A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  Livia dropped her eyes, misting up. She said to Pingping, “My mom’s friends all say you and Nan split up. My mom is afraid you’ll stay with us forever. To be honest, I won’t mind.” That was true. Livia was fond of Pingping, who was the only one who had contradicted Dr. Hornburger’s prognosis that the girl wouldn’t grow taller than five feet. Even her mother believed that Kraut.

  “They just gossip,” Pingping said. “Nan won’t walk out from Taotao and me. He’s good man.”

  Despite saying that, Pingping got more agitated than ever. She could see the logic behind the rumor. What if Nan hit it off with some woman in New York who could win his heart? Wouldn’t he start an affair and then abandon Taotao and her? If this happened back in China she might not be devastated, because she was a complete person there and could do anything by herself. But here she depended on him for many things, and Taotao needed him as his dad. Indeed, before they had decided to immigrate, she had even planned to divorce Nan after they returned to China, where she would raise their child by herself. That was why for years she had been determined to make money. But in this place she couldn’t live separately from Nan, and at all costs she must hold the family together, to give Taotao a safe, loving home. What’s more, recently she somehow could no longer bear the thought that Nan might go and live with another woman. She knew she’d get jealous like crazy if that happened. So now she must have him back. The longer he stayed in New York, the more trouble might start.

  17

  NAN came back and talked with Pingping, who agreed they shouldn’t rush to move out. To their amazement, Heidi had made up her mind to dismiss them, although she would let them stay another half year. She said, “I’ll need someone for house-sitting this summer anyway. But after August I won’t be able to use your help anymore. Are we clear about that?” Her face was wooden. The Wus thanked her for offering them the extended period.

  Nan wondered if he should return to New York, but decided not to, now that he could cook like a professional. He called Howard to apprise him of his decision. His boss said he understood and would send him his last week’s pay. That moved Nan, who had never thought he could get the wages.

  That night he and Pingping went to bed together, but he found all his condoms punctured or cut by scissors. “That must be our son’s doing,” she said, tittering.

  Nan didn’t reproach Taotao, realizing that the boy must have resented his absence from home. He smiled and said to his wife, “How could he understand sex? I knew nothing about it until I was thirteen.”

  “Here children reach puberty earlier. He has read some small books on biology and knows a lot about how babies are made.”

  “Still, it’s too early for him to be so interested.”

  “It doesn’t matter, as long as we love him and raise him well.”

  He said no more and went on making love to Pingping, who soon began to come. But she dared not scream for fear of waking up their son. She murmured tearfully while licking Nan’s chest, saying she couldn’t live without him. If only she could keep him home forever!

  The next day Nan began to look through job ads in the Boston Globe and World Journal. This time he wanted to be a cook. Two Chinese restaurants interviewed him, and the Jade Café in Natick hired him as a sous-chef. He was to start the following Monday.

  PART THREE

  1

  ONE DAY in the early summer of 1991, Nan came across an advertisement in World Journal for the sale of a restaurant in Georgia. The asking price was $25,000; the owner claimed that its annual business surpassed $100,000, more than enough to make a decent profit. “Perfect for your family,” the ad declared. Nan brought back the page of the newspaper and showed it to Pingping. They talked about it late into the night.

  For months they had been thinking about where to go. Should they stay in the Boston area? Or should they migrate to another place where the cost of living was lower?

  By now they had saved more money, having worked nonstop without spending a penny on rent for the past three years. They had two CDs in the bank, $50,000 altogether. Yet even with this much cash, they still couldn’t possibly buy a home or business in Massachusetts, where everything was expensive. Nan earned ten dollars an hour at the Jade Café wages like that wouldn’t qualify him for a loan from the bank. He’d heard that some Chinese restaurants in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama were quite affordable. Nan had been following newspaper ads, which seemed to confirm that. After working at the Jade Café for four months, he was already an experienced cook.

  But what about Taotao’s schooling? They decided this wouldn’t be an obstacle if they left the Boston area, because Pingping could teach him math while Nan could help him with his English. Despite the mistakes he made when he spoke the language, Nan knew English grammar like the back of his hand. The crux of the problem was whether they’d be willing to go to the Deep South, where they had heard that racial prejudice was still rampant, and where the Ku Klux Klan was active and even dared to march in the glare of daylight. On the other hand, they had also read articles, written by Chinese immigrants living in the South, that bragged about the quality of life there. One woman in Louisiana boasted that her family had sixty-four oaks and maples in their backyard, something they could never have dreamed of when they had lived in northern California. Others even praised the climate in the South, which was similar to that in their home provinces back in China, not dry in the summer and with no snow, to say nothing of blizzards, in the winter.

  That night, the Wus decided to contact the owner of the Georgia restaurant. When Nan called the next morning, a feeble male voice answered the phone. On hearing of Nan’s interest, the man turned animated and identified himself as Mr. Wang, the owner. “I can guarantee you that you’ll make good money here,” he told Nan.

  “Then why are you selling the business?”

  “My wife and I are getting old and can’t run it anymore. Too much work. Sometimes we go back to Taiwan to visit friends and family, and it’s hard to find someone to take care of this place when we’re away.”

  “How long have you owned it?”

  “More than twenty years. Truth be told, it’s an ideal family business, very stable. If we could manage it, we’d never sell it.”

  “But the economy is in recession now, and lots of restaurants have folded in Massachusetts.”

  “I know. Some people here have lost their businesses too. We have fewer customers these days, but we’re doing okay. Believe me, the economy will come around. Like I said, this place is very stable.”

  Nan asked him about the living environment of the Atlanta suburbs, which Mr. Wang assured him was absolutely congenial and safe for raising children. He had only heard of the Klansmen but never seen them in the flesh. Besides, there were thousands upon thousands of Asian immigrants living in the Atlanta area, which, he claimed, was almost like virgin land just open for settlement. In fact, Gwinnett County, where Mr. Wang was living, was one of the fastest growing counties in the whole country, and every two years a new elementary or middle school had to be added. Still, all classrooms were bursting at the seams, and on every campus some students had to attend class in trailers. All these nuggets of information were encouraging. Nan wanted to go down to Georgia and take a look at the restaurant. He told Mr. Wang he would come as soon as he got permission from his boss at the Jade Café.

  Pingping grew excited after Nan described to her his conversation with Mr. Wang. If this deal worked out, it would mean they’d have their own business and eventually their own home. She urged Nan to set out for Georgia that very week. He should pay a deposit if he believed that the restaurant was in good condition and the area adequate for living. He should also look around some to see how much an average house cost in the vicinity. As long as there were Asian immigrants living there, the place should be safe.

  2

  THREE DAYS LATER Nan set out for the South. He followed I-95 all the way to Virginia and switched to I-85 after Richmond. He drove for f
ourteen hours until he was too exhausted to continue and had to stop for the night. He slept in his car in the parking lot of a rest area near Ridgeway, North Carolina. Before sunrise, when tree leaves were drenched with heavy dew and a thin fog was lifting, he resumed his trip. Entering Durham, North Carolina, he caught sight of a burgundy motorcycle, which reminded him of the Yamaha scooter the wild Beina used to ride. He floored the gas pedal, but his car couldn’t go fast enough. In no time the motorcyclist’s white helmet, jiggling and dodging, disappeared in the traffic ahead. Nan sighed and shook his head vigorously to force the image of his ex-girlfriend out of his mind.

  Because of the construction along the road, it took him almost a whole day to cross the Carolinas, and not until evening did he arrive at Chamblee, Georgia, a suburban town northeast of Atlanta. He checked in at Double Happiness Inn on Buford Highway, managed by a Korean man who spoke Mandarin fluently but with a harsh accent. Tired out, Nan showered and went to bed without dinner, although Pingping had packed a tote bag of food for him—instant noodles, a challah, two cans of wieners, fish jerky, macadamia cookies, dehydrated duck, pistachios, clementines, as if none of these things were available in Georgia. She had also wedged in a coffeepot, with which he could boil water for oatmeal and tea.

  The next morning, Nan went to see Mr. Wang. The Gold Wok was in Lilburn, a town fifteen miles northeast of Atlanta. It was at the western end of a half-deserted shopping center called Beaver Hill Plaza, where several businesses and a small supermarket clustered together. Among them were a fabric store, a Laundromat, a photo studio, a pawnshop, and a fitness center. A few suites were marked by FOR RENT signs, which gave Nan mixed feelings. The vacancies implied that it would be easy enough for the restaurant to renew its lease, but it might also mean there wasn’t a lot of business.

  Mr. Wang, tall with withered limbs and a scanty beard, turned out to be much older than Nan had expected. His back was so hunched that he seemed afflicted with kyphosis, and his neck and arms were dappled with liver spots. As he spoke to Nan, he kept massaging his right knee as if he suffered from painful arthritis. He made an effort to straighten up but remained bent. He grimaced, saying that his chronic back pain had grown more unbearable each year. Somehow Nan couldn’t help but wonder whether he had a prolapsed anus as well, since both afflictions, he’d learned, were common among people in the restaurant business. The old man and his wife were glad to see Nan and eager to show him the place. Nan went into the kitchen and checked the cooking range, the ovens, the storage room, the freezers, the dishwasher, the toilets, the light fixtures. He was pleased that all the equipment was in working order, though the dining room looked rather shabby. In it there were six tables and eight booths covered in brown Naugahyde, and the walls were almost entirely occupied by murals of horses, some galloping, some grazing, some rearing, and some frolicking with their tails tossed up. From a corner in the back floated up a Mongolian melody, which was supposed to match the theme of the horses on the walls. The Wangs had hired only one waitress, a dark-complexioned young woman from Malaysia named Tammie, who spoke both Cantonese and English but no Mandarin. Nan opened the menu, which offered more than two dozen items, mostly for takeout, none of which cost more than five dollars. Although it was unlikely to generate $100,000 worth of business a year as the ad claimed, the restaurant was in good trim.

  As Nan was coming out from the kitchen, a young man wearing aviator glasses and a gray jersey strolled in, clamping a toothpick between his lips. Nan stepped aside to let him pass. Without a word the man went straight in. Presently Nan heard the brisk ring of a spatula scraping a pan.

  “Like I told you, this place is perfect for a family like yours,” Mr. Wang said to Nan.

  “Does your wife speak English?” asked Mrs. Wang, a waistless and short-limbed woman wearing a seersucker shirt.

  “Yes, she can do anything. By the way, I haven’t seen lots of customers. There aren’t many, are there?”

  “Tuesday is slow,” she replied.

  “Can you cook?” Mr. Wang asked Nan.

  “I’m a chef.”

  “Excellent. That will make all the difference. I can guarantee you that you’ll get rich soon.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure.”

  “Look, I pay the chef, the fellow in the kitchen, eight dollars an hour. I used to cook myself, but I’m too old to do that anymore. If you and your wife both work here, all the profits will go into your own pocket.”

  “You use a chef?” Nan was amazed, not having imagined this place could make enough to pay that kind of wages. He had taken the man wearing glasses for a family member or relative of the Wangs.

  “Yes. You can go ask him how much I pay him. That’s why we can’t keep this place any longer—most profits end up in his wallet. It’s like I’m just his job provider.”

  This was encouraging. If they could afford to hire a cook, the restaurant must be doing quite well.

  The old couple invited him to stay for lunch, saying this was the minimum they should do for a guest from far away. Nan accepted the offer and, together with Mr. Wang, sat down at a table. He poured hot tea for his host and then for himself, and they went on talking about life in this place. The old man assured him that Gwinnett County had excellent public schools. A girl in his neighborhood had gone to Berkmar High and was at Duke now, a premed. Nan was impressed. Mr. Wang also told him that compared with the other counties in the Atlanta area, Gwinnett had a much lower realty tax. That was why many recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America preferred to live here.

  Ten minutes later, Mrs. Wang stepped over gingerly and put before them a lacquered tray containing a bowl of pot-stickers, a plate of sautéed scallops and shrimp mixed with snow peas and bamboo shoots, a jar of plain rice, two pairs of connected chopsticks, and two empty bowls. “You can have a bite if you want,” she told her husband.

  “Sure, I’m sort of hungry.” But the old man just picked up a pot-sticker, saying to Nan that he didn’t eat lunch nowadays.

  Nan broke his chopsticks and began eating. He wasn’t impressed by the quality of the food. The pot-stickers had the stale taste of overused frying oil.

  Then he asked Mr. Wang about the lease, the various taxes, the cost of utilities, and the service of the local distributor that delivered vegetables, meats, seafood, condiments. Meanwhile, three customers showed up. One ordered a takeout, and the other two, a middle-aged couple, were led by Tammie to a corner booth. The wide-eyed waitress kept glancing at Nan as if she wanted to speak to him but withheld her words.

  After lunch, Nan took leave of the Wangs, saying he would come again the next morning. He tootled through several residential areas in Lilburn and Norcross, mainly along Lawrenceville and Buford highways and Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and he saw numerous homes for sale. Most of them were new and had four bedrooms and a brick front, priced between $120,000 and $130,000, but outside those subdivisions developed recently or still under construction were older houses, some priced even below $80,000. He hadn’t expected that a brick ranch would sell for under $100,000. In the Boston area, a three-bedroom house of this kind would cost at least three times as much.

  Nan’s car had no air-conditioning, and time and again he drank Pepsi from a bottle lying on the passenger seat. It was hot and humid, waves of heat lapping his face whenever he stepped out of the car. It was so muggy that his breathing became a little labored. For the first time in his life he physically understood the word humid. Back in Boston, when people said “It’s so humid,” he hadn’t been able to feel it. Now at last his body could tell the difference between dry heat and damp heat. Yet the sultry weather shouldn’t be a problem if his family lived here, because there was air-conditioning indoors everywhere. Back in China, he had once stayed in Jinan City for a month in midsummer; whenever he walked the streets, his shirt and pants would be soaked with sweat, and it had been hot indoors as well as outdoors. There you simply couldn’t avoid sweltering in the dog days’ scorching heat, but this Georgian humidi
ty and heat shouldn’t be a big deal. More heartening was that there were indeed many Asian immigrants living in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta. Within four or five miles, Nan saw one Chinese and two Korean churches. Without question this was a good, safe place.

  That night he called his wife and told her what he had seen and heard. Pingping was so impressed that she urged him to clinch the deal with Mr. Wang the next day, paying a deposit that should be less than twenty percent of the agreed price. Also, she warned him not to haggle too much. One or two thousand dollars wouldn’t make much difference as long as the business was solid.

  Before hanging up, she said in English, “I miss you, I love you, Nan!” Somehow her words sounded more natural from a thousand miles away. He hadn’t heard her speak to him so passionately for a long time.

  “I love you too.” Despite saying that, he wasn’t sure of his emotions. He still didn’t have intense feelings for her, but he felt attached to her and understood that they had become more or less inseparable—neither of them could have survived without the other in this land, and more important, their child needed them. If they moved to Georgia, it would mean they’d have to live more like husband and wife from now on. In a sense he wasn’t displeased with that prospect, since whenever he was with Pingping, he felt at peace. Still, these days his thoughts had often turned to Beina, who seemed to accompany him wherever he went, enticing him into reveries. When he closed his eyes at night, her vivacious face often emerged, as if she were teasing him or eager to talk with him. Then he’d again smell the grassy scent of her hair. If only he could love Pingping similarly so that she could replace that woman in his mind, who was, he knew, merely a flighty coquette.

  Late the next morning, toward eleven, he went to the Gold Wok again, but he didn’t immediately go in. He parked a short distance from the restaurant and stayed in the car, waiting to see how many customers would appear. It was drizzling, the powdery rain blurring the windshield. It wasn’t hot, so he didn’t mind staying in the parking lot for a while, listening to a preacher on the radio. The man was speaking about a verse from Matthew, expounding on the necessity of “fresh wineskins for new wine.” Nan was fascinated by his eloquence and passion despite the man’s oddly hoarse, croaking voice. Meanwhile, in less than half an hour, five people turned up at the Gold Wok, three of whom appeared to be Mexican workers from the construction site nearby. They looked like regulars, and when they came out, they each held a tall cup of soft drink besides the food in Styrofoam boxes.