A Free Life

by Ha Jin

  Her overbearing tone of voice enraged Nan. He exploded, “You haven’t returned my soup pot yet! You promised to do that five months ago—why haven’t you kept your promise? I can never trust you again. You talk so much about national pride and honor, but why wouldn’t you honor your own word? Why can’t you be more decent as a human being?” To his surprise, his questions shut her up. Mei Hong dropped her eyes, her face dark. Several people cackled.

  Then a young woman stood up and challenged Nan, “Are you a Chinese or not?”

  “I was born in China and—”

  “Give us a simple yes or no answer!”

  “I’m going to be a U.S. citizen. I believe most of you will—”

  “Get out of here, you shameless American!” shouted a male voice.

  “Let him speak,” a man interrupted. “I’m going to be a citizen too.”

  “Americans out! Americans out!” a few voices cried in unison.

  “This is a free country and I have the right of free speech,” Nan said.

  “We don’t want to listen to you.”

  “Yes, get out of here!”

  “Let him finish.”

  “Achoo!”

  “Listen,” Nan went on. “You people always talk about your nation, your China, as if every one of you were a kingpin of that country. Has it ever occurred to you that this obsession is dangerous? I mean to let a country dominate an individual’s life and outweigh everything else. What’s the definition of fascism? Do you know?”

  A hush fell over them.

  Then someone brought out, “Don’t give us another lie.”

  Nan replied calmly, “The first principle of fascism is to exalt country and race above the individual. If you don’t believe me, look it up in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the tenth edition. If we don’t stop this nonsense of China’s pride, we may end up ruining our own lives here.”

  “You never cease to amaze me.” Mei Hong stood up. “A madman is what you are. Let me tell you, you’re also a banana!” She jabbed her finger at Nan. “You always despise China and our language. That’s why you’ve been writing in English and dreaming of becoming another Conrad or Nabokov. Let me tell you, you’re just making a buffoon of yourself! Get real—stop fancying yourself a great poet!”

  Flustered, Nan felt his throat congesting. But he scrambled to answer, “To write in English is my personal choice. Unlike you, I prefer to be a real individual.”

  “Yeah, to be a lone wolf,” scoffed Mei Hong.

  “Exactly!”

  That somehow gagged her, and some people giggled. Nan said to the audience, “All I’m saying is that we ought to be decent human beings first, to be fair and upright to others and to ourselves.”

  The moderator rapped the table with her pen, but nobody took heed of her. “Stop bickering!” she begged, yet more people were jabbering now. The room was in a tumult. Many of the audience stood up, watching or whooping. The three panelists rose too, gathering their materials and about to leave. The scraping of chairs and shuffling of feet filled the room.

  A few pairs of eyes were glowering at Nan, who pretended not to notice them. If only he had listened to Pingping and stayed at the restaurant. He shouldn’t have come to this pandemonium to seek unhappiness. There was no way to reason with some people in this crowd, to which he felt he no longer belonged. Their ilk had the herd mentality that assumed the fulfillment of one’s selfhood depended on the rise and growth of a tribe. Nan wondered whether he should go up to the old historian on the panel and talk with him for a while, but he decided not to. He preferred to stand alone.

  22

  WHILE Nan was at the meeting, Pingping and Niyan were diligently preparing for the evening. It was Saturday, so they’d be busy after three o’clock. Nan had promised to come back before three-thirty. Pingping took out of the freezer the beef and chicken Nan had cut the previous night and let them thaw. She planned to wrap some egg rolls after putting a new ribbon of paper into the cash register. She hadn’t fully recovered from the abortion yet, and though most of her diabetic symptoms were gone, a numbing pain still tightened her lower back from time to time. In the dining room Niyan was chasing a fly with a long plastic swatter. She had been placing silverware and paper napkins on the tables.

  As they were working, a shaggy man in a maroon windbreaker came in with a half-empty bottle under his arm. He lurched directly to the counter, plunked beside the cash register the stout amber bottle printed with “Wild Turkey,” pulled out a snub-nosed revolver, and hissed at Pingping, “Give me all the dough you have here.”

  For a moment she was too transfixed to respond. The man said again, “Empty your drawer and give me all the cash!” His reddish beard, so thick that his mouth was invisible, quivered as he spoke, blowing hot, alcoholic fumes on Pingping’s face.

  Silently she unlocked the register and took out the tray that contained about a dozen singles, four fives, two tens, and some coins. Inside the machine, under the tray, was a sheaf of twenties, more than two hundred dollars, which she always kept in there for emergency use, but she didn’t touch it. With trembling hands she placed the tray before the man and said, “We haven’t star’ yet.” Through the corner of her vision she saw Niyan scurrying out the front door. The thought that she was left alone to face the robber petrified her, and she broke into sniffling sobs.

  Her crying seemed to startle the man, who grabbed the money and thrust all banknotes into the pocket of his windbreaker but left the coins untouched. “What lousy luck!” he grumbled, his boozy eyes flickering.

  “Please go away!” begged Pingping.

  “Nope. I’m hungry and want some food.”

  “We not open yet.”

  “Don’t tell me that!”

  “I don’t know how to cook.”

  “Sure you do. I’ve been here before and saw you cookin’ in there.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Let’s see.” He flipped open a menu on the counter. “Mongolian Beef, this one, spicy.”

  “My husband is chef. Me can’t make Mongolian Beef.” She was really unsure how to cook his order, because the dish wasn’t supposed to be spicy.

  “Don’t lie to me. I’m not a fool. Let me have some spicy Mongolian Beef.”

  “I don’t know how to cook that.”

  “D’you want me to come in and help you?” He slitted his eyes, leering at her.

  “Okay, okay, I will see what I can do.” She retreated into the kitchen.

  As she was about to make for the back door, a piercing siren shrilled, rising louder and louder. The man was frightened. He spun around and rushed away to the front door. Before he could get out, three policemen came in and pointed their pistols at him. “Hold it there!” one of them ordered.

  With a groan the man slumped to the floor. He wailed hoarsely, “I’m sorry! I’m really down and out. I need money to buy a birthday gift for my kid.”

  The police fell on him, pressed him on the floor, and handcuffed him. Then they pulled him up. Niyan came in and spat at the man’s face, saying, “Shame on you! The bank is right across the street. Why don’t you go there? We’re poor too.” She raised her hand and pulled off his marled hat, woven of black and orange wool and still bearing a Wal-Mart tag marked with the price—$3.75.

  “Hey, hey, don’t touch him!” said the short policeman with a beer belly, flipping the cylinder of the small revolver to remove the bullets. His colleagues were inspecting the crime scene, one in the kitchen.

  “Can’t make it anymore,” the man mumbled to Niyan.

  “Stop lying!” she snapped. “You still have money for a new hat.”

  “It’s a gift from my girlfriend,” he grunted.

  Niyan turned to Pingping. “Good heavens, hear this? He keeps a woman while he’s totally broke.” She thrust the hat into his left pocket.

  Pingping said to him, “You should feel shame yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man muttered, and hung his hea
d, showing a whitish spot on his crown.

  Pingping inserted his half bottle of whiskey under his arm. “Take your stuff.” She then pulled all the cash out of his right pocket while explaining to the officers, “He grab all money from our machine.”

  “All right, let’s go.” The short policeman slapped the criminal on the back, then steered him toward the door.

  An older officer began asking Pingping and Niyan questions. The waitress boasted that she could have grabbed the gun left by the man on the counter and shot him, but she phoned the police instead. “He’s stupid, you know,” she said, one palm on her hip.

  “Never take the law into your own hands. You did the right thing,” said the stalwart officer in a nasal voice, writing on a clipboard.

  Pingping thanked him again and again for coming to their rescue.

  When Nan came back, his wife, still beside herself, shouted at him, “I thought you had forgotten this place. Why are you here?”

  He was taken aback by her tear-stained face and didn’t respond. She was trembling a little as she spoke. After hearing about what had happened, he apologized and promised he wouldn’t go to any of those meetings again.

  Pingping went on, “If Niyan hadn’t called the police, that robber would have rushed into the kitchen and killed me in there. I was so scared! My legs still can’t stop shaking.”

  Niyan tittered. Nan threw an arm around his wife and told her, “We’re poor too. I never thought someone would rob us. Don’t cry, Pingping. I won’t leave this place to you alone again. That man must have been really destitute.”

  “Maybe so. He wasn’t like a professional robber. Probably he was scared too. I’m sure he was drunk.”

  Niyan put in, “Maybe we should keep a gun here.”

  “No, no, absolutely not!” Nan said. “If a robber shows up again, just give him what he wants. The most important thing is not to get yourself hurt. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the waitress with a grin.

  23

  THOUGH Taotao read The Oxford American Dictionary from time to time, he refused to learn Chinese anymore. Whenever his parents urged him to write some characters, he’d claim his hand hurt so much that he was suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. What was that? His parents had no clue. They believed the problem lay in his mind and it was his laziness that had caused the constant slippage with his Chinese writing. He could speak and understand Mandarin but could no longer read or write the words. Even when he spoke the language, he used it only in a rudimentary way. He was tired of his parents’ litany of the advantages in being fully bilingual. One afternoon his father yelled at him in the storage room, demanding that the boy promise to work hard on the written characters, but Taotao wouldn’t give him his word and instead complained about the uselessness of Chinese in his life. Shubo happened to be present and tried to convince the boy of the necessity of keeping his mother tongue.

  “It’s too hard,” Taotao said. “I’ve already spent so many years on it and can’t even keep the words I had learned before I was six.” Recently he had begun to resent the more difficult characters. Among those he could recognize, he hated the killer ideogram cang (hide) most, never able to remember the order and number of its strokes.

  “You’ve never poot your heart into it. Of coss you have regressed so much,” Nan said.

  Shubo coaxed, “Taotao, don’t give up. Stroke by stroke you can fell an oak.”

  “I don’t want to cut down any tree!”

  “I mean, no pains, no gains—if you keep to try, you will master Chinese.”

  “Fat chance,” grunted the boy.

  “Yes, you still have a big chance.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  His father broke in, “I know what you mean—‘a very slim chance.’ No matter what, you must continue to learn Chinese.”

  Unlike Nan, Pingping sympathized with their son and in private pointed out to Nan that Taotao would never learn enough of the language for taking the SAT II Chinese test. Her argument sank in, and for several days Nan left him alone.

  Now it was time for the boy to decide what foreign language to study in middle and high schools. There were Sunday Chinese classes at Emory University, which many children attended, but on weekends Nan and Pingping had to work and couldn’t drive their son into Atlanta. Moreover, Pingping didn’t believe Taotao would benefit much from knowing Chinese. She felt English was much more expressive and more useful. Back in China she could hardly write anything, but here once she learned a little English, she had found herself able to write a lot, as if whatever she put on paper became interesting. Nan agreed with her. Compared with written Chinese, English was indeed a language of common people, despite being hard to master, its grammatical rules too loose and its idioms defying logic. Without question, their son should devote himself more to this alphabet.

  So they stopped badgering him to inscribe the characters. If the boy didn’t like Chinese, he would never master it by copying the words. Maybe someday they could send him to Pingping’s parents during the summer; that way he could regain his fluency and literacy in his mother tongue. In his school Latin was very popular, and he applied for it but couldn’t get into the class. It was said that some students had learned Latin so well that they kept diaries in the dead tongue so that their parents couldn’t tell what they wrote. Nan knew that the knowledge of Latin would strengthen his son’s English, so he was displeased that Taotao couldn’t enroll in the class.

  Later Pingping found out that besides English, most papers in science were published in three other languages: French, German, and Japanese. So it would be better if Taotao took up either German or French, both offered at his school. At the beginning of the next semester he chose to learn French, which turned out to be so easy for him that he soon excelled in the class.

  Once he asked his parents, “Can I major in French in college?”

  “You should study to be doctor,” Pingping said. “What profession is better than save people’s life?”

  “I don’t like medical science. How about art history or English? Can I major in art history?”

  “Zen you will be a poor scholar for zer rest of your life,” Nan said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care because we work night and day to make money for you,” retorted his mother. “You act like rich kid who don’t need profession.”

  Taotao turned to his father. “Didn’t you tell me to follow my heart? You said, ‘As long as you do something well, you won’t starve.’”

  “Sure, I said zat. But you should take your mozzer’s opinion into account too.”

  “If I get a scholarship, can I study anything I want?”

  His parents didn’t answer, knowing there was no way to dissuade him. Nan knew Pingping would be happy if Taotao became a premed, but he believed they shouldn’t force their son to do anything against his will. Yes, he wanted the boy to follow his own heart.

  24

  “SOMETHING good happened,” Dick said to Nan when he stepped into the Gold Wok. There was a note of delight in his voice. He pulled his maroon scarf off his neck, his hair damp with rainwater and his cheeks steaming a little. It was still drizzling outside, and it had been a slow afternoon at the restaurant.

  “What happened?” asked Nan.

  “My book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.” Dick’s eyes were sparkling and his face was so radiant that he seemed many years younger.

  “How big is zis prize?”

  “Almost like a Pulitzer.”

  “My goodness, congratulations!” Nan gave him a bear hug, patting his shoulder several times. “So now you’re as famous as Edward Neary?”

  “I’m getting close.”

  “You inspire me,” Nan said in all sincerity. Indeed, just yesterday he hadn’t thought of Dick as a significant poet; now overnight his friend had become a literary figure.

  “Now my task is how to manage success,” said Dick.

  “How
do you mean?” Nan was puzzled, unable to see how success was something to be managed.

  “I must capitalize on the opportunity to promote myself and my work, also to raise my fee.”

  “What fee?”

  “The fee for my readings and talks.”

  “Oh, you’ll rake in zer kind of mahney like Edward Neary?”

  “You bet.”

  That surprised Nan, because Dick was talking like a businessman. Yet Nan said, “We must celebrate.”

  “Yes, let’s do that. Thank you.”

  Nan went into the kitchen to make Crabmeat Fu Rong and Scallops with Black Bean Sauce. Both dishes were easy to to cook, and the latter was one of Dick’s favorites. Nan told Niyan to take two bottles of Tsingtao beer to Dick. He said to Pingping, “Dick just won a top prize for his poetry book. He’s a star now.”

  “No fooling? What prize?”

  “I forgot what it’s called, similar to the Pulitzer.”

  “My, I should go and congratulate him.”

  “Tell him I’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  Both Pingping and Niyan gave their congratulations to Dick, who was so wild with joy that he wouldn’t use the glass on the table and drank the beer directly from the bottle and in long swigs. His eyes turned watery. He now smiled and now sighed, shaking his head as if bemused by such good fortune.

  A few weeks later Dick told Nan that he had received a job offer from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and decided to accept it. Nan had heard of that place and knew this was a major development in his friend’s career. At least Dick wouldn’t have to worry about his tenure at Emory anymore. Nan felt upset that from now on he’d be entirely alone as a struggling poet. He had been writing poetry in English these days, though somewhat halfheartedly, and had been planning to show Dick a few of his poems about animals once he polished them. Now his friend was about to leave; it was almost like a blow to him.

  Nan managed to be congratulatory, though deep down he wished Dick could stay in Atlanta a few more years. Dick seemed to have sensed Nan’s disappointment, so he promised to keep in touch with him and even said, “You must come see me in Iowa.”