Freedom Socialist • Vol. 29, No. 1 • February-March 2008

BOOK REVIEW

A Free Life: the quest of a Chinese immigrant to realize his dream

by Nellie Wong

Author Ha Jin Credit: Jerry Bauer

The latest novel by acclaimed author Ha Jin, A Free Life (Pantheon Books, New York), offers a captivating fictional look at the experience of dissident Chinese émigrés to the U.S. through a character called Nan Wu.

Disillusioned and saddened by the Chinese government's slaughter of democracy activists in the Tiananmen Square massacre in April 1989 and its suppression of individual rights, Nan yearns for something better. Passionate about living an independent life, he severs his ties to the country of his birth.

To survive, Nan quits the Ph.D. program in political science at Brandeis University in Boston. And he leaves behind political activism as well, after making some ill-advised remarks that threaten to bring down the wrath of both the U.S. and Chinese governments.

From this launching point, the novel expresses Nan's extended journey to give his life meaning - which, he ultimately determines, means overcoming a myriad of obstacles to become a poet.

In pursuit of an elusive dream. Nan and his wife, Pingping, a woman he married when both were rebounding from other love affairs, embark on several menial jobs, spending only on the essentials and saving carefully. On top of the constant material pressures Nan faces, he copes with Pingping's persistent worry that Nan will abandon her and their son.

Along the way, Nan learns a trade as a chef. After a few years, he and Pingping are able to buy a Chinese restaurant, Gold Wok, in a suburb of Atlanta. There they attempt to be satisfied with realizing the "American dream" of owning a business and a home.

But Nan is ground down by the unrelenting hard work of running a restaurant, and he feels unfulfilled. (The reader imagines the same is true for Pingping, but this is not her story.)

He questions his own decision to break with his native country, even though a visit back to China reinforces why he has done so. The theme of home percolates throughout the novel. Must a man's first loyalty remain to his home country just because of birth? Reflecting actual debates among Chinese immigrants, some of Nan's friends and fellow émigrés believe so.

But, most of all, Nan is tortured by the desire to be a writer, which seems to him to be beyond his reach. Among many reasons for this, he doubts his ability to write poetry in the tongue of his adopted country - and to have his attempts accepted without ridicule by the literary community and publishers.

Ha Jin emphasizes through his writing of the novel's dialog that when Nan talks, learned speech constraints cause him to "talk funny," pronouncing "the" as "zer" and "zat" for "that." Nan's nonstandard way of speaking English is one of the many facts of daily immigrant reality that will resonate strongly for foreign-born readers. It certainly did for me, thinking of my own immigrant relatives who spoke "broken" English (to the embarrassment of my younger self).

But Ha Jin also makes it clear that Nan excels in the use of his second language, helped by contact with university poets and immersion in the English-language poetry he loves.

In the end, Nan attains the freedom he seeks by working at a night job as a motel clerk, which allows him to pay the bills while writing poetry that may never find an audience. His English poems, appended in the form of a poetry journal at the close of the book, reveal the mind of a man who has come to believe that language and deep emotions can transcend national and cultural boundaries.

In the poem "An exchange," Nan says: "To write in this language is to be alone, / to live on the margin where / loneliness ripens into solitude."

A writer's liberation. Ha Jin is the winner of several prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Waiting, and his prose is as fresh as bok choy hot from the wok. A Free Life sparkles like a kaleidoscope. Its shimmering, changing colors illuminate the Chinese diaspora, dissident life in the U.S., the fight for economic survival, the worlds of poets in and out of academia, interracial relations, cultural and linguistic adaptation, and the question of home.

A Free Life undoubtedly reflects Ha Jin's own experience and struggles. And yet the idea that his protagonist embraces at the conclusion of his new novel seems to me false. To gain independence of the circumstances that shape one is impossible. No writer, no person, can exist on an island of individuality.

Nan's struggle for liberation through writing is moving and monumental. But if he believes that a free life means exemption from political and social constraints and possibilities, he is chasing a myth. And the contradiction is that his own story shows this to be true.

Read this fascinating book and see if you agree.

Nellie Wong, a San Francisco poet and Freedom Socialist Party leader of Chinese descent, can be reached at nelliewongpoet@yahoo.com.