Nan doesn’t love his political science studies either and so he leaves graduate school, taking a series of low-paying jobs in Boston and New York. He is finally able to finance the purchase of a small restaurant, Gold Wok, in the Atlanta suburbs, a territory that Jin, who has taught at Emory University, clearly knows well. There Nan and Pingping become true partners, working tirelessly to save money and buy a house on a lake near their restaurant. After all, Nan is aware, “in this place if you didn’t make money, you were a loser, a nobody.” At the same time, he knows he is paying a price for suppressing his own creative urges.
Most of the story is told from Nan’s point of view, though the long-suffering Pingping and even the rebellious Taotao occasionally take center stage. Along the way, in careful, lucid prose that at times seems deliberately formal, Jin introduces us to a well-drawn cast of American, Chinese, and Chinese American characters, including an anxious poetry professor who mentors Nan, an infertile couple who adopt a Chinese baby, and a set of grasping relatives who demand their share of Nan’s American bonanza.
As Nan and Pingping achieve financial and marital stability, A Free Life stalls and begins to seem long and a bit labored. Inevitably, Nan returns to China, a country simultaneously transformed and mired in the past; inevitably, too, a tide of middle-aged regret carries him to his long-lost love, with predictable results. The novel’s force derives from Nan’s larger challenge—his quest, like that of every immigrant and perhaps the rest of us as well, to make his way in “this lonesome, unfathomable, overwhelming land.”
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
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