of Waiting, a new novel about a family's struggle for the American Dream.

Meet the Wu family-father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. But severing all ties-including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth-proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

Publishers Weekly

Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waitingin 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an émigré writer's woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan's literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel's opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nan-amid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schooling-slowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivagoisn't coincidental: while Ha Jin's novel lacks Zhivago's epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution. (Nov.)

Shirley N. Quan - Library Journal

"Crossing over from China to America" describes not only the theme behind this latest work from National Book Award-winning author Ha (Waiting) but also his own transition as a storyteller as he breaks away from novels based in China and sets this work in the United States. Keeping to his use of strong male protagonists, Jin opens with Nan Wu, who, with wife Pingping, is reunited for the first time in three years with six-year-old son, Taotao (he's just been flown to the United States from China). Opening in 1989 and spanning nearly a decade, the novel is divided into six parts and multiple brief chapters that follow the Wu family's fierce determination to make a better life for themselves. Though living the "American dream," Jin's characters, as in his other novels, are not without conflict. Nan, for instance, struggles with his passion to become a successful author even as he works to support his family. Transitioning his characters from Chinese immigrants to Chinese Americans, Jin takes his writing to a new level as he skillfully crafts an ambitiously angst-filled yet masterly tale of assimilation overflowing with both heart and culture. Highly recommended for public and academic library fiction and Asian American fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

A Chinese immigrant family's experience of 1990s America is treated at epic length in this heartfelt new novel from the NBA-winning author of Waiting (1999). Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Nan Wu, seeking a better life for his wife Pingping and their son Taotao, precedes them to America, where he briefly studies political science before realizing he must abandon his ambition of living as a poet and novelist and provide for his family-who join him four years later as live-in household staff for a wealthy woman residing in the Boston area. Over the next decade, Nan moves in and out of U.S. literary circles (encountering, among others, Allen Ginsberg-like confrontational poet Sam Fisher), but finds neither satisfactory outlets for his creative energies nor relief from longing for the woman he didn't marry-all the while subsisting in a companionable, though not loving marriage, and enduring the trials of fatherhood, as Taotao struggles through assimilation and adolescence. The family moves to an Atlanta suburb, operating then purchasing a thriving restaurant, and appear, at last, "Americanized." But Nan's conflicted relationships with fellow Chinese-Americans who profess a love for their homeland that he cannot share erodes his energies and keeps him suspended between freedom and tyranny, the workaday world and the ideal realm of literature. The author's trademark clarity produces numerous lucid, moving scenes, and the gathering weight of the struggles endured by the Wus seizes the reader's attention. But the book's amplitude is unselective. When it ends with extracts from Nan's "Poetry Journals" and 30-plus pages of his deeply autobiographical poems (a blatant echo of DoctorZhivago, one of Nan's favorite books), we realize that these concluding pages tell his story far more succinctly than do the bloated 600 pages that precede it. A book that has obviously been labored over, yet still feels inchoate and unfocused.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

1. From the beginning, the novel presents a structure of very short chapters. Why might Ha Jin have chosen this means of organizing his story, and what is its effect? In what ways does the pace of the novel reflect the rhythms of daily life?

2. What is likable about Nan's character, and what is less so? Do his continuing infatuation with Beina, his lack of love for Pingping [pp. 23, 57–60], and his emotional distance from his son affect your opinion of him, and if so, how?

3. The use of language is an important focus of A Free Life. Ha Jin writes Nan's mistakes and mispronunciations into the dialogue when Nan is speaking in English; when characters speak in Chinese their speech appears in italics. What is the effect of the occasional misuse or noncolloquial use of a word or phrase in English, as when Nan says, for instance, that Sam is “bibulous” [p. 260], that a poet is “well endowed” [p. 305], or when he says in a job interview that he and his co-workers “all got laid together” [p. 25]?

4. The Wus' friendship with Janet and Dave Mitchell involves them in the emotional events of Hailee's adoption from China, as well as the discovery and treatment of her leukemia. At one point Nan is amazed at how emotional Dave becomes when having to choose between two orphan girls; he thinks, “Probably it was their Christian faith that had instilled in them the sense of guilt and enabled them to commiserate with the babies more than they—the Wus—could” [p. 313]. Do you think Christianity is the reason for the Mitchells' sensitivity? Does the episode suggest something about cultural difference or aboutNan's own powers of empathy?

5. Responding to Mr. Liu's statement that China should attack Taiwan to maintain its territorial integrity, Nan says, “For the individual human being, what is a country? It's just an idea that binds people together emotionally. But if the country cannot offer the individual a better life, if the country is detrimental to the individual's existence, doesn't the individual have the right to give up the country, to say no to it?” [p. 320]. Do you agree with this statement? What are the reasons that Nan feels he must say no to China?

6. When they deposit the $50,000 check and the woman at the bank looks at them strangely, Pingping realizes, “There was no way this woman could imagine the sacrifice and labor this check embodied” [p. 185]. Would you agree that most native-born Americans are no longer capable of the self-sacrifice and unremitting labor that the Wus engage in? What are the effects of a capitalist and consumerist economy on people's values and behavior, as seen through the eyes of Nan and Pingping?

7. Throughout the story, Nan holds onto the memory of Beina and wants to see her again “in order to preserve her in his memory as a lovely woman beyond his reach, as someone who still possessed his soul, so that the flames of inspiration would blaze in him again” [p. 562]. How do his feelings change after he sees Beina in Illinois [pp. 586-90]?

8. Nan tells Dick that “zer core of American culture” is “obsessed with two s's ... self and sex” [p. 307]. How does Nan react in episodes related to sex [pp. 31–34, 86–90, 544–46, 595–99]? What is the difference between Nan's self-absorption and the self-obsession he sees in Americans?

9. When the Wus sell their restaurant to their friends Shubo and Niyan they are shocked to learn that Shubo won't let Pingping work there [pp. 613–15]. What does this incident, as well as Nan's later visit to his parents in China [pp. 557–60] make clear for Nan about the bonds of friendship and family? How does he respond to the celebration of Halloween in their suburban neighborhood [pp. 271–73], and why?

10. After paying off the mortgage on their house, Nan has a brief period of elation which is followed by a profound sense of disappointment: “The struggle had ended so soon that he felt as though the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax. . . . He should feel successful. But somehow the success didn't mean as much to him as it should” [p. 418]. What is the cause of his dismay? How is his distress affected by his conversation with Shubo about the idea that immigrants must sacrifice their own dreams for their children and grandchildren [pp. 420–21]?

11. Observing the culture of moneymaking on his trip to China, Nan thinks, “Now he wanted all the more to live and die in America. How he missed his home in Georgia” [p. 568]. Throughout the story, Nan has felt almost no nostalgia for his life in China. Is this lack of emotional connection to his native culture partly the reason that Nan is willing to risk writing in English? What had come to define “home” for Nan?

12. The story's arc brings to Nan's attention only belatedly what the reader perhaps already feels: that Pingping has proven herself from the beginning the stronger and steadier character. She has left her native country to be with a husband she knows does not love her, she accepts his moods and his anger, and she works daily with their son to make sure he succeeds at school. How do Pingping's pregnancy and the loss of the baby girl affect their marriage [p. 469]? How does Nan come to realize Pingping's worth [p. 612]? What does his poem “Belated Love” [pp. 619–20] express about his new knowledge?

13. How would you describe the prose style of the novel? What are the notable aspects of the narration and what kinds of details does it bring into focus? Do you assume that the narration is mainly from Nan's point of view; is it a more objective third-person narration, or does it shift between the two?

14. Regarding his poetic vocation, Nan thinks, “The truth was that he had been frightened by the overwhelming odds against writing in English artistically, against claiming his existence in this new land, and against becoming a truly independent man who followed nothing but his own heart. To date he had tried every way to wriggle out of the struggle” [p. 472]. How do the poems at the end of the volume reflect Nan's new independence? What does the “free life” of the title mean for him?

Read an Excerpt