A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  The waitress smirked, collected the menus, and left.

  “What’s that?” Taotao asked his mother, pointing at half a side of roast pork hanging behind glass above a counter.

  “Golden pig,” she answered.

  “And those?”

  “Roast ducks? Want some?”

  “Not now.”

  “It tastes no good, too fatty,” Nan said. Then he chuckled as he remembered that when Taotao was a baby, barely able to use a spoon, the boy had liked meat and seafood so much that he’d hog them at a meal and even declare, “I want to eat it all. I don’t leave any for others.”

  Nan looked around and saw a few people eating noodles and wontons. The Cantonese ate lightly at lunch and wouldn’t order so much food as he had. The air was rife with fried scallion and soy sauce. Nan usually liked those smells in a Chinese restaurant, but today the usual aromas somehow irritated his nose. Feeling that his hands were a little sticky, he got up and went to the restroom to wash them.

  On his way back to the table, he caught sight of the community newspaper, Asian Voice, stacked on a steel rack near the restaurant’s side entrance. He picked up a copy. Sitting down, he opened the paper and saw a full page of photographs of some recent scenes from Beijing. One of them showed a naked soldier hanging, by a piece of iron wire, on the window frame of a burned bus, his feet dangling and still in boots. Beside him stood a rectangle of cardboard bearing two vertical lines of words, which read: “He killed five civilians and was caught when he ran out of bullets. He got his comeuppance!”

  The Wus’ order came with plain rice. The steaming soup was made with slivers of chicken, shrimp, snow peas, and slices of bamboo shoot. Both dishes tasted good, though Taotao didn’t like the squid in the casserole. He wanted more portabella mushroom, and his mother put several pieces on his plate. “Why don’t we have big bowls?” he asked.

  “Here people use only small bowls for soup in a restaurant,” Pingping answered.

  Gingerly he took a bite of a sliver of chicken as if afraid it was underdone. But soon he became more confident, chewing without hesitation.

  Halfway through lunch, Nan said to Taotao, showing him the photos in the newspaper, “Look here, all these are civilians slaughtered by the People’s Liberation Army.”

  “Put that away! He’s eating,” Pingping protested.

  “I just want him to see the truth. Well, Taotao, see how many people they butchered? Here are some bodies and bikes crushed by a tank.”

  His wife begged, “Please let him finish lunch in peace.”

  “Dad, isn’t this an army uncle?” The boy pointed at the hanged soldier.

  “Yes. But he killed some civilians and got his punishment. Don’t you think he deserved it?”

  Taotao was silent for a moment, staring at his plate, then mumbled, “No.”

  “Why not?” Nan felt frustrated and thought his son was stubborn and hopeless. His bushy mustache bristled.

  “Even for that, people shouldn’t kill each other,” Taotao said in a small voice.

  Stupefied, Nan didn’t know how to respond for a good while. His wide-spaced eyes gazed at his son as something stirred in his chest, which was so full that he lost his appetite. He managed to finish the food on his plate, then refilled his teacup.

  “Don’t you want some more?” Pingping asked.

  “I’ve had enough,” he sighed. Then his voice turned husky. “This boy is too good-natured and must never go back. He can’t survive there. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but he must become an American.”

  “I’m glad you said that,” she agreed.

  “I don’t want to be American, Mama!” Taotao wailed. “I want to go home.”

  “All right,” she said. “Don’t talk. Eat. You’re a Chinese, of course.”

  Nan’s eyes glistened with tears, and his cheek twitched. He turned to look out the window. On the narrow street tourists were strolling in twos and threes, and a few Asian men wore cameras around their necks.

  The waitress came again and placed in front of Nan a tiny tray that contained three fortune cookies, three toothpicks sheathed in cellophane, and a bill lying facedown. Although the lunch cost only twenty-six dollars, Nan left a five for tip. He meant to show the woman that some FOJs also had a fat wallet. Taotao had never seen a fortune cookie before; he pocketed them all.

  In the hotel the TV was showing a Chaplin movie. Taotao was at once captivated by it, laughing so hard that he coughed and gasped continually. He kept brandishing his hands above his head and would jump on the bed whenever a funny scene came on. Pingping was worried and told him to sit down and not to laugh so loudly lest people in the adjacent rooms hear him. Yet when the starved shorty appeared on the screen, wearing a patch of mustache and walking with splayed feet and bowed legs, visualized his fellow worker as a plump chicken and set about chasing him with an ax, Taotao sprang to his feet again, skipping around and shrieking gleefully. Nan was amazed that, all at once, the boy had become so at home here. He couldn’t help but grow thoughtful. Indeed, for a child, home is where his parents are and where he feels happy and safe. He doesn’t need a country.

  Nan was exhausted and soon fell fast asleep in spite of the racket Taotao was kicking up. After the silent film, the TV showed Tom and Jerry. Although Taotao didn’t understand it all, the wild cartoon kept him rolling all the same. Pingping was afraid that he might get sick, he was so excited.

  3

  HEIDI MASEFIELD’S house sat at the center of two and a half acres of prime land in Woodland, a suburban town twenty miles west of Boston. Near the southern side of this antique colonial stood an immense maple, whose shade fell on several windows in the summertime and kept the rooms cool. From one of its thick boughs hung a swing, two pieces of rope attached to a small legless chair. Except for the terrace at the back of the house and the driveway that led to a country road, the land was covered entirely by the manicured lawn. A line of lilac bushes encircled the property, replaced by low field-stone walls at the front entrance to the yard. During the summer the Masefields were staying on Cape Cod, in a beach bungalow near Falmouth, so the Wus could use the Woodland house for themselves. Heidi would be coming back every other week to pick up mail and pay bills. She and her two children wouldn’t return until early September, when the elementary school started.

  Two years ago Dr. Masefield, a plastic surgeon, had drowned in a sailing accident, so his wife had needed someone to help her with housework and to care for her son and daughter. Her sister-in-law, Jean, under whose supervision Nan had once worked as a custodian in a medical building, introduced the Wus to her. Heidi was so pleased when she saw the young couple, who looked steady and were so polite and cleanly dressed, that she hired them on the spot. She let the Wus use the two bedrooms in the attic in exchange for work—Pingping was to cook and do laundry while Nan would drive the children to school in the mornings, and, if their mother was too busy to fetch them, he’d pick them up in the afternoons as well. In addition to free lodging, Heidi paid Pingping two hundred dollars a week. Although she was rich, Heidi was determined not to take her children to restaurants very often, to prevent them from falling into the habit of dining out. So Pingping cooked breakfast and dinner for them on weekdays. The housework wasn’t heavy. Two black women, Pat and her daughter, Jessica, would come once a week to vacuum the floors and clean all the bathrooms except the one in the attic apartment—the mother did most of the work while the daughter, almost twenty, sat around reading. There was also Tom, a firefighter who worked the night shift at the Woodland Fire Station. He came regularly to mow the lawn and prune the flowers and bushes. He also plowed snow and sanded the driveway in the wintertime. Working for Heidi gave the Wus another great advantage they hadn’t foreseen—their son now could go to the excellent public school here.

  Amazingly, Taotao wasn’t jet-lagged at all. For a whole day he skipped up or bounced down the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the house. But he didn’t dare go out by himself yet. N
ow and then he looked out the windows of the kitchen and the study. He marveled at the detached garage that had recognized their car from a distance last night and opened automatically, as if welcoming them home. The lawn impressed him so much that he said, “Mama, I’m going to tell Grandpa there’s green carpet everywhere outside our house.”

  “It’s just grass.” Pingping smiled. “Why don’t you go out and see it?”

  “Can you come with me?”

  “Are you still scared?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Mother and son went out so he could touch the grass with his hands. She wore a lavender wraparound skirt, and Taotao had on white shorts and maroon leather sandals. The boy loved the feel of the grass under his feet and kept running about as if chasing a phantom ball. His legs were sturdy but slightly bandy, like his father’s. After he had frolicked for a while, Pingping took him to the woods beyond the northern end of the Masefields’ property to see if they could find a few mushrooms. Under her arm was a thick book; she had to depend on the pictures to tell the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones here. Together mother and son left the yard, where parts of the grass were glimmering softly and the lawn was shaded in places by the long shadows of the house and the trees.

  Nan saw his wife and son fade away into the woods. He was glad that for the rest of the summer they could use this house for themselves, but at the same time his mind was restless, teeming with worrisome thoughts. So many things had happened recently that he was still in a daze. Six weeks earlier, when the field armies were poised to attack the demonstrators in Beijing, some Chinese graduate students at Brandeis University, where Nan had been working toward a Ph.D. in political science, had discussed all the possible means of preventing the violence from being unleashed. They talked for hours on end, but were mainly blowing off steam. Then, without thinking twice, Nan tossed out the idea that they might seize some of the top officials’ children studying in the Boston area, especially those at MIT, and demand that their fathers revoke martial law and withdraw the troops from the capital. He was prompted by anger, just having seen on TV soldiers beating civilians with belts, clubs, and steel helmets, many faces smashed, bathed in blood and tears. To his surprise, his fellow compatriots took his suggestion so seriously that they began planning a kidnap. But before they could seize any hostages, the massacre broke out in Beijing and it was too late to do anything. Instead they went to Washington to demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy. Nan joined them and stood shouting slogans before that ugly brick building, in which the officials and staff hid themselves and wouldn’t show their faces but would give the demonstrators either the finger or the victory sign through the window curtains.

  Back from D.C., he was shocked by another incident. Hansong, a visiting scholar in East Asian Studies at Harvard, whom Nan had known quite well and who had been actively involved in the aborted kidnap plot, had kept a pistol that he was supposed to return to the gun dealer. Rumor had it that his girlfriend had disappeared in Tiananmen Square and that she must have been killed by the army and buried somewhere in a mass grave. Crazed, Hansong ran out one night and had a row with a homeless man in a park in Water-town. He pulled out his revolver and shot the old man in the head. Nan was so shaken by the killing and by his own involvement in the unexecuted kidnapping that he declared to Pingping that he would never participate in any political activities again. He also decided to give up his graduate work in political science, which he had never liked but which he had been assigned to study when he was admitted to college back in China. Later, he hadn’t had any choice but to stay within the same field when he went on to earn a master’s degree. Now he felt too sick of it to continue studying it.

  He had decided to quit graduate school, but he had no idea what he was going to do. It was said that the U.S. government would take measures to protect the Chinese students and scholars who didn’t return to their homeland, so he should be able to stay here legally, but what unnerved him was that from now on he couldn’t rely on the university for financial aid anymore. Such an independent condition was new to him. Back in China he had always been a member of a work unit that provided a salary, shelter (usually a bed or at most a room), coupons for cloth and grain and cooking oil, medical care, and sometimes even free condoms. As long as he didn’t cause trouble for the authorities, his livelihood was secure. Now he would have to earn a living by himself and also support his family. He was free, free to choose his own way and to make something of himself. But what were the choices available for him? Could he survive in this land? The feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed him.

  A week ago, Hansong, the deranged man, had been committed to a mental hospital. Nan hadn’t gone to see him, but his friend Danning, who had opposed the kidnap idea from the very beginning, had visited Hansong at the asylum and left him with a tin of jasmine tea, which made Nan wonder if an inmate in there could have free access to hot water. Danning had told Nan that Hansong grinned at him without any trace of remorse. “He’s a real psychopath now. His loony smile spooked me and made my scalp crawl,” Danning said.

  How fortunate it was that Hansong’s mental state had prevented him from talking; otherwise he might have revealed their plan for the kidnap. Then every one of them would have been dragged to court.

  Pingping and Taotao returned with just one fat yellow mushroom, the kind called Slippery Jack. There had been a drought, and most fungi in the woods had vanished. Nan noticed that since they’d flown back from San Francisco, his son hadn’t even once mentioned returning to China. Taotao seemed to be adapting quickly. Although unable to read a word of English yet, the boy was fascinated by an old set of Britannica, which his parents had bought at a church bazaar. He looked at the pictures in some volumes and raised all kinds of questions. He was eager to test his father and even asked him which planet was bigger—Mercury or Saturn? Nan couldn’t give a definite answer and just guessed, “Mercury.”

  “Wrong!” the boy announced, beaming. He seized every opportunity to make fun of his dad. One of his favorite tricks was to tie a long chain of rubber bands to Nan’s toe so that the whole thing would hit his sole when released from the other end. Nan was pleased by his son’s little pranks, which he felt indicated that the child had accepted him as his dad.

  Even though the Wus had the entire house to themselves, they confined themselves to the attic except when they had to use the kitchen downstairs. In their spacious room upstairs stood a large bed, Nan’s desk, a coffee table under the window facing the northern yard. Two of the walls were lined with books, most of which were the Masefields’. Nan had the habit of reading late at night, so he and his wife slept separately most of the time. Since their child shared the bed with Pingping now, Nan was left alone. He used the other room in the attic. It was smaller but fully furnished, with a pair of single beds and a redwood nightstand in between. This room had occasionally served as a guest room for the Masefields.

  Before going to sleep, Nan opened a volume of Robert Frost’s poems and began to read. He loved Frost, Auden, Whitman, Li Po, and Tu Fu, but sometimes he couldn’t fully understand the poetry written in English. Tonight his eyes were heavy, and from time to time the words blurred into a solid block and then faded from the page. Before he could finish the long poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” the book slid from his hand and plopped on the carpet. Without noticing it, he fell asleep, snoring lightly while the porcelain lamp still glowed on the nightstand.

  The next day the Wus went to the mall in Watertown to buy toys for Taotao. The boy wasn’t interested in cars, or guns, or bicycles, or stuffed animals. He wanted a large telescope so that he could watch the stars. His parents bought it for him for $105. The moment they came back, Taotao opened the long carton and began assembling the telescope. He couldn’t read the instructions but wouldn’t let his father help. Whenever Nan picked up a knob or screw, the boy would yell, “Put that down!” Somehow he managed to join the pieces together without a glitch, as if he had owned such a thi
ng before. He wouldn’t go down to eat dinner until he set the tube on the tripod.

  Unfortunately it was an overcast night, so his parents wouldn’t go out with him to stargaze. This upset him. After dinner, he was told to go upstairs and clear away the paper and the plastic bags, putting them in the trash can in the bathroom, and then come down again to look at a picture book together with his mother. Pingping had checked some childrens’ books out of the town library to prepare herself for teaching him how to read English.

  As she and Nan were talking about how to register him at the elementary school, suddenly something thudded on the stairs, followed by footsteps and a clack. “Taotao,” Pingping called out, “are you all right?”

  There was no response. Then, to their amazement, the boy scurried into the kitchen, dragging his red suitcase, which now had a squashed corner. “I’m packing, leaving for home,” he announced, his face sullen.

  “What did you say?” his mother asked.

  “I’m going back to Grandpa and Grandma.”

  That astounded his parents. After a brief pause, they burst out laughing. “Well, you’re welcome to leave,” Nan told him with a straight face.

  The boy was puzzled. “I’m packing.”

  “Sure. Do it, quickly,” Pingping urged.

  Taotao let go of the suitcase, dropped down onto the floor, and broke out crying. “I miss Grandma and Grandpa!”

  That frightened his parents, who had thought he was merely bluffing because they wouldn’t go out with him to stargaze. His mother picked him up, sat him on her lap, wiped away his tears with her fingers, and rocked him gently. Nan said, “Come on, we’ll watch stars when there are no clouds, all right?”

  “You’re already a big boy,” his mother added. “You should know we can’t go back anymore. We’ll have to live here. China won’t let us live in peace if we return. You know, Dad and Mom are going to work very hard so that we can have our own home someday.”