A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  Probably not. Unlike them, Nan and Pingping spoke English better and were never afraid of isolation. They wanted to take root here, having nowhere else to go. That was why Nan had seized every opportunity to learn English. He knew that in this land the language was like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, even though he’d feel out of his element whenever he used it. If he didn’t try hard to adapt himself, developing new “lungs and gills” for this alien water, his life would be confined and atrophied, and eventually wither away.

  Whenever Nan had a free moment at work, he would read his Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary because it was monolingual. He still used his bilingual dictionary, which was getting tattered, especially when he couldn’t figure out what a noun referred to as described in English. He could see that on the whole the definitions of the word entries written in English were more accurate than those given in Chinese. In addition, using the monolingual dictionary was a way to make himself think in English. He highlighted the words and phrases unfamiliar to him so that he could review them after he went over the entire volume. He had also bought a softcover New English-Chinese Dictionary for Pingping, but she seldom bothered to open it. Even when she came across a new word in her reading, she wouldn’t look it up, able to figure out its meaning from the context most times. She was so smart that she had little need for a dictionary.

  7

  ON SATURDAY MORNING a UPS van came to deliver their boxes, all of which bore the sticker FRAGILE, a few wrapped with duct tape and a broken one spewing foam peanuts. Nan found that a box, number 21, was missing. This upset him. He was sure it contained some of his poetry books, though he couldn’t name the titles at the moment. The deliveryman promised to check on it and have it sent over within a day or two, which actually never happened. Nan used a hand truck to move the boxes into their apartment through the screen door of the living room, but the Wus had to leave for work and couldn’t open them until they were back at night.

  That night, after unpacking them, they found the microwave broken. Taotao helped his father set up the computer, which was out of order too. Only the Sanyo TV set still worked, but it had more noise now and could pick up merely two channels. Nothing had been insured, so there was no way to claim damages.

  “This is a minor loss that will preempt real disasters,” Pingping said, just to console her son and husband. Yet Taotao was inconsolable and eager to have his computer fixed so that he could play chess with it again. For this machine assembled in a barn in Keene, New Hampshire, Nan had paid only seven hundred dollars, so it wasn’t worth repairing. Taotao then wanted a new computer, but his parents refused to buy that, saying they’d have to save every penny for the home they’d purchase in the future.

  “Do you want to throw away five hundred and fifty dollars every month?” Pingping asked him, referring to the rent they paid.

  “No.”

  “Then we mustn’t continue to waste money this way. Once we have our own home, we’ll get you a computer.”

  The boy knew it was futile to argue, yet he wouldn’t drop the topic without another try. He said, “I don’t want to go to the restaurant anymore. Leave me at home.”

  “That’s illegal,” put in his father.

  “It’s not safe here,” his mom added anxiously. “What if somebody breaks in and snatches you away? He’ll sell you to a stranger and you won’t be able to see us again. Would you like that?”

  “No. I just don’t want to stay in the damned restaurant anymore. It makes me sick just to smell the air in there.”

  “You have to come with us.”

  The couple living upstairs started fighting again. That stopped the Wus’ argument. Neither Nan nor Pingping had ever met the man and woman, having to go to work early in the morning and come back late at night. Yet they had heard enough of their exchanges to know them almost intimately.

  Would that couple ever be quiet and peaceful? They always yelled at each other as if they couldn’t live for a day without a fight. Sometimes they’d wake Pingping up in the middle of the night.

  Taotao kicked a squashed box, sullen and tearful.

  “You’re a sex maniac,” said the woman upstairs. “I’ve already let you have it twice this week—when will it ever be enough for you? I can’t sleep afterward. I’m having an interview tomorrow morning. Just leave me alone tonight, okay?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” the man snapped. “If you hate sex so much, why live with me?”

  “Get real here. You begged me to shack up with you. I still hate myself for listening to you.”

  “I’ll be damned if I can understand this.”

  “You can never understand a woman. Else your wife wouldn’t have left you for the other guy.”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  Then came a crash. Shoes started scraping the floor. They must have been grappling with each other.

  Pingping noticed her son prick up his ears. She said, “Taotao, go to bathroom and brush your teeth.” That also meant it was time for bed.

  The next day they cleared out a space in the storage room in the back of the restaurant and put in a small desk, at which Taotao could do his work for the time being. Both Pingping and Nan felt for him. Every day the boy had to stay with them for more than twelve hours, and not until ten p.m. could they go back together. To make Taotao more comfortable, Nan got a thirteen-inch TV for him, but they made him promise not to watch it too often. They also put in a love seat bought at a Goodwill store, on which the boy could nap. When it wasn’t busy, Pingping would go to the back room and check on him. If he was idle or watching TV, she’d urge him to do his “homework,” assigned by her. Seldom would he come to the front to see his parents.

  Pingping scolded her son one afternoon, saying, “Don’t be so lazy and watch TV all time.”

  “Duh, I’m tired.” He looked peeved.

  “Tired? We’re all living fast life here. You must do same.”

  “That’s not proper grammar, Mom.”

  “What?”

  “People say ‘We’re living a busy life,’ not ‘a fast life.’”

  “I mean burn candle at two ends.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I mean make two hundred percent effort.”

  “Impossible!”

  “All right, you live busy life. After this show, go back to homework.”

  “Okay, okay!”

  Whenever she said something wrong in her unique ungrammatical English, the boy would correct her. Sometimes he even did that in the presence of others. She was annoyed but never discouraged him, because she was determined to learn the language. What she and Nan didn’t know was that Taotao had been simmering, angry about their awkward English, which sometimes embarrassed him. He was especially discomfited by Pingping. She’d toss out malapropisms right and left, such as “gooses,” “watermelon skin,” “deers,” and “childrenhood.” One day the boy threw a tantrum, accusing his parents of having messed up his English, because that morning, his second day in school, he had blurted out the term “peach hair” instead of “peach fuzz,” for which some of his classmates had ridiculed him. He knew he had picked it up from his mother. “You’re ruining my career!” he screamed at Pingping that afternoon. She broke into peals of laughter after hearing him explain why, and she went into the kitchen to laugh more to herself.

  Every day she assigned him some math problems in addition to his schoolwork. However much he complained, she’d make him finish the assignments before they closed up.

  8

  WHEN they moved to Atlanta, the Wus hadn’t known that the children at Peachtree Terrace went to schools farther south, which belonged to another district. This meant Taotao wasn’t supposed to attend an elementary school in Lilburn. If there had been a grownup in their apartment to accompany him after school, his parents wouldn’t have minded letting him go to Shiloh Elementary in Snellville, which had a fine reputation. As it was, the boy would have to join them whe
n he got off the bus in the afternoons, so he needed to attend a school near the Gold Wok. Fortunately, the Wangs allowed the Wus to use their address so that Taotao could go to Rebecca Minor Elementary. When the secretary at the principal’s office called the Wangs, Mrs. Wang said Taotao was their grandnephew, who had come to stay with them. Mr. Wang told the Wus that they ought to live closer to the restaurant, to save the time and hassle of traveling back and forth every day. Also, gasoline was expensive nowadays as a consequence of the Gulf War. The Wus realized they’d have to move to Lilburn soon, but this town had few apartments for rent, which were all expensive besides. Every weekday they dropped their son at Rebecca Minor Elementary before going to the Gold Wok, and in the afternoon Taotao would get off the school bus at the east side of Beaver Hill Plaza and join his parents at the restaurant.

  At work, the Wus couldn’t stop feeling antsy about what might happen to their apartment, because Peachtree Terrace wasn’t a safe place. Sometimes at night they heard gunshots in their building. Police cruisers would come, strobe lights slashing the parking lot, and people would gather around to watch the police making arrests. Whenever such an incident happened, Nan would say they must move out soon.

  One night the Wus returned from work and found that a window in the bedroom used as Nan’s study was open. At once Nan flicked on all the lights to see what was missing. The computer and the microwave were gone; so was a pair of Pingping’s leather sandals. Other than those, they had lost nothing else. How fortunate it was that they’d kept all their papers in their safe-deposit box in the bank. On the carpet of the living room two pairs of muddy shoe prints stretched parallel to each other, one under eight inches long and the other about a foot. Apparently two people, a grown-up and an adolescent, had committed the burglary. At first, both Nan and Pingping were outraged and cursed the thieves. They wondered whether they should report the crime to the police, but eventually decided not to. The police might summon them to the station, and they didn’t want to go through the tedious process. They couldn’t afford to lose a whole morning, plus probably a good part of an afternoon. Actually, their loss was minimum, as both the computer and the microwave were already broken. Having calmed down, they couldn’t help smiling, amused that the thieves had made fools of themselves and must be racking their brains trying to make those machines work.

  “I’m pleased they removed the junk. Good riddance,” Nan said.

  “I want my computer back,” wailed their son.

  “It was already broken down, not worth keeping anymore.”

  “I want it back. It’s mine.”

  His mother stepped in. “Be reasonable, Taotao. This way we won’t have to bother to dump them. We just paid those fools a pair of my old shoes.”

  “It’s my computer.”

  “All right, once we have our own home, we’ll buy you a new one,” Nan said.

  “When can we have our house? I don’t want to live here anymore.”

  His parents looked at each other. Nan realized Pingping was thinking the same thought. He managed to answer his son, “I’ll start looking for a new place soon.”

  “Yes, Daddy will take care of that,” Pingping said. “You must stop hoarding things.”

  Neither Nan nor Pingping could say when Taotao had become a hoarder: he had never let go of anything that once belonged to him, not even a pencil stub or a paper clip. For some time his parents had wondered what was wrong with him. Then one day back north, on his way to work in Natick, Nan by chance listened to a psychiatrist on the radio discussing the psychology of hoarding with a caller whose son had the same problem—“a real dog in the manger,” the boy wouldn’t even let his newborn cousin wear the booties he had outgrown long ago. The man and his wife had been separated, and the psychiatrist said their shaky marriage might account for their son’s obsession—unconsciously the boy wanted to hold things together. The thought came to Nan that Taotao must have been frightened all these years when Pingping and he were often absent from his life. Now the boy must still be afraid of losing his parents, and this fear was manifested in his clinging to all trifles. Look at his duffel bag, full of trinkets: assorted batteries, dead wristwatches, rulers, a shoehorn, key chains, dog tags, pencil sharpeners, baseball cards, seashells, coins from various countries that Livia had given him. He had even saved every section of comics from the Boston Globe back in Massachusetts; his parents had forced him to dump them before the move, but now he had begun collecting the funnies from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. What puzzled Nan was that Taotao never looked at those pages again once he had thrown them into the pile in his closet, next to the carton containing issues of National Geographic, which his parents had subscribed to for him. The boy’s hoarding saddened his parents. Nan and Pingping agreed not to talk about their marital trouble in front of their child again.

  “I wonder why the thieves didn’t take Taotao’s telescope,” Pingping said to Nan when the boy was brushing his teeth in the bathroom.

  “The computer must have seemed worth a lot of money to them.”

  “If they’d walked off with the telescope, that would have killed him.”

  “Maybe we should store it in the restaurant.”

  So they took the thing along when they went to work the next morning. For the whole day Nan continually looked through apartment books and the “Home Finder” sections of the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a safe nearby place, but he couldn’t find one. There were a few houses listed for rent in Lilburn, all too expensive.

  To Nan’s delight, Mrs. Wang showed up the next afternoon and said that she and her husband were going to visit their relatives in Taiwan for at least three months. She would be happy to let the Wus “keep the house” for them. Nan and Pingping understood that also meant she’d want them to pay some rent. They offered her six hundred dollars a month, which Mrs. Wang happily accepted. “Nan, we trust you like a son of ours,” she said with feeling.

  Her words made Nan’s gums itch, knowing the Wangs had no son. But Pingping tittered and asked her, “Then I’m your daughter-in-law, right? And Taotao is your grandson, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you should let us use your house for free, shouldn’t you?”

  Mrs. Wang looked baffled; her small eyes dimmed while a worm-like frown gathered at her forehead. Pingping said, “Just joking. We’ll take good care of your house.”

  Nan was worried that the managerial office at Peachtree Terrace might not let him get out of the lease easily. He talked to Shona, the black woman in charge of the apartment complex, and she agreed to cancel his lease provided Nan was willing to lose the security deposit. He was unhappy but had no choice. However, a week after the Wus had moved out, Nan received a check of $275 from Shona. She didn’t write a word and just refunded him half the deposit, which pleased the Wus.

  Since moving into the Wangs’, the Wus hadn’t been able to figure out what the little red flag on the mailbox was supposed to do. Back in Massachusetts, the Masefields hadn’t had such a thing on their box, and Heidi had always taken her mail to the post office. Now every morning before going to work, Nan would raise the tiny flag as a way to greet the postman, who drove on the right-hand side of his van. Then one day Pingping found a slip of paper in the mailbox, bearing these words: “Don’t let your kids play with the flag! Keep it up only when you have mail to go.”

  Taotao loved the Wangs’ house and often set up his telescope in the backyard at night to look at stars. He was happy that at last he could use the instrument freely. His parents joined him in observing the sky a few times, but unlike in the Northeast, the air in Atlanta was still a touch humid in the fall, so even such a large telescope, 225 power, couldn’t penetrate the hazy atmosphere completely. Taotao once sulked and kept twisting the focus knob and the eyepiece. Nan told him, “The sky will be clear in the wintertime. Why don’t you wait until then? I bet you can see stars clearly when it’s cold.”

  The boy agreed and stowed away the telescope
in a closet. However, when winter came, he didn’t take it out. In fact, the frustration in the fall had squelched his craving for stargazing. He’d never touch the telescope again, as if it was just a toy he had outgrown but still wanted to keep.

  9

  BOTH Nan and his wife often dreamed of their native land. Yet neither of them missed their parents a lot, because they had grown up in kindergartens and boarding schools. Unlike Nan, Pingping sometimes remembered her father fondly. She didn’t love her mother that much; she had been grouchy, especially when frustrated at work, and had often vented her frustration on her children. As the oldest child, Pingping had to do many of the household chores and look after her siblings. Her mother would scold her if she didn’t rinse the laundry clean enough, and would even slap her if her siblings had fought with other kids whose mothers came to complain and make scenes. So Pingping had never missed her mother. Every so often, she still dreamed of China, but in the dream she was sometimes tormented by a full bladder; she’d toss in bed and shout, “Where’s the toilet?” A few times she awakened Nan, who slept in the other bed in the same room.

  Nan dreamed of different things and people. Once, in a nightmare, he appeared to be an escapee, hunted by men wielding truncheons and wearing helmets marked with a swastika, but the setting was his alma mater, the small college in Harbin, and all the Nazis had Chinese faces. As he was fleeing, from behind him rose ferocious barks made by the hounds sicced on those who lagged behind. Another time he dreamed that a friend of his was being arrested by the police and frog-marched to an execution ground below the dam of a reservoir. His friend wasn’t shot but was booted half to death, and Nan woke up drenched in cold sweat. More often he dreamed of Beina, that capricious woman. She would come to him snickering or sobbing; once she even caressed his throat and kissed his cheeks with her moist lips. She was different from a decade before, her egg-shaped face smooth and pale as if she were ill. Never did she look cheerful, more often irritated and grimacing, her large eyes tearful; neither did she ever speak a word to him. He was upset about her silence because she had a lovely ringing voice, and because her reticence contradicted her reckless nature. Once Nan dreamed that he and she were jogging together on the sports ground behind the classroom building of their old college, she following him stubbornly despite her heavy boots and the piercingly cold wind. Several times she appeared when he was talking with someone else—she stayed in the background but within earshot, listening closely. Whenever he woke up from such a dream, he’d feel a numbing pain in his chest. If only he could forget her. If only he had just flirted with her instead of being deadly serious and getting himself wounded. He wondered whether she ever dreamed of him.