Reading A Free Life Zachary Sng (bio) In Ha Jin's 2007 novel A Free Life, poetry gets the last word. Over the course of 650 pages or so, the book tracks its protagonist, Nan Wu, as he searches for a place to call home. Having come to the United States from China as a foreign student, he decides in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre to stay. Joined by his wife and young son, Nan embarks on a search for a new life. His journey takes him through various jobs, stations, and settings, ranging from the suburbs of Boston to New York City's Chinatown to a strip mall in the Greater Atlanta area where they set up a restaurant. Through it all, we never lose sight of one thing: what Nan really wants to do is write poems.1 His attempts at poetry remain sporadic and plagued by self-doubt, and as the book winds down to a quiet conclusion, we sense that the dream has run its course. But then, unexpectedly, we are asked to read on for a bit more: there is an epilogue with a few pages from Nan's poetry journal and 25 of his poems, written in English (his adopted language). The journal entries contain Nan's notes about writing and trying to get published. The final entry is dated October 30th, 1998: Sent out five poems to the Kenyon Review this morning. These days I have tried to memorize a few lines by Auden every day. Sadly, my memory is no longer as strong as ten years ago. Today I can hardly [End Page 491] recall what I learned yesterday. Probably my creative powers have passed the peak and I started too late. Yet for me there is only trying, and I will be happy if I can work this motel job for many years. (629) The reference to the motel job is telling. After a string of health problems beset the family, his anxieties about health insurance finally convince him to trade in the successful family restaurant for a regular job with benefits. The weariness we hear in "there is only trying" reflects Nan's state of mind about his writing but also a general resignation to the disappointment that is his American life. In the end, Nan does not manage to get any of his poems accepted for publication. The sporadic notes of encouragement that come his way pale in comparison to the harshness of one editor, Gail Upchurch: she is cited in his journal urging him to quit because his clumsy English "almost amounts to an insult" to a "native speaker" (626). Left with this odd combination of editorial savagery and authorial reticence, how are we meant to read Nan's poems? The novel does not frame them for absorption into any specific narrative. Do they support a story about progress, of incremental growth or reconciliation? Do they represent a modest triumph against everything that has worked to grind Nan down? Or do they record his quiet defeat in the face of insurmountable odds? It is hard to tell. John Updike's review of the novel judges it to be "relatively lumpy and uncomfortable" compared to some of Ha Jin's earlier work. Somehow languid and choppy at the same time, A Free Life measures out its slow pace in short, vignette-like chapters that drag against the forward-facing story of gradual progress. "It's a long trudge," Updike admits, "but then so is assimilation." The novel's lack of ease with itself is simply the price it pays for telling a tale of assimilation, which is bound to be flecked with regret and loss. If A Free Life is, indeed, a novel of assimilation, surely it is significant that it ends with something that resists assimilation. The poems ask us to read beyond narrative resolution, and in doing so, append a question mark to that resolution. Poetry's recalcitrance does not represent an unaltered core of authenticity or resolve in Nan, immune to the pressures that urge conformity. Rather, it is the sheer superfluity of poetry to the novel's formal economy that makes them...