A FREE LIFE
Ha Jin
Pantheon
Fiction
ISBN: 9780375424656

A FREE LIFE is the immigrant story for our times. As the book opens, the reader is introduced to Pingping and Nan Wu, who have traveled cross country to pick up their six-year-old son, Taotao, whose exodus from China they have finally been able to effect. Taotao has not seen his father since he came to America to attend graduate school four years earlier. His mother left China two-and-a-half years later, leaving Taotao in the care of her parents. It is no surprise that after only several days in America, Taotao announces that he is ready to go back home to his grandparents, a fact to which it takes him a long time to become consoled.

A scholar in every aspect, Nan drops out of graduate school on the heels of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which led to meetings with fellow Chinese students where many forms of protest were discussed, including kidnapping the MIT student children of high-ranking Chinese officials. After a fairly standard protest in DC, Nan returns disenchanted, disturbed and determined to give up his graduate studies in the field of Political Science, a field chosen for him by his government.

The family now begins a long evolution. Previously, Nan had envisioned a future involving books, letters, poetry and the mind. Now, forgoing his student stipend, earning a living and establishing a life that provides both security and financial independence for his family becomes a necessity.

From serving as caretaker in a wealthy, divorcee doctor’s home (with Pingping), to working as a security guard, to factory work, restaurant service in New York and other various jobs, Nan becomes a downright, sometimes downtrodden, blue-collar American immigrant worker. Underneath it all is the support and frugality of Pingping. Her intensity to provide for both today, tomorrow and the future often dominates everything. The family eventually finds themselves in possession of a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, a decent home they pay off very quickly and a son with whom they seem to never make a connection.

Through it all, Nan’s dream of literary success never wanes. Nor do his thoughts of Beina, the lover with whom he broke years earlier. While much of the books 600 pages is devoted to the everyday struggles of this family while pursuing what is, for them, the American dream of home and business ownership and --- more importantly --- no debt, there arrives a climax as Nan forces himself to come to terms with the decisions he has made, the paths he could have taken and the choices he still could make. Watching his return to China to confront the ghosts of his past, and a journey to Iowa to face what could have been his future, is a jumble of emotions for both Nan and the reader.

Pingping’s ceaseless devotion to Nan, her acceptance of his half-love for her, a late-in-life pregnancy and more combine to make her a sympathetic character who carries the weight of the entire family’s emotions on her shoulders. Jin often pits the couple against each other, and most often, one must root for Pingping.

The final 30 pages of the book are titled “The Poems of Nan Wu.” These are presented as the poetry Nan has been scribbling all these years, some of which he sent to publishers and schools such as the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. These pages are so beautiful and so insightful that they establish a side of Nan, a glimpse inside him, that has evaded the reader up until then. Taken with the end of the book, they provide redemption for Nan and a depth to the man around whom this novel revolves.

There are so many other storylines within these pages, it is hard to truly do justice in so few words. Yes, it is an ordinary tale of relatively ordinary lives, but it is their story and Jin makes you really care about these lives, whatever may happen in them. It is a book I find myself thinking about even now, months after putting it down. I handed it off to a very well-read teacher friend at a baseball tournament our sons were playing in. On the third day of the tourney, she handed it back, praising it effusively and scolding Jin for “keeping her up too late.” We watched our boys play baseball, living out the American dream in Cooperstown, New York, while --- side by side --- we both contemplated the version of that same dream that Jin had painted. I truly feel that A FREE LIFE should be considered now, and for a long while, to be the voice of the immigrant experience of our time.

   --- Reviewed by Jamie Layton

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