A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  “They’ll never do that,” Pingping said cheerfully.

  “Sure, they think we’re making tons of money here, eating nutritious food, drinking quality wine, and living like gods.”

  The more Nan spoke, the more vehement he became, so Pingping left him alone and went to the storage room with a bundle of towels to wash.

  Indeed, Uncle Zhao had presented Nan with four paintings, but two of them had fallen apart on account of the shoddy mounting. The other two had gone to Professor Peterson and Heidi Masefield respectively many years before. Nan had wondered why Uncle Zhao had mounted those paintings with such cheap materials that just a little damp air could warp them. The two broken pieces, still in the closet of Pingping’s bedroom, were absolutely unpresentable, and he didn’t know what to do with them, unwilling to spends hundreds of dollars to have them framed.

  After the letter from his father, Nan never wrote to his parents again. He felt they couldn’t possibly understand or believe what he told them. Taotao didn’t write to his grandparents either, because he had lost most of his characters, which he had been able to inscribe when he came to America four years before. These days, despite his protests, Pingping and Nan made him copy some ideograms every day, but he had been forgetting more of them than he learned. Evidently he’d never be really bilingual, as most Chinese parents here hoped their children would become. He could speak Mandarin but might never be able to read and write the characters.

  Every time a letter from Nan’s parents arrived, Pingping would reply. She didn’t complain about this, since Nan devoted himself entirely to their business. In a way she relished handling the correspondence, because after they married, Nan’s mother had often bragged to Pingping, “A monkey is smart enough to ride a sheep and supervise her.” Nan was born in the year of monkey, whereas Pingping was a sheep, so according to his mother, he was supposed to keep her under control. Now, her writing letters to his parents would show that the relationship between Nan and her was reversed. That surely wouldn’t please her mother-in-law, that control freak, and Pingping secretly gloated over the old woman’s irritation.

  Recently Nan had reorganized the service at the Gold Wok, which now offered a lunch buffet on weekdays and the regular menu at dinner. This change improved the business considerably. A lot of people working in the area would come in for lunch, which consisted of two soups, four appetizers, and ten dishes, all for $4.75. Nan and Pingping would arrive at work before eight a.m. and cook the food and get everything ready by eleven-thirty. After they closed up at night, he’d stay a little longer preparing the meats and vegetables for the following day. This made him busier, but the restaurant fetched ten percent more profit than before, and even Niyan got extra tips. The Wus were determined to pay off their mortgage in the near future.

  PART FIVE

  1

  IN THE SPRING of 1994, the Mitchells were preparing to leave for Nanjing to bring back their daughter, Hailee. “Hailee” was a name they had given her, though they’d kept her original first name, Fan, as her middle name. Her family name was Zhang, which had actually been assigned to her by the orphanage. Dave arranged to take a ten-day leave from work; Janet’s jewelry store would remain open when she was away. She told Susie, the salesgirl, to contact the Wus if anything turned up that she couldn’t handle by herself.

  The Mitchells had originally thought of stopping in Hong Kong for a day or two as a transition, because Dave had been to that city before and liked it very much. But they decided to go directly to mainland China together with two other couples living in Atlanta who were also adopting Chinese babies. Janet called them “our group,” and indeed they often met to compare notes and share their anxiety, frustrations, and happiness. All of them would have to go to the U.S. embassy in Beijing to get visas for their babies, so the Mitchells decided to use the capital instead of Hong Kong as their base in China. Janet had bought a Mandarin phrase book, and both she and Dave had been learning to speak some words and simple sentences. She often went to ask Pingping how to say pleasantries and order things in Chinese. Despite her good memory, she had trouble with the four tones, speaking some words as if she had a blocked nose.

  The Mitchells had recently decorated Hailee’s nursery on the second floor of their home with a band of wallpaper, two feet wide and just high enough for a toddler to reach. The paper had frolic-some animals on it—dancing bulls, bears playing the violin, wobbling penguins, elephants rearing up, dogs blowing the saxophone. On the ceiling of the room were numerous phosphorescent stars that would shine in the darkness but were almost invisible when it was light. A new crib sat by the window that overlooked the back garden, fenced in by white palings. On the floor were stacks of baby clothing, some of which the Mitchells would take to Nanjing and donate to the orphanage. They’d also bring formula and diapers for their daughter to use. Pingping had seen the stuff they planned to take along. There were so many things that she wondered if the Mitchells could possibly carry them all. They were going to pack in two lap robes, a bunch of baseballs, a stack of hats with the Braves logo on them, granola bars, water crackers, fruit candies, laundry soap, clotheslines and clothespins, fanny packs, billfolds, batteries, painkillers, tubes of sunscreen and insect repellent, a shortwave radio, not to mention a luggage trolley and a dozen boxes of Polaroid film. They’d shoot a lot of photos as mementos of Hailee’s native place. Pingping told them to take pictures of the people they wanted to thank and give them the photos on the spot, which would be a small present, appreciated by most Chinese.

  The Wus talked between themselves about the Mitchells’ preparations. In the past they had noticed that Dave was very frugal, almost stingy, and would always ask for a doggie bag after he dined at the Gold Wok, even if the leftovers were just a morsel. In the early days of their friendship, whenever Nan had offered him a beer or soft drink, Dave would beam but wouldn’t indicate that he planned on paying for it. Nan and Pingping never minded that, amused to see Dave was easy to please. But now he and Janet must have spent thousands for the trip and would donate an extra $5,000 to the orphanage that had kept Hailee.

  Four days before the Mitchells’ scheduled departure, out of the blue the Chinese side informed them that they had to postpone their trip for two months. Why such a delay all of a sudden? The Mitchells called around and couldn’t find a definitive answer. Their agent told them that the Chinese side wanted to ascertain that the girl was really an orphan. This threw the Mitchells into turmoil. What upset them more was that the other two adopting couples would leave for China as planned. Confused, Janet and Dave went to the Gold Wok and talked with the Wus, who couldn’t figure out a reason either. Janet kept saying, “We’ve already bonded with Hailee. Now we feel like someone has snatched our child away from us. This is more than we can bear.”

  “It’s awful!” Dave shook his head and blew his large nose into a tissue, his eyes moist and glistening.

  Pingping said, “Officials in China don’t care about your feeling, so you should make yourself happy. Maybe you can use this time to study Chinese or learn how to be parent.”

  “That’s an interesting thought,” said Janet. “Maybe I can attend a parenting class in the evenings. But we’re afraid that if Hailee is not an orphan, we might lose her.”

  “Don’t worry too much,” Pingping said. “The delay is just excuse for officials. If she’s not orphan, how can she stay in orphanage? Officials never care who is the girl. They just want to create trouble for you. Don’t let them torture you. Remember, in China, officials’ job is to make people suffer.”

  “Our agent didn’t think this had anything to do with our baby’s identity either. She said it was just bureaucracy.”

  “Zere will be a lawt of heartaches once you become parents,” Nan put in, “so don’t get distressed too easily.”

  “Well,” Dave said, “I guess this is just the beginning.”

  They all smiled. Dave lifted the teapot in front of him and refilled his cup. A black woman holding a
toddler stepped in and ordered two panfried noodles, so Nan went back into the kitchen after giving a lollipop to the baby girl, who clutched a nub of carrot.

  A few days later, Janet enrolled in a parenting class and went to Atlanta to take the lessons two evenings a week. Whenever there was news about Hailee, she’d share it with Pingping.

  2

  “TURN your heel toward me,” Pingping told Nan, holding a pair of large scissors in her hand, which was sheathed in a latex glove. She was scraping his feet for him. Both of them were sitting on low stools, a stainless-steel bowl between them. His left foot was steeped in the warm water while his right one rested on her lap covered with a khaki apron. It was early morning and their son had just left for school. A cuckoo cried from the depths of the woods across the lake and set the air throbbing. Between the pulsing calls surged a scatter of birdsong. A flock of mallards was quacking in the backyard, waddling around, and some flapped their wings so vigorously that they sent out a faint whistle. Two ducks had been hatching eggs in the monkey grass along the lakeside, so these days the Wus didn’t go there for fear of disturbing them. On the dogwood tree near their deck two squirrels were chasing each other, shaking dewdrops off the branches in full flower.

  “Your athlete’s foot looks better than last time,” Pingping said. “Be careful. It can easily get worse in the spring.”

  Nan nodded, still immersed in a volume of selected poems by Auden, whose photo appeared on both the front cover and the spine of the book. He loved Auden and had learned some of his lines by heart when he was in China. Yesterday morning he had chanced on this copy of poetry at the Goodwill store on his way to work and had bought it for a quarter. To his delight, he found the poem “September 1, 1939” within, a poem Auden himself had excluded from most of his collections. Nan was still happy about the bargain. In Gwinnett County, the public libraries would discard all the books that hadn’t been checked out for more than a year and would sell them dirt cheap, so Nan, now that he had his own house, had started collecting books again. He’d rummage through the book sections in thrift stores and go to libraries’ book sales whenever he could. Sometimes Pingping complained that the house would soon be cluttered up with books, but he simply couldn’t stop.

  Since they had married, Pingping had scraped Nan’s feet five or six times a year, because he couldn’t do it thoroughly by himself. In the beginning she had been frightened by his feet, the heels and the skin between the toes gnawed by fungi, and she had wanted to have them cured so that she and their baby wouldn’t catch the ringworm. She’d soaked his feet in warm water, then cut the calluses with scissors, rubbed away the dead skin with a chunk of emery wheel, and applied antifungal cream to them. This gradually developed into a habit, and Nan enjoyed being treated by her. Although his athlete’s foot was never cured, she had managed to keep it under control. Still, Nan wore socks all the time, even in bed. He liked taking a hot bath, which she urged him not to do, afraid the fungi might be spread to the other parts of his body. But a bath was so relaxing that he couldn’t help running one every few days. To date, his body had never been affected by fungi. Ever since moving to Georgia, the Wus had noticed that many people here suffered from skin diseases, probably on account of the humid climate. Sometimes at supermarkets they came upon cashiers whose hands and forearms were scaly with scabs and running sores.

  “Ouch!” Nan cried.

  “Did I hurt you?” Pingping stopped the scissors.

  “Don’t scrape too hard.”

  “All right, but I won’t be able to scrub your feet again this spring. We’ll be weak until summer.”

  Indeed, pollen had already set in and had begun to torment them. From now on they had to conserve their energy and keep all the doors and windows shut. These days they each carried a bottle of nasal spray in a pocket to prevent their allergies from becoming fullblown. The miserable season enervated and even pacified them—they became more gentle to each other, as if too tired to raise their voices.

  On top of that, Pingping was no longer worried about Nan’s obsession with his first love. Seldom did she see the woeful clouds that used to darken his face. She was right: Nan had indeed mellowed a lot. He hadn’t often thought of Beina in the past two years, although she’d appear in his dreams now and then. The numb pain still lingered in his chest, but it was no longer as acute as before. Every day he was too occupied to indulge in fantasies. When he got home at night, he’d go to sleep within an hour after taking a shower and reading a few poems. He felt that physically he was strong now, but his mind was empty. He simply didn’t have the energy to think of ideas, much less write anything.

  To some extent he was pleased by this state of affairs. In his mind would rise the lines by the ancient poet Tao Chien: “Human life runs the same course, / Whose end is to secure shelter and food.” Nan was peaceful, determined to stand on his own ground and willing to be a devoted family man.

  3

  SHUBO GAO had received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia the previous fall. He was still looking for a teaching position in sociology, but so far without success. He often talked with Nan about job hunting and would joke that he was ready to “turn a new leaf,” meaning to abandon his sociology specialty. The past winter he had gone to six interviews at a convention held in San Francisco, but the interviewers had all found that he spoke English with a grating accent, so despite his impressive résumé that boasted a book published in Chinese, none of the schools invited him over for a campus visit. Afterward, Shubo mailed out more than a hundred applications. He would receive a batch of refusal letters every week, which didn’t bother him much, though Niyan couldn’t stand it anymore. During the day she would not check the mail for fear of spoiling her appetite.

  Despite his bad English, Shubo was fond of clichés. He’d use all kinds of sayings, some of which were Chinese expressions he translated into English, such as “one hill cannot be inhabited by two tigers,” “search for a needle in the ocean,” “pour oil on fire,” “kill two eagles with one arrow.” He had a little notebook in which he’d collected more than a thousand English idiomatic expressions. Nan would tease him, calling him a social linguist. He also told Shubo, “If you really want to master English idioms, get a good dictionary, a Longman or Collins, and learn the real thing.” He explained that unlike the Chinese, who respected a person knowing a great many sayings and proverbs, a good English speaker wouldn’t repeat clichés, but Shubo continued filling his notebook with hackneyed expressions and tossing them out right and left.

  Though a Ph.D., Shubo respected Nan and often bantered with him, saying that Nan was a sad case and shouldn’t waste his talent by running a small restaurant. He once read Nan’s palms and said with a straight face, “You were born to be an official, deciding the fates of thousands. You know, you should’ve risen to prominence long ago. But now you’re a phoenix grounded and stripped of its wings, inferior to a chicken.”

  Nan rejoined, “Why don’t you go back to Szechuan? With your Ph.D. from UGA, I’m sure you can get a professorship at a Party school or a police academy.”

  “I’d prefer to be my own boss.” Shubo’s face fell.

  In fact, Shubo often said he’d never return to China, because when he was applying for his passport so that he could go to the University of Georgia to do graduate work, all the officials had treated him like a semicriminal and wouldn’t issue the papers to him until a whole year had passed, after the school had withdrawn its financial aid. He told Nan that not a single Chinese had ever said a good word to him when he went to their offices, and that only a young American woman of Indian descent at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, noted for her record of turning down most visa applications, had beamed at him, saying, “Congratulations!” when she handed him his visa.

  Although Shubo could joke about his situation, his wife had lost her peace of mind. Now that it was unlikely that he would find a teaching position, what should he do? Niyan often spoke to Pingping and Nan about him. Recently his
cousin, Yafang Gao, had promised that if he went to New York, she could help him find a job at Ding’s Dumplings; but he’d have to work there at least a whole year because her former boss, Howard, wouldn’t hire a temporary hand. Niyan told the Wus that Yafang herself had left Ding’s Dumplings a few months earlier to attend business school at NYU.

  Shubo talked with Nan about the restaurant work in New York; he wasn’t sure if he should go, reluctant to be away from his wife. Nan was uncertain whether Shubo still meant to remain in academia, but his friend assured him that he wouldn’t think twice about leaving his field if he could find a full-time job. Shubo hated teaching and had once taught an introduction to sociology course to more than thirty students, some of whom wouldn’t turn in their homework on time and would frown at his accent, a few even pretending they couldn’t understand him. During the first few weeks of teaching, he felt sick and often knelt on the floor of the bathroom at home and vomited into the toilet, his guts twinging while his wife slapped his back to ease his pain. Later, he attempted to make a joke or tell an amusing story from time to time in class. Once he even compared Americans to turkeys (fat) and the Chinese to cranes (thin), but only one big black woman laughed besides himself. The whole course was sheer torture to him, yet he had to get the teaching experience so that he could find employment in the future. In the course evaluations one student wrote “Bathetic & pathetic!” Now, still haunted by that class, Shubo wouldn’t hesitate to leave academia. On hearing that he really wouldn’t mind abandoning his field, Nan suggested he go to a bartending school. Once Shubo knew how to mix drinks, he could always find work at a Chinese restaurant. Niyan and Shubo thought this was a good idea, so Shubo paid $3,000 and enrolled in a bartending class in downtown Atlanta.