The Americanization of Ha Jin

Ha Jin was never terribly interested in learning English. After the Cultural Revolution ended and Chinese universities finally reopened in 1977, the 21-year-old from Liaoning applied to Heilongjiang University and had to list five courses of study he was keen on pursuing. He named English last--after classics, philosophy, world history and library science--but that's what he got stuck with. Before long, however, Ha Jin, like many of his peers and teachers, fell in love with American literature and buried himself in the recently unbanned works of Faulkner and Hemingway--a welcome change from the acceptably "proletariat" Steinbeck, Jack London and Langston Hughes.

Thirty years later, that last-choice assignment has turned out to be the key to his success. Ha Jin went on to earn a master's in American literature from Shandong University, writing occasional poetry in Chinese, and then traveled to America to pursue a doctorate at Brandeis University. He published his first book of English-language poetry, "Between Silences," in 1990; nine years later, he won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel "Waiting," about a Chinese Army doctor who keeps trying to divorce his wife so he can marry his sweetheart.

With his sensitive new novel, "A Free Life," Ha Jin crosses another literary threshold: it's his first book set in America. It follows Chinese poet and intellectual Nan Wu, along with his wife, Pingping, on the rapid journey from tentative new immigrant to successful Atlanta restaurateur and homeowner to discontented U.S. citizen hungering for more life of the mind. "The struggle had ended so soon that he felt as though the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax," writes Ha Jin of his protagonist. "In just a few years he'd gone through the journey that often took most immigrants a whole lifetime … It seemed that he had forgotten his goal and gotten lost in making money. Why hadn't he devoted himself to writing poetry?"

Ha Jin first conceived "A Free Life" in 1992, after a friend showed him a book of poems written in Chinese by a restaurant owner in Waltham, Mass. "I was very touched by that," he says. "I began to imagine how it would be to write that book." It's populated by a rich assortment of complicated characters, both Chinese and American, who fret and argue over the purpose of poetry, as well as such subjects as religion, Chinese adoption and the perils of U.S. citizenship. Ha Jin gives them plenty of room to ponder and grow. He fills the last 25 pages with Nan's English-language poems--a few of which Ha Jin published previously, but most of which he wrote fresh from Nan's perspective. "The poems took a long time," he says. "It was a huge risk. But I realized I had to so Nan wouldn't appear as a total crackpot."

Still, Ha Jin is quick to point out that Nan's story is not his own. "I was more fortunate than Nan," he says. "I didn't work in a restaurant." In fact, his experience more closely resembles that of Nan's friend Dick Harrison, a well-regarded American poet and teacher. Yet there are certain elements of the narrative that directly mirror Ha Jin's life; the novel opens with Nan and Pingping traveling from Boston to San Francisco's airport to greet their young son, who had been living with his grandparents until the parents got settled--just as Ha Jin's son did in the 1980s, after Ha Jin and then his wife moved to America.

Like Ha Jin, Nan grapples with whether to write in English--a metaphor for his growing comfort in America. At the novel's outset, he and Pingping converse largely in Chinese, denoted by italicized print, and their English speech is ungrammatical, heavily accented and rife with malapropisms. But as the story progresses, they get noticeably more fluent. Other characters remark on it, and at one point Nan observes with surprise that during an argument, neither he nor Pingping uttered a single word of Chinese. But no matter how facile he becomes at expressing himself in English, insecurity persists--a sense the author certainly shares. "I don't feel I'll ever be really at home in English," says Ha Jin, who calls the language in this novel more "playful" than in previous ones. "The question is how to use that to my advantage."