A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  17

  HAILEE was going to be one year old on September 16, and Janet had been busy preparing the birthday party, to which the Wus were invited. As the nominal mother Pingping had agreed to go, but Nan was reluctant. Six weeks ago he and his wife had attended a party at the Mitchells’, and he had felt out of place among the crowd there. This time, afraid he might again feel left out, he decided to stay at the Gold Wok that evening. Besides, there was so much to do at the restaurant that either he or Pingping had to be around during the busy hours. So Pingping went to the Mitchells’ alone with a picture book in Chinese as a present for the baby. When she arrived, most of the people hadn’t shown up yet. Janet told Pingping that several of Hailee’s godparents were coming too.

  Dave was watching a baseball game with their daughter on his lap while Janet was busy in the kitchen, unwrapping cheese and pouring a jar of salsa into a soup bowl. A large woman holding a glass of seltzer came up to Pingping, introducing herself as Christine, and they entered into conversation. To Pingping’s surprise, Christine had taught nursing at a medical school in Taiwan for a year and was reminiscing about her experiences there fondly. She said she missed the night snacks sold at the streetside eateries in Taipei. Pingping noticed that her left eye was bloodshot and a little puffy, so she asked her, “What happen to your eye?”

  “Oh, I just had laser surgery.” She touched the root of her plump nose with her fingertips as if she were still wearing glasses. There was a sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks.

  “So you can see better now.”

  “Absolutely. For the first time in my life I can see individual leaves on treetops with my naked eyes. I began to wear glasses at seven, and before that, my poor eyesight had always made me think a tree crown was just one block of green, not made of individual leaves. This is wonderful. I can drive without glasses on now.”

  The door chime rang and two couples stepped in. Christine knew the new arrivals and hurried to greet them. Janet, holding a plate of lox, stopped on her way to the dining room and asked Pingping to help her remove the spinach turnovers from the oven, because she had to go and welcome the guests. Gladly Pingping entered the kitchen, put on a mitt, and began taking out the hors d’oeuvres. After that, she resumed the work left by Janet, mashing avocado to make a dip for corn chips. Janet had cooked the buffet dinner already, and several platters were filled with meats and there were also two large bowls of salads, mixed organic greens. Presently Janet came back and together the two of them started carrying dinner to the oval table in the dining room.

  The house was noisy now, ringing with chuckles and chitchat. After everything was ready, Pingping went to join the guests. A rotund man with a domed forehead was sitting alone on a love seat. He looked sleepy on account of his doughy face and thin eyes. Despite his fleshy lips and fair skin, he somehow reminded Pingping of Vladimir Lenin. She went up to him and said pleasantly, “Hi, how are you?”

  The man raised his eyes, and his face suddenly tightened, his pupils shifting. He seemed flustered and didn’t know how to respond. As Pingping wondered about what to say, a raccoon-faced woman came over with two glasses of red wine. She glared at the man, then asked Pingping sharply, “Can I help you?” The plunging neckline of her dress revealed her tanned cleavage.

  Confused, Pingping stammered, “I—I’m Pingping. Janet and Dave are substitute parents for my son.” In panic she forgot how to say “legal guardians” in English.

  “You mean godparents?” the woman asked, handing a glass to the man.

  “Something like that.”

  “Oh…I’m sorry. I’m Kim and he’s my boyfriend, Charlie. So you adopted a baby too.”

  “No. My son already in middle school.”

  “I see. Charlie is Hailee’s godfather and I’m her godmother.”

  Pingping thought of mentioning herself as a kind of godmother to the baby too, but refrained. She was amazed that the Mitchells had an unmarried couple as their daughter’s godparents. Somehow she felt uncomfortable talking with Kim and Charlie, though she couldn’t say why. She was sure Kim had been rude to her just now, so she said a few more words, then went away to play with Hailee.

  She didn’t enjoy Janet’s cooking and ate just a piece of chicken breast and some cherry tomatoes, which she always liked. Yet she had a good time with the baby, who was chewing on a tiny rubber fish. She removed the teether from Hailee’s mouth and tried to teach her how to say “Mommy” and “Daddy” in Mandarin, but the girl could speak only one syllable at a time. Hailee laughed a lot, her mouth drooling, and she held Pingping’s thumb and dragged her along when she crawled around on the Persian rug. No guests stopped to talk with Pingping, probably assuming she was a nanny. Indeed, she looked as young as if she were in her late twenties.

  When the large birthday cake was brought out, the house turned noisy again. As people began singing “Happy Birthday,” Pingping carried Hailee to the living room while a few ladies, Susie among them, walked backward in front of the cake, chorusing and clapping their hands. Hailee was puzzled and wouldn’t blow at the single candle, so Janet did that for her.

  After nine o’clock, Nan arrived to pick up his wife, having left the restaurant for Niyan to close up. This time he mixed well with the Mitchells’ guests, especially with a wiry man sporting a goatee, who was a librarian in Decatur and liked Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher. The man also knew Dick Harrison and had invited him to read in his library. Nan and he conversed over wine for a good while. Then Nan turned to talk with Christine about which Chinese cities she should visit, because she had applied for a teaching fellowship. If that came through, she’d love to go to China to teach.

  Dave came, beaming, and placed his hand on Nan’s shoulder. “Did you try the Parmesan chicken I made?” he asked.

  Nan hadn’t but prevaricated, “I didn’t know you can cook.”

  “I’ve just begun to learn to make a few things.”

  Christine chimed in, “He’s a father now and should be a well-rounded family man.” She laughed; so did Nan and Dave. In fact, the chicken was undercooked, half of it left in the two platters.

  On their way back, Pingping was unhappy and wouldn’t speak to Nan. She had often complained that Nan would leave her unaccompanied whenever they went to a party. This time he had done that again, not staying with her for a single minute. She shouldn’t have gone to the Mitchells’ today. She simply didn’t like some of Hailee’s godparents. Nan knew why his wife was fuming, so he remained quiet.

  The next morning, Pingping dropped in on Janet at the jewelry store on her way to work. When Janet asked her if she had enjoyed the party the night before, Pingping said, “Not really. I like Christine, but to be honest, I don’t like Kim and Charlie. They’re rude to me, like afraida me or something.”

  Janet smiled quizzically. Pingping pressed on, “What? I’m never nasty to them.”

  “You know, Kim is vulnerable. Charlie has been her boyfriend for almost two years, and she cannot afford to lose him.”

  “Crazy. How can she think I want her boyfriend, that chubby Charlie? I have Nan, he’s already more than I can handle. One more man will kill me.”

  Janet stowed away a box of assorted beads on the shelf, turned back, and said, “A few years ago Kim lost her boyfriend to a Japanese girl, so she must’ve feared you might do the same to her.”

  “She’s sick.”

  “Come on, Pingping, you don’t know how pretty you are. You can easily bewitch a lot of men. In fact, after you left yesterday, both Kim and Charlie said you and Nan were a lovely couple. Kim was really relieved to know you were married.” Janet tittered, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “Have you heard the expression ‘yellow fever’?”

  “Yes. A kinda disease?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. It also means that a lot of men are crazy about Asian women. Believe me, if you weren’t married, you could have lots of dates.”

  “I don’t want to date man, I want marriage. No
body, only Nan want to marry me.”

  After Pingping left, Janet thought about their conversation, amused by her friend’s innocence. She often talked with Dave about Pingping and Nan, knowing they’d had marital trouble all along. Dave would say Nan was a lucky man who didn’t seem to know how to appreciate his luck. What amazed the Mitchells was that Nan and Pingping, in spite of their rocky marriage, seldom quarreled and wouldn’t have extramarital affairs, as if both were content with the situation and would make no effort to improve it. Janet once urged Pingping to take Nan to a marriage counselor, but her friend refused, saying, “We don’t need shrink.” Probably thanks to the hard work at the restaurant, neither Pingping nor Nan had the time and energy to look for another lover. Also, their son kept their hands full and held them together.

  More amazing was that the Wus always shared everything—they had the same bank accounts and paid all the bills together. Whatever they owned was under both names. In fact, Nan let Pingping handle all the money that went through the Gold Wok. By contrast, Janet and Dave each had personal bank accounts and each would contribute $3,000 a month to their joint account, from which all their household expenses, including the mortgage and dining out, were drawn. On holidays and birthdays, they’d buy each other presents paid out of the givers’ own pockets. Janet noticed that when Pingping bought clothes or shoes for her family, she’d get the same kind for both Nan and Taotao, as if Nan were just another child of hers. In addition, the Wus never got presents from each other. Once, on Pingping’s birthday, Janet asked her why, and her friend said, “I don’t need gift from Nan. He spend my money if he buy anything. If I buy something for him, I spend his money.”

  Janet could see the logic of those words and was even more fascinated by their marital state, which seemed quite stable despite Pingping’s denying that Nan loved her. Aren’t passion and sex essential parts of the married life? Can a marriage last without those basic ingredients? Sometimes Janet raised those questions to herself and couldn’t answer them, unable to imagine living with Dave without the desire to possess him and without deep love for him. She was sure that if Dave hadn’t loved her, he could definitely have started an affair with another woman, and then their marriage would disintegrate. But in the Wus’ case, Pingping and Nan seemed in harmony, and neither was really bothered by the absence of passion in their marriage. On the other hand, Pingping had admitted to Janet that she and Nan did make love from time to time, and that the longer they lived together, the more comfortable she felt with Nan in bed. Strange. Maybe they did love each other, but in their own peculiar way.

  18

  NAN was peeling ginger while watching CNN. The TV, hung up in a corner behind the counter, had tiny refulgent spots on its screen. As the camera shifted to a street crowded with Asian faces, the anchor-woman with kohl-rimmed eyes said, “A Chinese dissident was arrested yesterday afternoon in Beijing. Mr. Bao Yuan, an exiled artist living in New York City, returned to China last week with the intention of publishing a literary magazine in his homeland. The charge is still unclear, but our CNN source reports that he’s accused of the crime of sabotage…”

  Nan was flabbergasted and stopped the peeler in his hand, his eyes fixed on the screen. He was eager to see Bao’s face, but it never appeared. Instead, a scene that didn’t directly bear on his apprehension emerged: a group of policemen frog-marched four handcuffed criminals toward a six-wheeled truck, whose back was canvased, as if they were heading for an execution ground.

  At once Bao became the topic at the restaurant, though neither Pingping nor Niyan had ever met him. Nan told them how he had lived off Wendy and how she had called in her brother, who threw Bao out of her house. They all felt that Bao might have planned to get arrested for the sake of publicity; otherwise only a fool would have run the risk of sneaking back into China, where the police were awaiting him. Shubo stopped by on his way to work and left a copy of World Journal for Nan, saying Bao Yuan must have been out of his mind. He had to hurry to Grand Buddha and couldn’t stay to join them in their conversation. Before Nan could tease him, saying Shubo’s unshaven face brought to mind a koala today, his friend was already outside, striding away toward his car. Shubo’s bald patch was more eye-catching when viewed from behind.

  Nan opened the newspaper. The front page listed Bao’s arrest as a major piece of news. On the third page was a long article about the incident, entitled “China’s New Human Rights Violation.” Together with the writing was Bao’s photo, in which he wore a sardonic grin as if trying hard to fight down a wild laugh. The article reported that he had taken with him a hundred copies of New Lines and intended to distribute them in China. He also wanted to explore the possibility of publishing the journal on the mainland, but before he could find a business partner, the police seized him and confiscated all the copies of the journal. Rumor had it that the authorities were going to put him on trial, which Nan doubted would ever take place, because it might raise more international uproar. He was sure Bao already had a green card, so it would be difficult for the government to imprison him like a regular Chinese citizen. More troublesome for the authorities, the dissident communities in major U.S. cities were already on the move, launching protests and staging condemnations. The article stated that a group of freedom activists in New York and Washington, D.C., had started collecting signatures and appealed to some U.S. congressmen to intervene on Bao’s behalf.

  Nan talked with Dick on the phone about Bao’s trouble. Dick chuckled and said, “I’ve heard about it. He’s famous now, and even my colleagues in Asian Studies have been talking about his bravery.”

  “What? Zey believe he’s brave?” asked Nan.

  “Sure, how could they think otherwise?”

  “He might have meant to attract attention.”

  “Probably. Still, it takes a lot of guts to smuggle the journal into China personally, don’t you think?”

  “I guess all zer copies must have been back issues. Zer journal was dead long ago, you know zat.”

  “Maybe he meant to resurrect it in China.”

  “Well, I’m not sure.”

  “Jeez, Nan, you’re too cynical. Come to think of it, the guy might do many years behind bars just because he believes in free speech and free press.”

  “It’s not zat simple. I don’t feel he’ll become a prisoner of conscience.”

  “What makes you think that way?”

  Nan couldn’t explain it in detail on the phone, so he suggested they meet and talk about it. Dick was busy going through his copy-edited poetry manuscript, which he had to send back to his editor that weekend, so he couldn’t come until the following Wednesday.

  19

  WHEN Dick came to the Gold Wok on Wednesday afternoon, Bao had just been released and expelled from China. It was reported that some in the U.S. Congress had pressured the Chinese government for his release. Nan felt vindicated and said to his friend, “See, I told you he wouldn’t be in jail for long.”

  “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they sentence him to a prison term?” Dick shook his chin, on which sweat was beading.

  “Zat would make him more famous,” said Nan.

  “I guess now he has quite a bit of material for a book.”

  “He was writing a memoir when I worked for him in New York.”

  “I know. I saw some chapters of it in translation. Utterly atrocious. I told him to scrap the whole thing and start over.”

  “Maybe he has finished it.” Nan wanted to say that perhaps Bao could easily find a publisher now, but he checked himself.

  Out of his back pocket Dick pulled a mock cover of his new book. It was a piece of glossy paper, fourteen by ten inches and divided down the middle, the right half red and the left half white. Two large handwritten words stood in the center of the right-hand side, Unexpected Gifts, above which was the author’s name, “Dick Harrison,” and below which was a basket of fruit: apples, pears, tomatoes, grapes. The opposite half of the paper bore some words of praise for Dick’
s other books and a blurb on this volume by Sam Fisher, commending Dick for “his unerring ear.” Nan disliked the cover on the whole, but was impressed by the fruits embodying the gifts.

  “How do you like this cover?” Dick asked.

  “To tell zer truth, I don’t like zer crimson, too loud, like a cover of a revolutionary book.”

  “The color’s fine. Red is eye-catching and will help it sell better.”

  Dick’s reply surprised Nan, who had never thought that a poet would be so concerned about the sales of his book. In spite of his own hard effort to make money, when it came to poetry Nan couldn’t imagine it as a commodity. He didn’t know how to say this to his friend, so he pointed at the wicker basket on the cover, saying, “Zese fruits look nice.”

  “I hate it!” said Dick.

  “How come?”

  “It’s so banal. Why can’t they have a basket of more peculiar things, like squash, or pinecones, or trout, or pheasants? I quarreled with the publisher this morning before I went to class. Gosh, he’s impossible.”

  “Are they going to change zis?”

  “I don’t know. The guy said it was too late. I told him it wasn’t too late because they just started working on this book. We yelled at each other on the phone. He’s a schmuck, but he’s my publisher. Maybe I shouldn’t have had the altercation with him.”

  “A mediocre cahver shouldn’t be a big deal. People will judge zer book by its content.”

  “I want everything to be perfect.”

  Nan said no more. He felt Dick had overreacted to the cover, trite though it might be. Dick told Nan that the first run of this volume would be one thousand and that if all the copies were sold, the book would be a success. Nan was surprised by the small number and couldn’t figure out why Dick was so eager to sell the book if he could hardly make any money from the sale—the publisher had agreed to pay him merely five percent of the list price for royalties. Dick mentioned that some journals might write about Unexpected Gifts. If the reviews were positive, they’d bolster the sale of the book.