Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "Portrait of the Artist as an Immigrant: Ha Jin's Quintessentially Chinese-American Novel" by Ruth Franklin (©2007 by Washington Post. Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC).

It is a literary truism that writers ought to write in their native language. Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Thomas Mann, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz: They all spent much of their lives far from their homelands, but their work is inconceivable in any language other than its original. With few exceptions, writers who break this mold are met with incredulity. Creativity, so the mythology goes, can spring only from an original source.

The work of Ha Jin, who has lived in the Unite States for more than 20 years and now teaches creative writing at Boston University, has been greeted with similar wonderment. With the publication of A Free Life, his fifth novel(there have also been three books of poetry and two of short stories), he is still fielding the perennial question: Why does he choose to write in English?

A Free Life—Jin's most personal novel, though not exactly autobiographical—confronts the taboo head on. This meandering yet deeply affecting novel is at once a version of the classic saga of an immigrant family adjusting to life in the United States and a highly unconventional portrait of the artist as an immigrant, family man, and all-around ordinary guy. While Jin has always been polite to his interviewers, it seems quite clear that Nan Wu, the poet who is the protagonist of A Free Life, speaks for his creator in response to a magazine editor who asks, "Can you imagine your work becoming part of our language?" Nan bristles: "I have no answer to that xenophobic question, which ignores the fact that the vitality of English has partly resulted from its ability to assimilate all kinds of alien energies."

In a relaxed narrative, A Free Life follows Nan over the course of a double journey: his quest to provide his family with financial stability while simultaneously realizing his dream of becoming a poet. He starts off working odd jobs, but soon he and his wife, Pingping, have saved up enough money to buy a Chinese restaurant and a house of their own. By all the benchmarks of the American dream, they are successful. But Nan worries that the banality of his daily existence is stifling him as a writer. "Do you have to live a literary life to produce literary work?" he asks a poet friend. By closely tracking every step of Nans creative genesis, Jin's novel offers an alternative vision of imaginative growth inspired precisely by the most mundane circumstances.

Ha Jin has said that he sees himself as a Chinese American writer: "I need the hyphen." A Free Life is the quintessential Chinese-American book, in which the dilemma of how to exist simultaneously in two worlds—on both sides of that hyphen-animates every page. Like the famously four-toned Chinese dialect of Mandarin, the novel takes place in multiple registers First there is the dominant narrative voice, at times fluid and evocative, but also idiosyncratic and clunky: Though it is disguised as a conventional third-person narrator, this is Nan's literary voice struggling to find its way in English. Sometimes he overdose the literary effects, as when he describes a Chinese restaurant as "glazed entirely with mirror, on which some sea creatures were blazoned." And sometimes he overshoots in search of the right word or drops in a jarring colloquialism. This is the work of a man who speaks English as if he had learned it from the dictionary—and indeed, we often glimpse Nan studying his dictionary during lulls on the job.

Nan's literary voice contrasts dramatically with his heavily accented speech, a device that works to emphasize the gap between Nans fluent thoughts and his speech: Though he will come close to mastering English in his head, he will never sound fully competent to others.

Somewhat less convincing is Jin's other major stylistic choice. While his other works have been rigorously structured, A Free Life is loose and baggy, with episodes that lead down dead ends and digressions that amount to little. The Wus' life is full of dramatic events, but they are presented in a tone of almost comical understatement. This artlessness feels intentional, an approximation of how a talented but unschooled writer like Nan might tell his own story.

It is a testimony to Jin's abilities that the novel manages to be engrossing despite its total disregard for narrative tension. The charm of A Free Life comes from its cheerful subversiveness, its gentle upending of the most persistent myths about the creation of art.