The Past Is Another Country

When Ha Jin left China to study literature in the United States, he never anticipated that his move would be permanent. This was in 1985, a very different time, when both Coca-Cola and whispers of democracy were still rare throughout China. Everything changed with the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. In the end, Mr. Jin decided to stay in the United States, and while his focus would wander — he was here as a graduate student, after all — he eventually pieced together a career as a writer of broad, sentimental best sellers about China that seemed political, but weren’t. Much like a character from one of his stories, Mr. Jin’s books entered a system not of his choosing: In the shadow of Tiananmen, it became unfathomable to some that a Chinese author could write about China and not be making some veiled political statement.But Mr. Jin left China too early to write of the frantic, hyper-urbanizing China that the West has grown obsessed with, post-Tiananmen and pre-Olympics, and he has always seemed hesitant to claim the perspective (and privilege) of the exiled dissident. This reluctance courses through “A Free Life” (Pantheon, 660 pages, $26), Mr. Jin’s fifth novel, and the first set entirely in the United States.There is nothing outwardly complicated about this occasionally frustrating and somewhat generic story of a family’s assimilation into its American environment. It opens shortly after the Tiananmen incident, as the bright but lethargic Nan Wu and his dutiful-to-a-fault wife Pingping await reunion with their son Taotao, who has been living in China. Taotao comes to embrace the family’s new life in Boston, where Nan goes through the motions of graduate school and Pingping works as a glorified domestic for a wealthy widow. (Someone who has followed Mr. Jin’s career closely may recognize details — graduate school, a son who flees China after Tiananmen, an affection for Charles Simic — and settings — Atlanta, Boston — borrowed from his own life, though he has always refused claims that his work is autobiographical.)Nan eventually quits his studies, suspecting he has one or two truly magnificent poems in him. But inspiration fails and duty calls: After a brief, disillusioning spell working for a superficially edgy Chinese literary magazine in New York, the family relocates to a suburb of Atlanta, where they own and operate a Chinese restaurant. Despite an air of middle-class comfort, Nan gently struggles with his passions — an old lover who haunts his memories; his inability to truly commit to his wife and son, and his private aspiration to throw it all away and pursue the writer’s life instead.Much like Mr. Jin’s breakthrough novel, “Waiting,” a great deal of “A Free Life” describes how men frequently rationalize their emotional unavailability by claiming a higher purpose — in this case, it is the inextinguishable fire of poetry. These men hurt those around them, so as not to damage them permanently: Nan constantly fantasizes about escape from his loveless obligations to his wife and son, yet he refuses to leave them, which occasionally seems like the crueler fate.In Mr. Jin’s stirring previous works, the struggle between passion and duty was projected against the backdrop of the closed society of Communist-era China. There were few choices to be made, and the very language available to Mr. Jin and his characters reflected that. His plain, unadorned style found a perfect subject in China — huge, idealistic, but confused and paranoid — as it attempted to reset its entire society. Mr. Jin’s works resisted the temptation to damn this impulse, and they rarely fixated on the awful human wreckage that resulted. Instead, Mr. Jin described characters seeking a way off the grid, if only for a moment of solitude or a few minutes of lust-fulfillment. The characters populating “Waiting” and “War Trash” — his strongest novels — weren’t so much skeptics or future dissidents as they were merely confused and exhausted, expressing themselves with a limited vocabulary of freedom.The tension between the individual and society isn’t as pronounced in America, guarantor of the “free life” the characters seek, and Mr. Jin’s prose feels less restrained here. A hint of naïveté plagues “A Free Life,” as when Nan feels “grateful to the American land that had taken in his family and given them an opportunity for a new beginning.” It is the kind of simple, sugary sentiment one rarely finds in Chinese-American fiction, known for describing cultural dislocation in bleaker tones. When Nan visits a museum dedicated to Chinese immigrant culture, he walks away depressed that the American promise has produced Gish Jen and Amy Tan, but “no Picasso or Faulkner or Mozart.” Nan’s “new beginning” is meant to be a spectacular one, free of history or imaginary attachments to a Chinese ideal.There is certainly nothing wrong with Nan’s peachy keen faith in the American Dream. It is occasionally charming, in fact, thanks largely to Mr. Jin’s remarkable ear for the accents and rhythms of Chinese immigrant speech. He brilliantly reduces the intergenerational struggle of this family to a funny scene in which the angsty, Americanized son calls the poet father a “douche bag.” Unable to find the word in his Chinese-English dictionary, Nan “asked his son how to spell it, but the boy wouldn’t tell him.”Nan is a frustrating central character, feebly working toward an ideal he seems intelligent enough to deconstruct. He is sharp enough to play with our notions of identity, as when he brilliantly toys with his customers’ expectations for culinary authenticity at his Chinese restaurant. He maintains a respect for the art over the artist, even as he struggles to find readers for his own work. When he befriends a circle of famed poets — composites of Mr. Jin’s real-life friends, one assumes — he chides their market-driven ambitions, rather than prostrating himself to them.Most important, Nan refuses to play the position of the native informant. Throughout the book, Nan witnesses each of his dimwitted peers peddle fragments of their identity and ascend to some inconceivable height: The visionless, oft-drunk publisher of the literary magazine remakes himself as a political firebrand, just as America’s appetite for Chinese dissidents grows to faddish extremes. A friend from graduate school becomes a literary sensation back in China by penning paint-by-numbers tales of his days in America, while another refashions himself as a wealthy painter-guru. At times, it seems like anyone can find work as a Chinese interlocutor for an American patron — a scenario eerily similar to present reality, as travelogues, books warning of a coming standoff with China, and reprints of Pearl S. Buck find eager audiences.Instead, Nan sits on the sidelines, refusing anything easy and ignoble. (Perhaps Nan represents Mr. Jin’s younger self, steadfast in a belief that literature should transcend the author’s autobiography.) When a famous poet tells him he should cash in with a memoir, he retorts that such a book “should be written by someone who had experienced something extraordinary.” Principle or self-rationalized lethargy, it is frustrating that Nan ultimately invests his faith in some abstract promise that “a free life” will deliver him from this superfluous existence. As the book draws to its very uneventful close, the possibility arises that perhaps Nan has suffered from too much freedom — that the freedom of too many choices has merely paralyzed him. The realization haunts the epilogue, a collection of Nan’s diary entries and unpublished poetry that recasts the events of the preceding 600 pages in self-aware, sparsely gorgeous tones: a casualty of the free world, perhaps.Mr. Hsu teaches English at Vassar College. He last wrote for these pages on the novelist Douglas Coupland.

The Past Is Another Country

The Past Is Another Country

More from the New York Sun

Trump’s PAC Pours More Than $800,000 Into Last-Minute Get Out the Vote Messaging Campaign for Darline Graham

Robots on a Roll: Ukraine Stages World’s First ‘Drone Parade’

Jeffries Addresses Private Meeting With Kushner, Saying Conversation Will Not Affect Democratic Investigations Into the ‘Trump Cartel’

The Luxury Condos Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax Missed

Abbott Asks Federal Court To Reject Minnesota’s Effort To Force ‘Rushed’ Extradition of ICE Agent

Harry and Meghan’s Professional Future Murky as Ex-‘Working Royals’ Return to Prodigal Prince’s Homeland

America’s $40 Trillion National Debt Is Less Alarming Than It Appears

A Muddled ‘Real Ivanov’ Strains for Modern Resonance

More from the New York Sun

Trump’s PAC Pours More Than $800,000 Into Last-Minute Get Out the Vote Messaging Campaign for Darline Graham

Robots on a Roll: Ukraine Stages World’s First ‘Drone Parade’

Jeffries Addresses Private Meeting With Kushner, Saying Conversation Will Not Affect Democratic Investigations Into the ‘Trump Cartel’

The Luxury Condos Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax Missed

Abbott Asks Federal Court To Reject Minnesota’s Effort To Force ‘Rushed’ Extradition of ICE Agent

Harry and Meghan’s Professional Future Murky as Ex-‘Working Royals’ Return to Prodigal Prince’s Homeland

America’s $40 Trillion National Debt Is Less Alarming Than It Appears

A Muddled ‘Real Ivanov’ Strains for Modern Resonance