A Free Life

This is the second Ha Jin book I've read. The first one was "Waiting". Both books could have been written with a lot less pages. "A Free Life" was over 600 pages. There were so many pages filled with too many descriptions of things like insects in Georgia, of places visited, of full church services, etc. I would become so bored at times that I considered not finishing the book. Instead, I'd stop reading when I was bored and then pick up the book again later. It usually takes me about 10 days to read a 600-page book. This one took me 3 weeks. I've read 600 and more page books where I didn't think there was one un-necessary word. On a positive note, this book gave me an excellent view of what it is like for Chinese immigrants living in the United States and how life has changed for people still living in China.

I am a longtime Ha Jin fan who was thoroughly pleased by this, his latest book. I read it cover to cover in one weekend, and then began reading it again on Monday to savor it over the next week. The characters are flawed but sympathetic, and their stories move the reader. Their lives are related with exquisite detail that underscores plausibility. This is a work of depth and complexity that is probably not as rewarding when read hastily or superficially.

I received this book by Ha Jin in good time and in the condition advertised. Although I am only half through the six hundred page plus length of the book, I find it well-written and structured, as well as a compelling story of immigrant life for an educated Chinese couple. Their struggles are familiar but different from those of other ethic immigrants. The stories of their neighbors and friends in different parts of the U.S. add to the human value of the narrative.

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.

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.

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 T