Review by New York Times Review
Ha Jin's first novel set in the United States is about a Chinese immigrant who works hard to get ahead. RUN down to the bar and rouse the culture editor: the impossible has happened. In the dispiriting age of Bush and Britney, with our military still bogged down in Baghdad and our media still bewitched by Beverly Hills, an accomplished, respected American writer (a recent National Book Award Winner, in fact) has published a serious patriotic novel. Its title, "A Free Life," is not altogether ironic. Its subject, everyday bravery and nobility in a system built on risk and too often based on mutual exploitation, is delivered straight. Finally, its Chinese-born author, Ha Jin (whose seven previous works of fiction have all been set abroad), seems positively pleased and proud to be here. Or at least his characters do. Nan and Pingping Wu, a husband and wife, are the sort of persevering newcomers, firmly set on a legal path to citizenship by way of unremitting thrift and toil, whom presidents like to point to from the podium during major addresses on the economy. Much as Jin himself did, the Wus came from China to study, not to stay, but they realized after the Tiananmen Square massacre (as Jin did too, he's said in interviews) that they couldn't go home again and be themselves, since both their selves and their native land had changed. "A Free Life" is the story of their family's naturalization - bank deposit by bank deposit, dental appointment by dental appointment, appliance purchase by appliance purchase - and like most novels of what professors call "The American Immigrant Experience," it's chiefly a tale of trial and error. The trials provide the drama, the errors the comedy, and their overlap the pathos. It's an orthodox format, hard to reinvent, mostly because reinvention is its theme. For Nan, who's at graduate school in Boston when the tank turrets swivel in downtown Beijing, the first trick is to switch from brains to brawn. To support the good wife whom he doesn't truly love and the young son, Taotao, whom he doesn't quite understand, he gives up the life of the mind, which suits his temperament, for the lot of the laborer, which doesn't. On one of his early jobs as a security guard, he runs out to a market for a snack and finds himself waylaid on his return trip by a boozy, aggressive man and woman who badger him to come with them to a party packed with "purty girls." Nan's confusion about their motives panics him. Once he's back at his post with the trusty pocket dictionary he's using to improve his English and the tattered literary classics that speak to his stifled dream of writing poetry, he concludes that he's barely avoided being forced to join in an orgy or a smut film. Had he weakened, it might be all over for him now. His aspirations are thoroughly middle-class - a decent house, a healthy bank account and maybe, someday, time for thought and art - and while he knows he's starting from the bottom, he also knows that, in America, there's nothing under the bottom but more bottom. As Jin puts the Wus through their paces as up-and-comers who might become down-and-outers at any moment (or so their exaggerated sense of caution causes them to fear), the story develops the cycling, skipping rhythm of a dirty compact disc. Each step up for the Wus - from renter to owner, employee to employer, bricked-in city dweller to waterfront suburbanite - stirs a vivid burst of hope followed by a fresh new stretch of static, as when the Wus grow mistrustful of the lawyer who uses a legal tactic called a "straw" to secure their joint title to a small restaurant they've bought in Atlanta's allbeige strip mall outskirts. "Stupefied, Nan couldn't help but imagine that they'd sold their business for only one dollar. At the same time, he kept reminding himself that he shouldn't be too paranoid or think ill of Mr. Shang. ... According to the attorney, they'd receive a notice about the registration from the deeds office within two months. What could the Wus do in the meantime? It looked like they could do nothing but wait anxiously." The nervousness of the Wus is not infectious but sympathy-inducing, like watching a bright child learn to spell. You know she will; you just wish that she knew, too. Given the novel's 600-page-plus length, the Wus' regular lapses into bafflement breed no suspense about their ultimate destinies. As they blunder along through the hazards and the hassles of ascending sandy Mount Capitalism, from confronting bouts of sickness without sufficient insurance to losing, in stages, their only child's attention to the nonstop come-hithers of the Internet, the sheer volume of unread print and untouched paper signals us that their climb will go ahead, with lots of skids and slipups, naturally, but no headlong plunges, even at the end. Volatility, after all, is a measure of health in a free market, and the elementary algebra of Jin's narrative pace - as slow, implacable and steady as interest accumulating in a savings account - implicitly promises that his dimes and quarters of mundane description and petty conflict will result in a full piggy bank for all. Neither does Jin give his people flaws or problems grave enough to threaten their well-being. Pingping's chronic fretting is not disabling, and Nan's nascent ambitions as a poet aren't the kind that lead to leaps off bridges if they go unattained. The Wus' credentials as model neopuritans - their humility, self-sacrifice, efficiency and unremitting skepticism about easy credit in all its forms, including the loans to the erotic self afforded by commercial sex and porn, which Nan feels calling to him on occasion - are so unassailable that if they failed, the book would wind up as an Upton Sinclair-ish protest novel; a case study in humanity's futile puniness against the Great Machine. The Wus are the only ones who can't see that they're moving up, which feels almost jokelike because the novel's timeline - from the late '80s to the late '90s - was, we know now, an era of mass bounty. The novel's sole mystery is how satisfied the Wus will feel when they pull up the rope ladder behind them and kick back in their little piece of heaven. The range of possibilities is narrow. They won't be euphoric - it's not their way - but they won't be radically disappointed, either. A headspinning windfall might unhinge them, yes, but what seems most likely, and what we watch occur, is their introduction to the faint melancholy of "Is this all there is?" American comfort, followed by Nan's resolution to aim higher on the spiritual and mental plane the instant his mortgage is paid off. IMPECCABLE kitchen-sink realism? Not really. The two steps forward, one step back progression of the Wu's acculturation may be true to the actual experiences of countless naïve, non-native English speakers, but it feels here more like a monastic meditation or a ritual breathing exercise than a fictional documentary. Jin's simple sentences, familiar sentiments, and uneventful three- to fivepage chapters that typically end with such pulse-suppressing non-cliffhangers as "the day before the Wangs returned, the Wus moved out of the bungalow and set up their residence at 568 March Drive," appear to derive from a highly refined aesthetic of anti-excitability. Life, from day to day, seems hardly to alter, yet it shifts beyond recognition over the years - this is what fascinates Jin, apparently, and it's what the Zen-like composure of his prose and his conveyorbelt time-sense seek to demonstrate. This proved, the experimental apparatus keeps on operating, though, repeating the same results with dwindling verve and testing the inner Buddhist in Jin's audience in ways that some may find calming and others sedating. Aside from a bruising medical episode concerning the abortion of a dead fetus, the novel's fiercest interludes are rhetorical, as the Pledge of Allegianceminded Nan debates the China-first set at various gatherings. Eventually, thanks to a winning raffle ticket, he gets to see firsthand the country he left, which has been transformed during his absence into a carnival caricature of the nation he left it for. That Nan finds China's rapaciousness familiar from what its blackest propagandists have alleged about America is the novel's only excursion into cynicism. Nan has seen the future, and it ain't us. His retreat to Atlanta and a menial job that will at last allow him to write poetry feels oddly elegiac - a great leap backward into a New World that he was too busy growing into, and growing fond of, to notice becoming ancient. Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is "The Unbinding."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
"*Starred Review* A poet as well as a fiction writer, Ha Jin writes of sacrifice, isolation, and valor with uncommon perception. In his earlier novels, including Waiting (1999), winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and War Trash (2002), also a PEN/Faulkner Award winner, he looks back to China, his homeland. In his seventh work of fiction, Ha Jin anatomizes the immigrant experience. Nan Wu, a Chinese graduate student in Boston, drops out after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He would like to abandon his marriage, too, but his sense of duty toward Pingping and their young son is stronger than his desire for passion and the freedom to write poetry. So Nan laboriously progresses from busboy to chef, then purchases a small Chinese restaurant outside Atlanta, Georgia. He and Pingping work hard, live frugally, and strive to understand their baffling new world, including white friends who adopt a Chinese daughter. While Pingping evinces great strength of character, Nan remains deeply conflicted over his longing for art and his commitment to pragmatism until his ruminations on everything from the lives of birds to the differences between Chinese and English precipitate a profound liberation. For Nan, a free life is an honest and creative life. Capacious, pointillistic, empathic, and tender, Ha Jin's tale of one immigrant family's odyssey in America affirms humankind's essential mission, to honor life."--"Seaman, Donna" Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an emigre 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. Zhivago isn'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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"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, LJ 7/07.]-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 Doctor Zhivago, 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
