A Free Life

by Ha Jin

Nevertheless, as time went by, a kind of disappointment sank into his heart. The struggle had ended so soon that he felt as though the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax. In his mind he wrestled with the bewilderment that had begun to enervate him and made him work less hard than before. He tried to convince himself that the house was really theirs, and so were the van and the restaurant, that the realized dream wasn’t merely an empty promise. If his family hadn’t come to America, he couldn’t have imagined owning these things, not in his wildest expectations. He was baffled, wondering what was wrong with him. Why couldn’t he be as happy as his wife? Why couldn’t he enjoy the fruits of their hard labor? He should feel successful. But somehow the success didn’t mean as much to him as it should.

  Gradually he figured out what had happened—in just a few years he’d gone through the journey that often took most immigrants a whole lifetime. Usually the first generation drudged to feed and shelter themselves and their families, and toward the end of their lives they might own a house or an apartment, and if they were more fortunate, a business. Their children, having grown on the bases the parents had built, would have different kinds of dreams and ambitions, going to college and becoming professionals and “real Americans.” Most of them wouldn’t repeat their parents’ lives. In other words, the first generation was meant to be wasted, or sacrificed, for its children, like manure used to enrich the soil so that new seeds could sprout and grow.

  But Nan was merely forty, and still had many years of life ahead. What should he do next? Work hard to acquire another business? Absolutely not. Of that he was certain. He didn’t want to die a successful businessman.

  Nan remembered the credo he had repeated to Danning six years before: Do something moneyed people cannot do. The memory occasioned a sudden pang in his heart. It seemed that he had forgotten his goal and gotten lost in making money. Why hadn’t he devoted himself to writing poetry? Instead, all these years he had been working like a brainless machine. He tried to convince himself that this “detour” might be a necessary procedure, a step toward some achievement of higher order, since logically speaking, only after you were fed and sheltered could you mull over ideas and enjoy the leisure needed for creating arts. Yet his disappointment wouldn’t abate, its heaviness weighing down his mind.

  He couldn’t help fulminating against himself mentally. “You’ve been living like a worm and exist only in the flesh. You’re just a channel of food, a walking corpse.” He was so irascible these days that his wife and son again avoided eating with him at the same table.

  2

  SHUBO often came in to give Nan World Journal after he himself had read it. If the restaurant wasn’t busy, the two of them would chat at length. One afternoon, Nan told his friend that he should have spent more time writing poetry, Shubo shook his balding head and said, “You’re too impractical.”

  “Why should I be practical?” countered Nan. “The world has been created by impractical people.”

  “I mean, you shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew.”

  “If you speak Chinese, you don’t need to mix in English idioms. When did you learn that expression, yesterday?” Nan felt his temper rising.

  “See, that’s exactly your problem,” Shubo said, and took a swallow of oolong tea.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You’re impatient and always talk and act as if your bottom were on fire.”

  Nan hated that expression and asked, “What do you mean by ‘impatient’?”

  “We’re new here and cannot go a million miles in one life. Writing poetry can be a profession only for your grandchildren. For example, I don’t think Taotao will write poetry. You want him to study science to earn a meal ticket, don’t you?”

  “Maybe, but that has nothing to do with my life.”

  “Forget about your life. You’re supposed to sacrifice yourself for your children, who are an extension of your life and who will do the same for their children. That’s how we Chinese survive and multiply—each generation lives for the next.”

  “That’s why children must be filial to their parents, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guess what, I don’t buy into that crap. Why should I sacrifice myself? I’m done sacrificing—I’ve had enough. Besides, ‘sacrifice’ is just an excuse for our cowardice and laziness. My son has his life and I must have mine.” Nan wanted to remind Shubo that he didn’t even have a child and was unqualified to talk about parental sacrifice, but he held back.

  “Nan, you’re too impatient. In your life span you want go through the course of three generations. You’ll be better off if you scale down your ambition. If you really want to write, do it in Chinese. That will be more reasonable.”

  “I don’t want to be reasonable,” sneered Nan. “We’re too often emasculated by reason and pragmatism.”

  “We shouldn’t continue talking like this, going in circles. All I’m saying is that one must be financially secure first and then think about making arts or writing books. In other words, it takes generations for the immigrants to outgrow the material stage.”

  “That’s a philistine mentality,” said Nan.

  “No, it’s the American way. Remember, Ben Franklin’s father forbade his son to be a poet, saying most verse makers were just beggars?”

  “Then Franklin’s dad was a major American philistine,” Nan said crossly, his long eyes glinting. “I don’t believe artists starve in America. I’ve met many of them. They can be poor and wretched, but they don’t starve. Take Dick Harrison for example, he’s living a good life by being a poet.”

  “Nan, you’re too stubborn. Dick’s great-grandparents came to the States last century. Like I said, your grandchildren will be able to live Dick’s kind of life, but that’s not for us.”

  “So we have to compromise?”

  “Do we have another choice?”

  Niyan came over and put their checkbook in front of her husband, who was off work today. Their air conditioner had been struck by lightning the night before, and a technician was scheduled to come and look at it at three o’clock. Shubo rose and stretched up his arms, then rubbed the small of his back with both hands. He’d suffered a backache recently, having to do a ten-hour shift six days a week at Grand Buddha. “We’ll talk more about this next time,” he told Nan, and thrust the checkbook into his pocket, ready to leave.

  Nan grimaced without speaking.

  3

  NAN decided to write poetry again. It seemed he couldn’t get anywhere if he continued writing in Chinese. Obscure and unpublished, he was completely isolated from the Chinese writers’ community, which was centered in New York. In Toronto there was also a group of novelists who, though having emigrated, were still writing in their mother tongue and sending their works back to China for publication, but their manuscripts were often censored there or rejected on the grounds that the subject matter wasn’t right. In Nan’s case, it was clear that writing in Chinese would lead him to a dead end. Could he do it in English? The same old question again tormented him these days. He knew that to him Chinese meant the past and English the future, the identification with his son. He also understood that by adopting another language he might wander farther away from his Chinese heritage and have to endure more loneliness and run more risk; eventually he might have to estrange himself from his mother tongue, in which a writer of his situation, in fact all writers in the Chinese diaspora, would be marginalized. But to write poetry in English was like climbing a mountain with a summit he couldn’t see or envision. It was very likely that he might mess up his life without getting anywhere. Still, was there another way if he was determined to write?

  The following Thursday when Dick came for lunch, Nan asked his friend to give him a list of books of contemporary poetry in English that he should know. Without hesitation Dick wrote eleven titles on the notepad Nan had placed before him. They included:

  Darker, Mark Strand

  Scream! Sam Fisher

>   The Fortunate Traveller, Derek Walcott

  Descending Figure, Louise Glück

  The Book of the Body, Frank Bidart

  An Explanation of America, Robert Pinsky

  North, Seamus Heaney

  Elsewhere, Linda Dewit

  The Ether Dome and Other Poems, Allen Grossman

  Dien Cai Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa

  An Appointment in the Afternoon, Richard Harrison

  “Thanks, thanks,” Nan said. He tore off the sheet and folded it carefully. “I’ve made up my mind to write in English.”

  “Good. You’ve been dillydallying too long,” Dick said.

  “Do you sink I can make it eventually?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘make it.’”

  “I mean whezzer I can become a decent poet in English eef I persevere.”

  “No doubt about that, Nan. You’ll be a fine poet.”

  “I may also mess up my life.”

  “That’s common. I’ve already ruined a good part of mine.” Dick laughed and blinked.

  “Why did you say zat?”

  “My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I even went to law school at Columbia for a year, then I quit. My dad was mad at me for wasting so much money. In my parents’ eyes I was a loser.”

  “But you’re a success now. You have an excellent jawb.”

  “I may lose it anytime. If Emory doesn’t give me tenure, I don’t know where I’ll go. Look, you have your wife and kid and you have a home. That’s already a success. I have nothing but myself. Most poets in America are worse off than I am. I knew a middle-aged poet who died of pneumonia because he had no health insurance and couldn’t go to the doctor when he was ill. To tell the truth, in a way you’re lucky, Nan. Whatever happens to you, your family will be with you and love you. To top it all, you have your own home and business, a solid base.”

  Dick’s words surprised Nan. Never had he thought his family could play such a vital role in the writer’s life he tried to imagine for himself. Indeed, even if he ruined himself totally, his wife and son would remain with him. Without question, to Dick he was a kind of success, at least domestically. This realization gave him some confidence, now that he knew he had little to lose. All he could do was try.

  He drove to three local libraries and found seven of the eleven poetry books Dick had listed for him. To get the other four titles, he went to Borders at Gwinnett Mall and bought two of them. He also ordered Linda Dewit’s Elsewhere at the bookstore. But they couldn’t find Richard Harrison’s An Appointment in the Afternoon. The young saleswoman searched in the computer, but to no avail. “Are you sure this is the right title?” she asked Nan, biting the corner of her mouth, beside which a pair of thin lines emerged. Nan wondered whether they were wrinkles or scars.

  “Yes. Do you carry ozzer books by zis author?”

  “No, I don’t see any here.” She kept her eyes on the monitor.

  “Have you ever stocked zis title?”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  Nan didn’t try further, since the nine poetry books already in his hands would occupy him for two or three months. Besides, he was sure that Dick had a copy he could borrow.

  When Dick came to the Gold Wok the next time, Nan mentioned his inability to get hold of Richard Harrison’s book. Dick reddened, lowering his eyes while slurping seaweed soup. “What’s zer matter?” Nan asked. “Don’t you have a volume of his poetry?”

  “Of course I do. I wrote it.”

  “What? But your name is Dick, not Richard. Your new book has ‘Dick Harrison’ as zee author.”

  Dick laughed nervously, his face puckering a little. “You don’t know Dick is a nickname for Richard.”

  “Oh, I really don’t know. You mean it’s like Bob for Robert or Bill for William?”

  “Exactly. From now on I go by Dick for my author’s name.”

  “My, I never thought you would be on zer list.”

  “Why? You think I’m unqualified?”

  “No, I don’t mean zat. We Chinese would never do that!”

  “Do what?”

  “To put down your own name on such a list. I didn’t imagine it was you. Hey, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m just telling zer truth.”

  “I’m not that fragile. But I have to assert myself, even to pat myself on the back. A lot of poets just write dreck, but still they have everything—fame, money, and women.”

  “So you write for those?” asked Nan, half joshingly.

  “Why not? Poets are not saints. We have to make our way in the world too.”

  “But poetry seems useless to me.”

  “You have to take it as a matter of life or death if you want to write well,” Dick said in earnest, and unconsciously put down his spoon.

  Nan thought about his friend’s words afterward, but he was unconvinced. He couldn’t see how poetry could be used as a means of getting fortune and fame, much less women. In the Chinese tradition, poets often celebrated poverty, believing their art could improve and mature with hardship and impoverishment. On the other hand, Nan remembered that Wallace Stevens once said money could become poetry. Yet that statement was mainly about the time and energy the poet needed for writing; it didn’t bear on the fortune and fame Dick had in mind. Nan didn’t agree with his friend, and neither would he believe in the principle upheld by traditional Chinese poets who had ritualized poverty. He felt that too much hardship could dull a poet’s sensibility and smother his talent, just as in his own case the hard work over the years had stunted his growth as a poet. Now he had to keep his mind alert and clear and find his way.

  4

  IN MARCH, Mrs. Lodge bought eight ducklings, each already more than half a foot long, and kept them in the lake. They grew rapidly and in two months looked like adult ducks, waddling about with heavy asses. When swimming in the green water, they looked blazingly white. Though they didn’t fly away to other bodies of water, they took off occasionally, darting from one end of the lake to the other end and quacking gutturally. Because of their ability to fly, Nan often wondered whether they were a hybrid of some domestic and wild ducks. The eight of them always stayed together. When they paddled around, the largest drake would lead the flock, and together they resembled a miniature cruising fleet. Taotao called the head drake the bully, because the rascal would chase female ducks and even geese. If a goose was too large and too tall for it to tread, it would just sit on her back as she sailed around in the water, both of them shrieking like crazy.

  One morning in May, Nan and Taotao returned from the supermarket with the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The moment they got out of the car, the boy caught sight of the bully duck perching near the gate to the backyard and shuddering in silence. Taotao went up to it, but the drake wouldn’t move or make any noise. He pushed it with his foot; still it wouldn’t budge, trembling without pause. Nan came over too. They saw blood on its head and feathers. “He must have been injured,” Nan thought aloud in English.

  The boy ran into the house, flapping his hands above his waist like a pair of penguin flippers. He shouted, “Mom, we have the bully duck in our yard. He won’t go away.”

  Mother and son came out together while Nan held up the drake and saw that it had been mangled by fishing lines and hooks, its tongue hanging out, slashed by a large fishhook that had gone through it from underneath. Several pieces of fishing line were twined around its neck, choking it. One of its wings had collapsed, unable to move. Stroking its feathers, Nan found another hook stuck in its good wing. He managed to dislodge this one and some other hooks, but he couldn’t take off the one on its tongue, which, when he tried to remove it, hurt the duck more and made its mouth bleed again. The poor creature was so damaged that it couldn’t make any noise.

  Pingping cut the fishing lines with scissors, but they couldn’t get rid of the fishhook without further injuring the drake’s tongue. She went back into the house and returned with a pair of pliers, her apron pocket stuffed with a bottle and c
otton balls. With both hands Nan severed the hook so that the barb wouldn’t cut the tongue again when he pulled the shank out. The steel of the fishhook was so hard that it had even dented the edges of the pliers. “Open his mouth,” Pingping said to Nan while taking an aspirin tablet out of her apron pocket.

  Father and son pried the duck’s bill apart. Pingping, who had worked on a poultry farm for two years back in China and knew how to treat sick chickens, broke the aspirin in half and inserted one piece into the drake’s mouth. It swallowed the medicine, and she rubbed its throat to ensure that the aspirin sank into its craw. Next, with a pair of sticks she picked off the maggots from its wounds. Then she gingerly rubbed the gashes with a cotton ball soaked with hydrogen peroxide; the wounds kept foaming while the drake’s legs twitched fitfully. After the treatment, Taotao and Nan carried the creature to the lakeside and released it. It paddled away listlessly, hardly able to keep its head above the water.

  For the rest of the day, Nan and Pingping talked about the bully duck, which must have stayed in their yard for a whole night. The drake had been the strongest of the brood, but when it was injured, it had been left to die alone and none of the flock had accompanied it. All the other ducks perched in the shady bushes on the other shore, sleeping, feeding, and mating as usual. Once in a while they’d get into the water, frolicking or catching fish or insects. Their life wasn’t in the least disrupted by their ex-leader’s absence. Pingping sighed, “It’s just like human beings—when you’re weak, you’re left to die alone.”

  To their amazement, two days later, the bully drake led the flock swimming in the lake again, its head raised high, and it quacked as lustily as before. Again it would chase female waterfowl. These ducks and the mallards were very fond of the Wus’ backyard. They’d bask in the sun on the shore and lay eggs in the clumps of monkey grass. The lake couldn’t sustain too many of them, so Pingping left only ten of the duck eggs in the grass to be hatched. She took the rest home and salted them in a jar of brine.