A Free Life

by Ha Jin

From Ha Jin, the widely-acclaimed, award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash, comes a novel that takes his fiction to a new setting: 1990s America. We follow the Wu family--father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao--as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.

At first, their future seems well-assured--Nan’s graduate work in political science at Brandeis University would guarantee him a teaching position in China--but after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan’s disillusionment turns him towards his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs while Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Nan struggles to adapt to a new language and culture, his love of poetry and literature sustains him through difficult, lean years.

Ha Jin creates a moving, realistic, but always hopeful narrative as Nan moves from Boston to New York to Atlanta, ever in search of financial stability and success, even in a culture that sometimes feels oppressive and hostile. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange, paradoxical attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. And severing all ties--including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth--proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

Ha Jin’s prodigious talents are evident in this powerful new book, which brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes that characterize the contemporary immigrant experience. With its lyrical prose and confident grace, A Free Life is a luminous addition to the works of one of the preeminent writers in America today.

Genres: Fiction, China, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Asia, Audiobook, Literature

660 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Ha Jin is the pen name of Jin Xuefei, a novelist, poet, short story writer, and Professor of English at Boston University.Ha Jin writes in English about China, a political decision post-Tiananmen Square.

Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ha Jin's Waiting with its precise writing, its absence of adjectives and the cool, objective yet somehow deeply emotional stance was like no style I had ever read before. I am not a fan of the florid, whether paintings, poetry or books, yet minimalism of the written word always seems to me to me to be a self-conscious style, a deliberate attempt at being thought 'an artist'. Waiting was just perfectly balanced and so I was looking forward to reading another Ha Jin.

It's quite different, much more mature writing, not quite so spare, a deeper exploration of the emotional life and an even more enjoyable read. On one level it was a really good family saga showing how Chinese immigrants take what they find useful from American life but, other than superficially, assimilate not at all. It's very insightful and as with all good sagas detailing the triumphs and disasters of the progress of a family through life, both interesting and involving.

And on another level, it is a man's search for meaning in his life. For the balance between necessary materialism and freedom from the baggage of goods, between status and the freedom to do what one's heart truly desires, and from the pressure of two communities, American and Chinese, that a man's measure of his worth is how he succeeds in the eyes of others and, again, for personal freedom.

On every level, this is a 5-star book. It would make a great film too. If a Hollywood movie, the sort that the main character could get an Oscar for, if a European movie, one where you would want to stand at the end and applaud the director. Highly recommended.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most thorough treatment of the Asian immigrant experience you're ever likely to find. All of the most intricate details ring so clear and true. Only someone who has lived this experience could render it so honestly and poignantly. I am in awe of Ha Jin's mastery of English. He's so careful with the language, choosing just the right words and placing each exactly where it belongs. He has a better command of the language than many native speakers. Remarkable!

Through the character of Nan Wu, the author touches on all of the struggles, inner and outer, experienced by those seeking to make America their adopted country. It takes many years of back-breaking work and conflicted loyalties before Nan finally relaxes and feels that this is his permanent home. He alternates between resentment of American ways, and gratitude for the freedoms and opportunities available. He's equally conflicted about his own country, dwelling on happy memories and wanting to love China, but feeling anger toward the government and their control of all thought and behavior. When he finally returns to China after many years away, he realizes he no longer belongs there and is uncomfortably eager to get back to America.

Back in the 90's I had a variety of international housemates, so I was especially tickled by the blunders made as the characters tackled the English language. I remember my housemates' valiant efforts and hilarious mistakes. They were so good-natured about being corrected and snickered at. Far more gracious than I would be had I tried to learn their languages.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Chinese immigrant moves to Boston and becomes disenchanted with his political science studies, so he drops out of university and struggles to take care of his family, doing a series of low-paying, somewhat demoralizing, exhausting jobs. What he really wants to do is write poetry. He can't seem to forget his ex-girlfriend, even though he's married to someone else -- someone wonderful -- and has a child with her. As the years pass, in slow but beautifully-written, simple detail, he learns to cook in NYC and eventually moves down south to Atlanta, where he buys a restaurant and a house. He's able to pay off his mortgage and live the American Dream with his wife and son, but he doesn't see it that way; he's convinced that he is a failure.

This book is for anyone who's ever tried to be an artist. It redefined the term for me.

Despite consisting of low-key events and day-to-day details (no huge action), I was riveted by this book and cared deeply about the characters. It's quite sad at times but has an uplifting and satisfying ending.

[jo]

dude. i'm not even a fifth of the way through and i've heard that
1. it's very hard for a chinese immigrant in the post-tiananmen era of forced migration of chinese students to get a job, let alone a decent job.
2. the protagonist is unhappy.
3. he doesn't reciprocate his wife's big love for him but is somehow bound to her for the sake of his child
two hundred fifty three times

yeah, no.

[Nancy Petralia · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ha Jin's success in the United States has been an extraordinary rebuttal to Yeats's claim that "no man can think or write with music and vigor except in his mother tongue." An immigrant from China who survived the Cultural Revolution and almost six years in the People's Liberation Army, Jin had been writing in English less than a decade when he won a PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996 for his first story collection, Ocean of Words. The next year, his second collection, Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O'Connor Award; Waiting took a National Book Award in 1999; and War Trash was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. And yet despite this pile of literary laurels and a professorship at Boston University, Jin still seems troubled by Yeats's dictum.

His enormous new novel, A Free Life, his first to be set in the United States, is the most autobiographical of his works. It tells an archetypal tale of immigrant struggle and success, but its real focus is the author's battle to break into the language and the literary culture of his adopted country. The story begins in Boston soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Nan Wu is a political science student at Brandeis with a beautiful wife he does not love and a 6-year-old son. The changed political climate makes it impossible for Nan to go home, and it seems senseless now to finish his PhD. "He had no idea what he was going to do," the narrator writes. "Such an independent condition was new to him. . . . Now he would have to earn a living by himself and also support his family. He was free, free to choose his own way and to make something of himself. But what were the choices available to him? Could he survive in this land? The feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed him."

The problem of freedom has been central to all Jin's previous works, but how fascinatingly different that problem looks in a free country. Liberty raises the specter of failure, poverty and uselessness in a way unimaginable to Nan back in China, where he was "provided a salary, shelter (usually a bed or at most a room), coupons for cloth and grain and cooking oil, medical care, and sometimes even free condoms." Now, he and his wife are given asylum, but nothing else. "I feel like a crippled man here," he thinks.

His fellow students switch to more marketable degrees in business and law, but Nan wants to write poetry, even though he knows there's no audience for Chinese poetry in America and no possibility of having his work published back home. Despondent about his career and still pining for a girlfriend who cast him off years before, he takes a series of low-paying jobs and presses on through a fog of depression and shame. Eventually, he and his wife, Pingping, manage to scrape together enough money to buy a small Chinese restaurant in Atlanta, where they build a successful business, buy a house and attain the trappings of the American dream.

That dream is complicated, though, by the persistence of Nan's desire to write poetry in English, a desire Jin draws with aching sympathy. "He knew that in this land the language was like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, even though he'd feel out of his element whenever he used it. If he didn't try hard to adapt himself, developing new 'lungs and gills' for this alien water, his life would be confined and atrophied, and eventually wither away."

Over the years, even when working in menial jobs, Nan remains within the Chinese literary community, which introduces him to a broader circle of successful writers. Throughout the novel, Jin uses these encounters to present an odd series of cautionary tales about how not to live as an artist. Most of the names here are fictional, and maybe the writers he punctures are too vain to recognize themselves, but even in Nan's humble voice, there's no mistaking Jin's disdain: the pompous literary lion fawned over by a parasitic graduate student; a writer who manipulates his reputation by recycling positive reviews of his work through different journals; another who dissipates his talent with overexposure; all of them falling "prey to moneygrubbing instead of aspiring to a higher order of artistic achievement." A brief trip to the Iowa Writers' Workshop gives Nan a chance to look down on the next crop of American poets: They're smart enough, but he finds them "quite fragile," writing "mainly for themselves. . . . Poetry had become an esoteric art here, somewhat deprived of its vitality and earnestness."

And earnestness, Jin makes clear over these 600 irony-free pages, is pretty much the pinnacle of his artistic expression. In War Trash, Jin's restrained, unadorned voice rendered the horrors of a Korean prison camp all the more harrowing, but when used at this exhaustive length to describe the details of suburban Georgia, the story grows dull. And the structure of the novel -- scores of short chapters, each just a few pages long -- puts enormous emphasis on episodes that are frequently not very significant. That's a shame, not only because it buries some truly lovely sections involving Nan's wife, but also because the novel's corpulence smothers the poetic sensibility Nan keeps trying to develop.

The plot's lack of momentum is exacerbated by the number of potentially exciting events that rise up but come to naught. It's a pattern established right in the novel's opening when Nan's son is lost during the trans-Pacific flight to America. Don't worry: The boy was just dawdling on the plane. Soon afterward, Nan plots to kidnap the children of Chinese officials studying in America, but he quickly abandons that violent plan. Later, a lawyer swindles them out of their business, but, no, Nan was just being paranoid. A tornado approaches . . . and then blows over. A runaway teenager shows up on their doorstep, but then goes home to her mother. An armed man bursts into the restaurant, but police arrive before he does any harm. A neighbor asks Nan's wife to be a surrogate mother, but she decides not to. By the time their friends' daughter gets leukemia, I had no worries about the girl's future at all. This isn't so much a free life as a charmed one.

And yet throughout, we have to endure Nan's childish outbursts, his melodramatic self-denunciations, his obvious, tardy epiphanies. "Besides dreams, what else can I have?" he whines toward the end. How about a devoted wife, a successful business, a healthy son?

But push on (or skip) to the end: You'll find an epilogue that contains 25 moving, startling "Poems by Nan Wu." These verses roughly chronicle the events in the novel, but they vibrate with the precision and intensity the long preceding narrative lacks:

I prefer to crawl around at my own pace

in the salt water of English.

As for the great ghosts in the temple,

why should I bother about their acceptance?

The light of dawn does not discriminate.

A tree, or butterfly, or stream

(unlike the dog corrupted by humans)

does not notice the color of your skin.

To write in this language is to be alone,

to live on the margin where

loneliness ripens into solitude.

There's no question that Jin's language has ripened into something extraordinary. And taken as a whole, A Free Life is a striking demonstration of the poetic success he craved. But how many readers will endure till its convincing finish?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

[Zinta · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Баясгалан Батсуурь · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If you want to sing
sing clearly
Let grief embolden your song."

Recent days have been passing quiet cheerful with this novel by Ha Jin. Although i have finished it, i know its melancholic atmosphere will linger on in my mind for some more time. It seems to me that Ha Jin is a great novelist with his brilliantly detailed, quite realistic writing. More importantly, "A free life" gave me a new inspiration to write poetry again which i had left in the middle of my way.

[Saleh MoonWalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Onvan : A Free Life - Nevisande : Ha Jin - ISBN : 375424652 - ISBN13 : 9780375424656 - Dar 660 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2007

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first of Ha Jin’s writing to be primarily set in the United States, A Free Life is a meandering, yet nevertheless beautifully written novel, expounding upon and nuancing the prototypical Asian American immigrant narrative. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Wu family (comprised of Nan Wu, the father, Pinging Wu, the mother, and Taotao, the son) must forge a new life in the United States. After Nan drops out of graduate school in political science at Brandeis University, the family must work harder than ever to ensure a successful future. The novel takes us from suburbs of Boston, to New York City, to Atlanta, and in the later stages of the text, back to China. In the meantime, Ha Jin aims to clarify some of the nuances in the Chinese diasporic community by linking some of the difficulties that the Wu family faces directly because of their Mandarin-speaking background. My biggest critique of the novel is that it is just too long, and clocking in at a morbidly obese 660 pages, A Free Life could have certainly used a harsh editor. The uneven plot does little to carry the reader along and really, I believe, it is the strength of Ha Jin’s writing style that lovingly develops and carries what meager momentum there often is for the Wu family. For those that have read some Asian American literature, the narrative itself will seem ultimately overly familiar, for the “American Dream” looms large as a unifying trope in numerous cultural productions and texts. Why it is that we should deign to spend it with this seemingly mundane family does beg the particular question about whether or not Jin aimed to consider this from the perspective of U.S “minority” literatures? Indeed, Nan Wu, an aspiring poet and writer, does at one point, come upon the names Gish Jen and Maxine Hong Kingston, but later rather emulates other more “canonical” poets. Given the immigrant suffering and angst so prevalent in Jen and Kingston’s work, perhaps Nan Wu would have found a different perspective from which to understand, challenge, and critique his own life’s path. Toward the concluding pages of the text, Nan is finally sending out poems for publication: “He mailed out another batch of poems to a small journal called Yellow Leaves, which he had noticed published some Asian American authors” (591). The reader never discovers if his poetic aspirations are successful, only left with an epilogue of Nan’s poems.

[Colleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a little disappointed thus far, but I'm only about 100 pages into it. People gush about this author, but I find that his English prose isn't as engaging as I expected it to be. The concepts are interesting...but I'm not digging the writing.

Having finally finished: 600+ pages of driftiness! There is no plot, just the internal musings of a man trying to find himself. Sometimes, though, in mid-chapter the point of view changes to other characters, even incidental ones about whom we know little. Then there are the annoying anachronisms: the nine year old son is building his own computers in 1992, hanging out on the internet all the time, and in 1994 he's surfing, chatting, emailing, and playing games online with people around the world. Uhmm......NO. Ultimately, there just isn't any POINT to this novel.

[Ruthiella · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main character, Wu Nan, mentions reading Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas in this novel about a Chinese immigrant family’s search for the “American Dream” in the late 20th century. The books are similar in that they are slow moving accounts of an outsider looking to find permanence and security on the inside; both books dwell on the minutiae of daily life.

Occasionally I found the book a little dull as a result of its slow place and lack of plot; and I don’t think that Ha Jin’s prose style is as formidable as Naipaul’s, but on the whole I admired this look into one immigrant family’s experience in the U.S., so very different from my own. Nan is a would be poet who abandons his political science studies after his involvement in dissident activities in the U.S. make his return to China untenable. Over the years, both Nan and his wife Pingping work hard to succeed, even if this means that some dreams must be deferred and some ambitions unrealized. Most notably, I enjoyed the reflection of post Mao China and Chinese politics as seen from the point of view of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S.

I did find it annoying, however, to read the accented Chinese-English phonetically: "zhe" instead of "the" or "Sanks" instead of "Thanks". Just tell me his English is heavily accented, I can do the rest.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read several books by Ha Jin, and this was the first time I was conscious of reading English as a Second Language. That's not actually a complaint. The story is about a Chinese man, a poet, who brings his family to the United States to pursue the American dream. The occasionally jarring idioms or strange wordings just kept me closer to the character. By the end of the book, especially after reading the poems in the appendix, I was in awe of the writer's achievement in English. Also, the story kept me involved - the ups and downs of family life in a foreign country, and the internal struggle of the would-be poet who runs a restaurant. He set the story in Lilburn, where I grew up, and only slightly modified names of places I knew well when I was a kid. That was interesting, too.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sigh. I wanted this book to be awesome--Ha Jin is awesome!--but it REALLY could have benefited from closer editing. It was way too long and dragged a bit--not that his story of a Chinese family acclimating to life in America isn't a great one, but really nothing much happens in it. It's all about a wannabe poet's daily life, which is great, but hard to get caught up in for 600+ pages. Not to mention a couple of character notes that kept popping up--if you've already said that a couple act like newlyweds, does it really need to be repeated in those same words a hundred pages later? Before reading this, I thought it'd be a likely contender for the end of the year list, but instead I give it a B.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Free Life is one of the best portrayals of the experience of immigrants to the US that I've read. Ha Jin captures the pervasive anxiety and uncertainly that both motivates the Wu family's achievements and at the same time sets them apart. The reader constantly fears that racism or flimflam artists or bad decisions will destroy the family, but instead they face illness, temptations to infidelity, financial strains,the loneliness and isolation of suburban life, conflicts with children--common experiences that take particular forms in our capitalistic/individualist society. It is only when Nan visits China after a decade in the US that he realizes that imperceptibly over the years he has become an American. The book does not minimize the sacrifices the Wu family or other Americans make in order to live a "free life," but it nevertheless affirms that the struggle is worth the price.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful, gently-unfolding story of the lives of a Chinese family- Nan and Pingping Wu,and their son Taotao - who must make a life in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre prevents them from returning to China. It does what good novels do; draws you into an unfamiliar world, one that seems to have no identifiable signposts, until you are captive by the recognition and reminder of all that unites us, whatever our nationality or native tongue.

It's not a heart-racing narrative. It unspools by the pace set by the perseverance of naturalization - as one review put it - "bank deposit by bank deposit, dental appointment by dental appointment, appliance purchase by appliance purchase" as the family creates stability and familiarity in a new country. It IS the immigrant experience and it unfolds around us everywhere.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple, beautiful, direct prose that examines what a free life means. Follows the life of Nan, a political science student at Brandeis, and his wife Pingping, who together struggle to get their son to the U.S. from China afer the Tiananmen massacre. Nan works a series of jobs, eventually owning a restaurant and a home in the southeast, all the time trying to balance his dream to be a poet with the practicalities of providing security for his family. I enjoyed the language of this book, as well as the hours I spent mulling over how an indvidual seeks and attains creative freedom. This would be a great book to discuss in a book group, in a class or with friends. But I don't know anyone who's read it yet ...

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story and characters are quite good and I would give the book four stars for that. However, it is way more sprawling than it can really justify. It feels like the author loves the characters so much that he couldn't bear to lose any lines in the book, even when they weren't really useful. It felt as if he indulged them too much, at the expense of the story. The story was still good, and I did like the characters, but the lack of discipline bloated the story at times...enough to knock my overall opinion down a star. Could have perhaps been one of the better books I've read by this author, but the overindulgence messed with that a bit. That's cool though, he wasn't writing the book for me.

[Rachele Hayward · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read tons of positive reviews of this book, and was really looking forward to it... but then I was miserably disappointed. Got through probably the first 100 pages but then sentences like, "he wished he loved his wife, but he really didn't that much," got to me... these were the 2 main characters being described! What kind of description of human emotion is that? I guess it's just something about Jin's writing style, but I thought it was awful.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

A striking, sobering portrayal of modern immigrant life - a story that has not often been told, but one that has a rich history. As the Wu family moves throughout the eastern United States, ever seeking the American Dream and the happiness that they feel certain to one day acheive, Ha Jin peels back layer after layer, exposing the complexities at the heart of mother, father, and son.

[Jessica Keener · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am in the middle of reading this and loving it; savoring the day-to-day details and intimacy of despair, desire, striving that the protagonist, Nan,experiences as tries to find who he is. Cultural dissonances saturate the characters who have left China (by choice or exile) to live in America.

[Ummu Auni · Rating 2 out of 5]

I borrowed this from my friend, I wanted to give this book a higher rating, but towards the end, it wasn't satisfying enough.

The book started off with Taotao arriving in the United States, and he was welcomed by his parents, Nan & Pingping. The story started off quite well, I was wondering the ending would be when they made it in the United States. Nan, a graduate student quit his study and wanted to provide better life for his family. Even though, he married Pingping out of love, but they stayed put because of their son. The author was able to capture the essence of being an outsider living in the US, but most importantly, the struggle that they have to go through, just to survive in the new country. They only have two options: Being in China meant only one thing, they have to go back to the Communist regime, or being in the US, they have to struggle making ends meet.

I was over joyous with the fact that Nan was able to open up a small restaurant, but then the author tend to make it anti climax towards the end, since they sold the restaurant, just to cover for medical expenses, which is quite sad really. It seemed sometimes that Nan tolerated almost everything, and doesn't have the guts to defend what he has.

I was expecting much out of this book, especially Taotao, I wanted to know how well Taotao cope with his surroundings, but the story focused on Nan especially with regards on finding his ex, Bienda. But, I particularly like how he was able to let go everything after meeting his first love.

The ending was unsatisfying indeed. The story just go through the ups and downs with regards to Nan's family, but there was nothing, an achievement/something/cliff hanger to attract my attention towards it. And I was left feeling disappointed.

[MaryJo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Waiting and the Crazed. Both of them intrigued by with their appreciation for the quotidian and their pacing. The Free Life is the first novel by Ha Jin I have read that takes place in the US. It is the story of a man who come to the US as a grad student in Political science (not his choice), who decides not to return to China after the student uprising and Tiananmen Square protests. He and his wife stay in the US and bring their young son to join them here. Nan, the protagonist, leaves graduate school always dreaming of becoming a poet, but stuck with other jobs to earn a living to support his family. He learns to cook at a restaurant job in New York's China town when a gig editing a literary journal falls through. He and his wife eventually buy a chinese restaurant in an Atlanta suburb and struggle to earn a modicum of financial security there. They also learn to define what kind of Chinese Americans they can become as they interact with other Chinese immigrants and US citizens in the area. Nan maintains ties to the poetry world, and the end of the book includes a section of his poetry--in imitation of Dr. Zhivago, a novel that makes a big impression on Nan when he reads it. There was lot I liked here, especially the depictions of the daily life, and Ha Jin's wry appreciation for the human condition. But the book is long, and parts of it were kind of clunky. Nan's long lasting infatuation with is first love whom he left in China also detracts from his appeal. Still this view of contemporary immigrants is a compelling story.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I definitely had mixed feelings about this book. A lot of the time I just wanted to smack the main character. After reading many stories of immigrants who have come to America and won through struggles much more severe than this man he seemed whiny and ungrateful. For instance when he fell into a depression because the struggle to pay off his mortgage wasn't as hard as he'd thought it would be so it wasn't as big of a victory. However, as the book went on I began to think that maybe this was an answer to all the books that are meant to distill the immigrant experience into an everyman journey. This was definitely one individual's experience with all the oddities and and occasional parallels that brings. He certainly did work hard but also made mistakes and squandered things. Though this book is supposed to be fictional the reader can't help but think it is based on the author's experience. It does not have the magical lyricism of others in this genre and sometimes reads as too realistic and humdrum. Perhaps the parts with the most tension deal with the main character's feelings about his native country which are at odds with the Chinese community. And yet it is hard for the reader to feel too strongly about this. Most of the opinions are conveyed essay-style and not really worked deeply into the plot. I won't pan this book but can't highly recommend it either.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book--every word seems to be exactly the right one. One (at least this one) marvels at Ha Jin's extraordinary command of English, putting him in the polylingual stratosphere with Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, etc. It has been several years since I read "A Free Life" but I still can recall the thrill of discovery, having read only Ha Jin's shorter works before this one.

Nan and Pingping Wu are classic strivers in the Horatio Alger rags to riches, pull yourself up by your bootstraps mode, but every move upward (and there are a lot of them as we see the Wus ascend step by step, dollar by dollar, purchase by purchase) is accompanied by panic and anxiety, the haunting fear that everything they have could disappear in an instant--a crooked lawyer, a rapacious landlord, just plain bad luck in deciding what strip mall to put their restaurant--financial and personal ruin lies around every corner.

Nan Wu is a terrific character, one with whom it is impossible (at least for me) not to root for and identify with. Highly recommended for everyone.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book made me want to befriend Nan Wu, this novel's shy and philosophical protagonist. I also wanted to taste the food he served as his restaurant. When I finished it, I was moved by the "journal" and "poetry collection" that served as an epilogue. At some points while reading the novel, I started to feel like I was staring into Nan Wu's belly button, or even picking lint out of it. Fortunately, the novel comes up for air and balances its intense interior portrait of one character with some interesting external and even global perspectives. Not everyone will be able to read this, but those who let themselves be drawn in will come away satisfied by its beautiful and honest reflections on the lives of ordinary people in the U.S., whether immigrants or not -- gender discrimination, racism, the mixed blessing of owning a home or a business, the search for meaning in life, the search for meaning in art, the importance of education, and much more.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I looked back at all of the books I have chosen for reviews to try to find a book I read last year (or actually an audio book that I listened to that I really liked) and I could not find a reference in all of these many books that I've noted. That's unfortunate becausew that book, which was about the Indian acclimitization to America has many similarities to this book. The culture is different here, but the goals end up being similar. I liked this book, just as I liked the previous one that I, unfortunately, cannot remember the name of. There are many differences as the cultures are different and the assimilation ends up taking place in an entirely different part of the US, but the baggage that immigrants bring with them and the desire to move into the American culture are evident - sometimes disturbing, sometimes, fascinating.

A well-written book from an outsider's viewpoint.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally finished this book. It's looong -- in terms of pages and also in terms of narrative. Or lack of narrative. It's mostly a description of the daily life of a Chinese immigrant pursuing the American Dream, questioning the American Dream, and trying to make peace with China and his first love. The language was spare and beautiful but also sort of flat -- the book was written in English, but it was clearly thought in Chinese. The hard work and isolation and insecurity rang very true for me. But I wanted more story, more plot, more transformation...overall, just I wanted more from this book.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ha Jin's writing is both concise and descriptive, a very difficult line to walk. In his novels, the characters and their worlds are complex, without resorting to overdramatization or hyperbole. In "A Free Life," the characters spend most of the time quietly contending with their own internal conflicts and struggles, and these lend even more depth to their personalities as the book progresses. A synopsis of the plot might make it appear that not much happens, but as in everyday life, much of what happens is rooted in subtle interactions between people, and it can be easy to miss if you're not paying attention.

[Charity Hester · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit hard for me to get through and I can't pin point why. I also listened to the book on cd during my drive and disliked the reader, so that may have effected my enjoying the book. I enjoyed reading it much better... Any who, this is next month's book club (yes, I screwed up and read the wrong book!) so I'm sure it will be a fabulous discussion.

Chinese immigrants to modern day America, post Tienanmen Square - very interesting! (Never mind that my work intern just said "what's Tienanmen Square?"). The emotional and personal repercussion of communism on "modern day" China. Fascinating. But this main character drove me crazy! "Grow up! Be a man!" I wanted to shout at him!