Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
'A Free Life' explores pursuit of liberty
A Chinese immigrant finds that poetry does not always flow freely, nor does happiness.
By Vikram Johri, Special to the Times
Published October 28, 2007
A Free Life
By Ha Jin
Pantheon, 672 pages, $26
---
"The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work." This quote from William Butler Yeats is the bedrock of Ha Jin's latest novel, A Free Life. This book, which follows Jin's critically acclaimed Waiting and War Trash, is an intricate peek into the artist's sensibility. Nan Wu, a poet at heart, emigrates from China with his wife Pingping (followed later by their son Taotao), and opens a Chinese restaurant, the Gold Wok, in Atlanta. But Nan, forever trying to make a name for himself as a poet, does not locate happiness in his dreary existence. He is happy at having escaped the Communist excesses of China, but his new position, as a man working day and night to make ends meet, offers few of the consolations of "a free life." Within this banality, Nan searches for the perfect muse, in the image of Doctor Zhivago's Lara. He senses a deep connection with the book in its exploration of a poet-doctor torn between two women. It troubles him that the novel does not explore its hero's efforts to develop his poetry, and he cannot see how the poems at the back of the book relate to the prose. Jin uses this device masterfully and includes a stash of Nan's poems at the end of A Free Life. Amid this Chekovian portrait of life and its soothing dailiness, Jin is also a deeply subversive writer. On a trip to Beijing, Nan encounters a city intent on destroying every fragment of its past to showcase its modernity. The hypocrisy of a regime that must touch up its Communist ills to make them palatable is a recurrent theme. But this does not imply a simplistic view of life in America; Jin is too nuanced a writer for that. Nan must accept his shortcomings, yet he must, for his own sake, keep trying to live the life of the artist. It is in Jin's evocation of this compromise that A Free Life breaks free of the shackles of the novel to become something greater: a love song to the pull of art. Vikram Johri is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a writer in New Delhi, India. A Free Life By Ha Jin Pantheon, 672 pages, $26
[Last modified October 24, 2007, 18:23:21]
Share your thoughts on this story
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Letter to the editor
