Free, not always easy

In Ha Jin's new novel, a Chinese immigrant finds a brave, baffling new world

Ha Jin, a professor of English at Boston University and the author of the novels "The Crazed," "War Trash," and "Waiting," winner of the National Book Award. (TANIT SAKAKINI/THE BOSTON GLOBE)

A Free Life
By Ha Jin
Pantheon, 660 pp., $26

In his "History of the Peloponnesian War," Thucydides called freedom "the secret of happiness" and added that it requires "a brave heart" - by which he meant a willingness to fight for it. The immigrants from China in Ha Jin's "A Free Life," his first novel set in America, discover that freedom also requires a different sort of bravery because it guarantees opportunity but not security. For those unprepared for it, freedom can be overwhelming and terrifying.

Writing, too, involves uncertainty and resolve, and Jin has taken all sorts of risks in his eighth novel. Its American setting is a major departure from his earlier books, which concerned a subject of almost guaranteed fascination for American readers - China under Mao, a culture largely closed to westerners.

"A Free Life" is a big, bulky saga about a Chinese immigrant's first 12 years in the United States. It charts "bookish," hard-working Nan Wu's pursuit of the American Dream, which becomes an odyssey toward self-discovery and self-realization. It is not a page-turner, but is cumulatively engaging as one penetrates deeper into the lives of Jin's sympathetic characters. Among its riskier moves, "A Free Life" ends - like Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," which it explicitly cites - with an appended collection of rather banal poems attributed to its poet-protagonist.

Jin's new book is more expansive and autobiographical than his beloved 1999 National Book Award winner, "Waiting," or his last two novels, "War Trash" and "The Crazed." In its unbridled scope, it reads at times like a first novel into which the author has poured his heart and soul and everything he has felt and seen while adjusting to "this lonesome, unfathomable, overwhelming land."

Like his protagonist, the author left China in 1985 to earn a PhD at Brandeis and decided to stay in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which disillusioned him with his native country. Both author and character move from the Boston area to Atlanta for work - Wu to buy a restaurant, Jin to teach English at Emory University before returning in 2002 to a full professorship at Boston University. Most important, both Jin and his hero make the difficult decision, much discussed in this novel, to write in the language of their adopted land, in the tradition of Conrad and Nabokov.

But whereas Jin began publishing poems and then fiction shortly after earning his doctorate, his character takes a harder path: He abandons his graduate studies in political science, realizing that his passion is poetry. Despite an education that would win him privileged status in China, he is more comfortable selling his brawn than his brains to support his wife and son in America, saving the latter for his true vocation. He's a reluctant capitalist, running his own small restaurant as an expedient route toward self-sufficiency.

Poetry is Wu's obsession, and we hear a lot about it. He loves W. H. Auden and Robert Frost, attends readings, and worries that he's wasting his life behind a wok. Like that of the doctor in "Waiting" who endures 18 years trying to free himself from an arranged marriage, Wu's essential life is on hold while he toils for the economic security that will allow him the luxury of work that might not pay off. Also like the doctor, Wu is not in love with his wife, Pingping, though he appreciates her steadfastness and is "determined to be a decent husband and father." For years, he pines for the woman who spurned him back in China. He hopes that tapping into that passion will stoke his verse.

Narrated in the third person, the novel closely tracks Wu's constant comparisons between China and America. After Tiananmen, he realizes that his future is uncharted: "He was free, free to choose his own way and make something of himself. But what were the choices available for him? Could he survive in this land? The feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed him." He notes that "freedom is meaningless if you don't know how to use it."

Nan and Pingping work "like coolies" in their restaurant. Owning a business and home aren't security enough; even a small mortgage feels unbearable to them. They fret about health insurance. Their goal, like that of so many waves of American immigrants, is to give their son a better life than theirs.

Jin explores Wu's bitterness toward China, an attitude he debates repeatedly with poet friends. Wu's outspokenness raises hackles among those who celebrate their native land but not its government: "I spit at China, because it treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands nothing but obedience. To me, loyalty is a two-way street. China has betrayed me, so I refuse to remain its subject anymore."

"A Free Life" is a leisurely, generous tale, with room for a parade of quotidian, homely incidents that convey the texture of life: back spasms, gingivitis, a backyard drake tangled in fish hooks, a miscarriage, concerns about a derelict neighbor, a son's first Halloween, cross-country drives through lush landscape, and endless discussions about money, the evils of nationalism, and what constitutes a worthwhile existence.

There are times one wishes Jin had been more selective and taken an editor's pencil to his manuscript. But there is also something apt about a book that is as vast and unbounded as the brave and overwhelming new world it describes.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for newspapers.