Customer Reviews

A Free Life: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Ha Jin's A Free Life begins the same year as one of the Twentieth century's greatest atrocities--the Tiananmen Square massacre--but the book does not take place in China. Protagonist Nan Wu is a native of the frigid city of Harbin, China, but his considerable academic gifts and strong written English skills have afforded him the enviable opportunity of pursuing a political science Ph.D. in America.

Due to his disillusionment with the Tiananmen Square massacre, the disgusted Nan wants to distance himself from all things political, so he drops out of his program of study. However, before he removes himself from the Ivory Tower, Nan and some of his fellow grad students mention a plot to kidnap the children of mainland officials--a plot leaked to Chinese officials, causing Nan to be blacklisted and subsequently left a man without a country. With his wife Pingping and son Taotao also living in America, Nan feels he has little to lose, so he intends to make a new, permanent life in America. In order to support them, Nan takes one of the few jobs that someone armed with an M.A. in the humanities can do: He becomes a security guard.

Nan does aspire to higher things, though. He wants to be a good provider for his family, but even more, he wants to find meaning for his own being. After having his passport taken away by the Chinese consulate, Nan turns to the written word to help relieve his anxieties. However, he does not turn to writing in his native tongue; instead, he turns to the language of his adopted country, devouring book after book of English poetry and spending spare moments at work studying an English dictionary.

Nan feels the need to write for two reasons: to fully embrace the language of his adopted country and to regain a passion that he lost after his first love, Beina, left him while still in China. The resulting numbness has rendered him unable to love Pingping and Taotao fully. Through English poetry, which he feels is more emotive than Chinese poetry, Nan wants to regain a lost part of himself. By writing in English, Nan is also able to distance himself further from his native land. This distancing does not limit itself to China but extends to the Chinese community in America with which Nan finds himself increasingly disgusted each time he interacts with it.

Ha Jin does not whitewash tensions between various racial groups. Those unfamiliar with the tensions within the Chinese Diaspora may be surprised by the vicious arguments between the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese, not to mention a number of the mainlanders' hatred for the Japanese. Nan's perspective of his community distinguishes this story from the majority of novels dealing with Asian Americans--particularly from those featuring a first generation immigrant. He is upset by his fellow mainland immigrants' willingness to whitewash the atrocities caused by the Chinese government and to support a nationalism that not only is destructive to relations with America, Japan, and Taiwan but also continues to breed hate.

Despite being a massive 672-page novel, A Free Life is an incredibly fast, enjoyable read that is difficult to put down. Perhaps this is because the chapters are rarely longer than five pages and, instead of being one long story, the novel seems more like a collection of vignettes concerning the lives of one man, his family, and the lives of other Chinese expatriates. The magic of A Free Life is that each short vignette is carefully chosen to cast light on one of the family's small victories and defeats. Readers get to experience Nan and Pingping's grief when they are desperately trying to save money, and they get to experience the couple's happiness when the Wus open their own restaurant. These events are not major, but they paint a very real life and help the reader feel closer to the characters.

A Free Life is a masterful work detailing the minutiae of one family's day to day life. While this might seem to be the makings of a cut and dry novel, the novel also details an immigrant's struggle with his native land and fellow immigrants. Though younger generations such as Taotao's are spared the long threads of political intrigue that bind many Chinese expatriates to mainland China, Nan's entire being is ensnared by these threads that threaten to strangle him. However, through his family and his desire to write, Nan might be able to experience "a free life" unhindered by the past.

I found this book to be one of the most powerful books I have ever read. This book is so subtle and delicate you have to be persistent to discover its beauty. I didn't really get into it until page 75 or so (which is quite a bit of reading for a modern novel). I enjoyed the writing of the first 75 pages, Ha Jin is a wonderful writer, but it wasn't until Nan went to New York City that I really felt the story started to solidify.

This is a very artistic and highly nuanced story, and deserves to be read carefully. The story slowly unfolds and becomes more and more powerful until coming to an emotional crescendo in the journal and poems that complete the novel. Don't misunderstand me, this is a very understated tale, but for me all the more powerful for its restraint. I thought it impossible that this book would move me as much as Waiting. I was wrong. This is Ha Jin's most powerful work. I would give this book 10 stars if I could. It was that good.

It's hard to imagine heading to a foreign country like Japan or Korea or even China to start a life with virtually no money and no real job training. Get a job, learn a language, get enough money to pay the bills, learn how a whole new culture really works. This story is well worth reading if only to reconfirm the benefits of living "A Free Life." Here are the things I found unique and interesting about the book:

1. There is really no dramatic story here. It reads like a journal describing every little thought and action including his little fights with his wife and son, everyday relationship with fellow workers, friends, poets. etc.

2. It's very description of the conservative and simple life of the regular Chinese people, those loyal to the old ways of Mao and those trying to flee from the country to start a new life in America and other places. They are willing to put in the long hours, are fiscally very very conservative, worried about every penny and investment. You understand that life is looked at from a different perspective, a perspective that you aren't entitled or worthy when you are born. You are here to work and earn enough money to pay the bills.

3. You can tell that the book is written by an intelligent, educated foreigner. It works well, flows well, is easy to understand and enjoy, but it is almost too straight forward, honest and lacks any poetry or beautiful writing. It seems like you are reading from a personal journal where comments about reactions to life's most mundane things are made. But this is part of what makes it worth reading. You comprehend the frustrations, fears, and real life of very good and devoted people. You can tell that everything that is said is from the heart and ruthfully honest. It takes him a long time to really accept and return the love his hard working devoted wife gives him from day one. He is honest about his fantasies about a girl he was once in love with and how this fantasy affects his life.

4. He opens our eyes to the evolution of China and the thoughts and desires of the Chinese people, how the older generation is still loyal to the old communist government and how the country and younger generation is becoming more and more devoted to capitalism. In a certain way, there is nostalgia for the old Chinese way of life.

5. By the end of the book, it is clear that he has become an American Citizen in all ways and living a conservative, frugal version of the American way of life. He loves it and respects it, but it is very realistically stated.

It is a long and touching story, sometimes a bit boring and slow, but always worth moving ahead. It is well worth the read and it gave me a lot of insight into these people and the sacrifices they make. Driving by Chinese restaurants run by hard working Chinese people feels different now. I want to talk to them and make friends with them and I really do respect them more now that I've had a chance to walk in one of their brother's shoes.

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

I expected to enjoy A Free Life, but this exceeded my hopes. I worked my way through Waiting this summer. It was good, and I grew comfortable with Ha Jin's writing. That story took place in China and did not develop its characters, so much as it revealed something about life in rural China.

A Free Life goes beyond his previous work. The book covers almost twenty years in the life of a small family who emigrate from China. They live in Boston and New York for a while, but soon settle in suburban Atlanta. Their life experience shows something about the struggle of making it in a new country.

Nan, a sensitive aspiring poet who accepts a dutiful life of hard work in a humble restaurant, is haunted by his old country and by a past love. His wife, Ping Ping, works though the doubts held by her husband and is often the core of the family. They have a son.

This book deals with a lot of the same issues as a very different work, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Both explore the tension between the freedom of the creative spirit and the lasting accomplishment of solid duty. In this case, of course, its the opposite journey for the subject. Still, Nan has plenty of artistic friends in his midst who weigh in on the other side of the equation.

They grow up and resolve this conflict, but not without some regret. This book is a very real account. Although it is characterized as fiction, my understanding is that it reflects the author's own life. This is a great book.

I had the privilege of meeting Ha Jin when he visited Kalamazoo College some years ago, when I still worked there in media relations, and so when his name came up again - this time as an author to read in a new bookclub I have joined at my new workplace - I took up his newest novel, "A Free Life," with warm anticipation. To add to that sense, Ha Jin will be visiting Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a few days from this writing, and I look forward to hearing him speak of his new work.

Perhaps hearing Ha Jin speak will deepen my understanding of his novel about the immigrant experience from communist China to the United States. I would welcome that. At this point, however, reading it wasn't the shining and revelatory experience I had hoped it would be. Granted, that may in part be because, through my own family's immigrant experience of coming from Soviet-occupied Latvia to the United States in WWII, I am already too familiar with this type of tale. It lacks discovery for me. And, since English is not my native language, either, I find myself almost painfully aware in reading Ha Jin's prose - it isn't his. His language has almost a barrenness about it, simple and spare to the bone. It can be so very difficult to absorb the subtleties of language, I know, and to not only communicate in written language, but express color and life in it with the varied nuances of idiom, metaphor, humor. These are often the missing elements in this novel.

The hero of the novel, the young Chinese man named Nan Wu, seemingly always on the silent edge of a ready despair, can be difficult to warm up to - and I can't always say why. It could indeed be that second language limitations don't allow the writer to give him the blood we need to feel pulsing in him to see him as real, thus one with whom we can empathize. His rather absurd longing for a first love throughout the book, the cruel and shallow Beina, who never misses a chance to treat him like dirt, does little to endear him to the reader, either. Not even after the predictable conclusion to that storyline, when Nan takes a trip to find Beina later in life, only to discover she is neither beautiful nor desirable, and his vision of this woman had no substance in reality, she had been desirable only in his mind. Ah, all that wasted time and fantasy, when his devoted wife, PingPing, has loved and cared for him, broken hearted at her husband's chilly heart and lack of passion for her, through thick and thin. His new appreciation for the real love in his life, so late in coming, is satisfying if not quite redeeming.

The immigrant experience for Nan is one of chasing the American Dream, and he does it well. As is often the case, the immigrant does it better, in fact, than most Americans. He doesn't take long to own a business, pay off his mortgage, clear any debt, and blaze a path for himself to become a poet. His trip back to his childhood and youth home in China clears away any remaining nostalgia. As with his misguided love for Beina, though, home is better in the foggy mythology of the past than in reality. He concludes that Home is, indeed, where one has one's loving family and builds a life, not necessarily where one has ancestral roots.

The novel concludes with the poems written by the character Nan, and although that seemed odd to me at first, as I read through them, I found them pleasing. I realized I might have liked to have seen them within the pages of the story rather than in concluding it. It might have given me more reason to emphatize with Nan, which I was never quite able to do.

My final sense of this book is that Ha Jin has had great literary courage to take on the feat of writing in a new language. With that in mind, this is a worthy accomplishment. Compared to the best in current American literature, however, it is a little tempting to urge a writer to hold back a while longer - until the finer points of language are absorbed and mastered.

If you prefer intense movies, loud music, drama, and constant stimulation this might not be the book for you. I loved it. It was like real life; generally pretty low-key, so you have to find the beauty in what's there, rather than being slapped in the face by it. It's not a noisy book.

The spare prose that others have mentioned helps this; you have to think about what's being said, and can fill in the gaps on the characters. The conclusion that one's life is really what one assembles out of the pieces that they start with, what they go after, and what they are handed is a natural one. But, again, low key.

While others didn't much like the ending, I actually loved it. I felt as though I knew people whom I didn't really know before, and could find the commonality among us.

I'm not really a poetry lover, but somehow having read the whole book, I was able to fall into the poems at the end. It was as though the book trained me to be able to understand them, because it had given me enough of his view to see through those eyes at least a little bit.

Four stars because it's not for everyone. But five for me...

This may be Ha Jin's "first American novel" but he is already well-established as a master of the English language. There can be no doubt that the storyline of this book must echo a substantial part of Jin's own life, especially the literary references he often makes. The weakness of this novel is that it lacks dramatic tension, unlike "Waiting" which was gripping and "War Trash" which was harrowing.

I am a huge fan of Ha Jin's writing, but I submit he is not being well served by his editor. I don't think it's necessary to dissect the problems in this review, but both "War Trash" and "A Free Life" are much longer than need be.

Do I recommend this? Most definitely. But Jin needs to reflect on what made "Waiting" such a magnificent novel.

I was intrigued by the first chapter of this book, the story of a Chinese couple who are living in the USA. Their 6 year old son, Taotao, is traveling alone from China to LA, and they are meeting him at the airport. Nan, the father, hasn't seen his son in 4 years, Pingping, the mother, for 2 years. Both are anxious and worried. For the next 200 pages I followed their lives, challenges, and dreams of an independent life in America. They work hard, very hard. He leaves his academic career and works many menial jobs to support his family. They buy a restaurant and work long hours. They're good parents. She teaches their son every night, first to catch him up to the American kids, then to help him surpass them. Nan struggles with his love of poetry writing, which he has abandoned. He struggles more with thoughts of a lost love. And so it goes. After about 300 pages I was getting bored. We learn about their new American friends, a childless couple who adopt a Chinese baby. Nan meets poets. They buy a house. He's unhappy. They suffer physically from their long hours. He thinks about that lost love. He reads dictionaries and American poets. She works in the restaurant kitchen when he can't be there. Are you bored yet? You see, the author just tells you what happens. The characters never come alive. I didn't care about any of them. The book is written in very short chapters--just a few pages--that make it easy to read. But, as it drags on for 629 pages, it feels more like a diary than an edited novel. Exactly where was the editor here? I found many sections that added nothing to the real story, and too many details that were unnecessary. Do I need a description of what he sees on the road from Atlanta to Chicago? Sure, the life of an immigrant is difficult. The language barrier is hard. Educated people take menial jobs because their skills aren't recognized in this country. But the storytelling isn't compelling. And the ending is predictable and unsatisfying.

I recently read both the English and the translated Chinese version of "A Free Life". It is about a family that immigrated to the US and how the father spent years trying to make a living, but consequently did not follow his dream to become a poet. As an immigrant who has just started to blog in English, I find so much comfort, mixed with sadness, in Ha Jin's words.

The main character in the story had always wanted to "do something moneyed people cannot do", which was to write poetry. Instead, he spent years working like a brainless machine to make money. After he achieved some financial freedom, his unhappiness led him to realize that he needed something more fundamental and important -- the courage to face failure.

This book vividly tells the story of how first generation immigrants struggle to feed and shelter themselves and their families. This book made me understand why my parent's generation thinks or behaves the way they do with a deeper level of understanding. Since reading this book, I further appreciate my freedom to be ambitious and am proud of where I came from.

I recommend this book to Chinese immigrants and people who want to understand them.

Wonderland Alice