Word: nanning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sequel to The Crazed, 51-year-old Ha Jin's latest novel A Free Life begins, chronologically, where that book left off - a sort of literary diptych. It's July 1989, a month after Tiananmen, with gloom and anxiety still charging the atmosphere. Chinese student and would-be poet Nan Wu and his wife Pingping are living near Boston while Nan finishes his Ph.D. at Brandeis, and they have no desire to return to a paranoid, post-Tiananmen China. Instead, they send for their only child, 6-year-old Taotao, who has been living with his grandparents in Shandong province...
...dimensional character of Pingping is another disappointment. She wants Taotao to have a good future in America (as a doctor - what else?). She also worries that Nan doesn't really love her and even tells him he can sleep with other women as long as he comes home to her at night...
...telling of Nan's story, however, that the book really falls flat. Rather predictably, the swift transition from starving student-poet to middle-class business owner leaves him spiritually barren. He spends grueling days behind a fiery wok pondering how to balance his duty as a breadwinner with his duty as a poet. His writer friends are getting noticed, and he's not. (If you read his verses, appended at the end of the book, you'll see why. "Don't blame me if I am such a man/ who goes to ball games as a major fan," Nan chimes...
...Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu...