He was uncertain of his future and what to do about his life, not to mention his marriage. The truth was that he just didn’t love his wife that much, and she knew it. Pingping knew he was still enamored of his ex-girlfriend, Beina, though that woman was far away in China. It seemed very likely to Nan that Pingping might walk out on him one of these days. Yet now he was all the more convinced that they must live in this country to let their son grow into an American. He must make sure that Taotao would stay out of the cycle of violence that had beset their native land for centuries. The boy must be spared the endless, gratuitous suffering to which the Chinese were as accustomed as if their whole existence depended on it.
As Nan’s search for security takes him from Massachusetts to New York City and then to the Atlanta area, he encounters a colorful variety of Chinese expatriates and relatively native Americans, and copes with a series of lowly jobs, but the reader follows him for more than 650 pages in pursuit of resolutions to the issues posed in the sentences above. Will Nan get over Beina? Will he start to write poetry in English? Will Pingping ever be loved by Nan as she deserves? What kind of American will Taotao become? Will the Wus get to own two cars and pay off their mortgage? It’s a long trudge, but, then, so is assimilation.
In an interview with Powell’s Books, Ha Jin said that “the core of the immigrant experience” was “how to learn the language—or give up learning the language!—but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant.” A striking typographical device conveys the inside and outside of the linguistic problem. Conversations in Mandarin are rendered in italicized English, and we observe Nan’s brain and tongue functioning at a sophisticated level. When he applies to an Italian-American supervisor called Don for the job of night watchman at a factory in Watertown, we hear him speak as he sounds to Americans:
“I worked for one and a half years at zer Waltham Medical Center, as a cahstodian. Here’s recommendation by my former bawss.… My bawss was sacked, so we got laid all together.”
“You got what?” Don asked with a start. A young secretary at another desk tittered and turned her pallid face toward the two men.
Realizing he’d left out the adverb “off,” Nan amended, “Sorry, sorry, they used anozzer company, so we all got laid off.”
And Nan’s English isn’t that bad; how else do you pronounce “boss”? But he is tripped up here by a peculiarity of English that Dr. Johnson noted in the preface to his dictionary:
There is [a] kind of composition more frequent in our language than perhaps in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty. We modify the signification of many verbs by a particle subjoined; as to come off [and] innumerable expressions of the same kind, of which some appear wildly irregular, being so far distant from the sense of the simple words, that no sagacity will be able to trace the steps by which they arrived at the present use.
Nan agrees: “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.” Elsewhere, becoming a handy American householder, he thinks, “Now he loved hand tools—oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.” This exacting language is “like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, even though he’d feel out of his element whenever he used it.”
Reaching to encompass the American scene, Ha Jin’s English in A Free Life shows more small solecisms than in his Chinese novels. We get a character “licking his compressed teeth,” a tennis court “studded with yellow balls,” “a giant disk [the sun] flaming a good part of the eastern sky,” “the lobby was swarmed with people,” a victim of violence “booted half to death,” eyes that “shone with a stiff light like a crazed man’s,” a “hilly gravel road filled with doglegs,” a swimmer “crawl-stroking to the shore.” Complicated facial maneuvers challenge our ability to visualize: “Unconsciously she combed her upper lip with her teeth”; “His eyebrows were tilting as he kept pushing his flat nose with his knuckle”; “His eyes turned rhomboidal and his face nearly purple.” Metaphorical overload can occur: “In his arms, she was like a meatball with love handles.” Some expressions feel translated from the Mandarin: Pingping says, “You shouldn’t have mixed our decision with his fault,” and Nan thinks, “If his wife had been of two hearts with him, this family would have fallen apart long ago.” Rare words wander in from the hinterlands of the English dictionary: “a short-haired barmaid in a lavender skong,” “It was mizzling,” “empleomaniac.” Taotao’s vocabulary has grown to the point where he exclaims, in the midst of a family tussle, “Ow! Don’t break my humerus!” Anxiously, Nan keeps seeking verdicts on his use of English: one consultant pronounces it “fluid, elegant, and slightly old-fashioned,” whereas another, an editor of a little magazine called Arrows, testily tells him, “The way you use the language is too clumsy. For a native speaker like myself, it almost amounts to an insult.”
Unfortunately, the novel rarely gathers the kind of momentum that lets us overlook its language. The processes that Ha Jin is concerned to describe—survival and adjustment in an alien land, the firming up of a literary vocation, the emergence of marital and family harmony after the shocks of transplantation—are incremental, breaking into many small chapters but yielding few dramatic crises. The central action consists of the Wus’ decision to buy a small Chinese restaurant, the Gold Wok, in a half-deserted mall northeast of Atlanta, and their recipes (foreshadowed by some knowledgeable descriptions of food preparation in Waiting) for success. The sheaf of the fictional Nan Wu’s poems at the very end is meant to serve, like Zhivago’s at the end of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, as the narrative’s climax and triumph. Of the other Chinese literary aspirants Nan meets in the United States, he alone commits to English-language production; the others, after their overseas adventures, return to the Chinese mainland and the constraints and rewards there. One returnee, Danning Meng, achieves official approval and financial security, but tells Nan, when the expatriate visits:
The higher-ups want us to write about dead people and ancient events because this is a way to make us less subversive and more inconsequential. It’s their means of containing China’s creative energy and talents. The saddest part is that in this way we can produce only transient work.
Bao Yuan, who employs Nan for a time on his short-lived Mandarin quarterly in New York, New Lines, becomes a painter and makes an American splash, establishing himself in a studio near Nashville with students and a rich patron, but Nan, nothing if not critical, “could find little originality in these paintings” and distrusts the American sunniness and exuberance that have replaced Bao’s old “depressive agitation, the jaundiced view of the world, and the dark despair.” Sure enough, Bao’s paintings bring less and less money, though he turns them out ever faster. When last seen, he has taken a Chinese bride, a factory owner’s daughter, and cranked out a series of bad paintings of Shanghai: “Obviously Bao, cashing in on his success, had diffused his energy and lost his creative center. This troubled Nan.” Not that Nan’s American friend, the poet Dick Harrison, is any more of an inspiration, scrambling up the rickety ladder of grants and workshops and prizes and influential acquaintances that enable ascent in a capitalist versifier’s thoroughly academic career.
Ha Jin’s description of American life—laborious, money-mad, philistine, and cheesy (there is apparently no cheese in China)—is not apt to trigger a wave of immigration. Asked the difference between China and America, Nan says, “In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone.… Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don’t want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit.” To himself, he thinks, “The louder I shout, the bigger a fool I’ll make of myself. I feel like a crippled man here.” Nevertheless, he elects to stay, in this “lonesome, unfathomable, overwhelming land.” The Wus
strive less to let America in than to squeeze China out—“squeeze every bit of it out of themselves!” Nan tells Danning, “I spit at China, because it treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands nothing but obedience.”
Toward the end of A Free Life, our hero wins, in a supermarket raffle, an airline ticket from Atlanta to Beijing and back. He visits his parents and sees signs of the new prosperity but is unmoved: “He wondered why so many overseas Chinese would retire to this mad country where you had to bribe and feast others to get anything done. Clearly a person like him wouldn’t be able to survive here. Now he wanted all the more to live and die in America.” The flight reminds him of his first flight, in 1985, to America, and
how he and his fellow travelers, most of whom were students, had been nauseated by a certain smell in the plane—so much so that it made some of them unable to swallow the in-flight meal of Parmesan chicken served in a plastic dish. It was a typical American odor that sickened some new arrivals. Everywhere in the United States there was this sweetish smell, like a kind of chemical, especially in the supermarket, where even vegetables and fruits had it. Then one day in the following week Nan suddenly found that his nose could no longer detect it.
His assimilation had begun.
An Upstate Saga
AMERICA AMERICA, by Ethan Canin. 458 pp. Random House, 2008.
From the first pages of Ethan Canin’s new novel, America America, we feel in safe hands; the prospects are panoramic, and the prose, in the author’s preferred first-person mode (“It’s easier to write when you have a voice,” he has said), is ruminative, ominous, and all set to confide a story. The narrator, Corey Sifter, is a fifty-year-old journalist and the publisher of the Speaker-Sentinel, a surviving independent newspaper in a town called Saline, an hour south of Buffalo and twenty miles east of Lake Erie. Corey has just attended, on a Saturday in late September 2006, as “the smell of rotting apples was drifting up from the meadow,” the funeral of Senator Henry Bonwiller, a local product who in 1972 made a strong but thwarted run at the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Bonwiller was eighty-nine, and had been out of politics for twenty-eight years. The funeral is well attended, though hints of two old scandals, alluded to as “Anodyne Energy” and “Silverton Orchards,” shadow the graveside tributes to “the greatest liberal member of the United States Congress since Sam Rayburn.” One elderly couple linger as the sod is being laid on Bonwiller’s grave, and the man, with a carved cane and “that certain kind of roughly determined American face that you see less and less often around here,” kneels and weeps. Corey recognizes him: “There was no one else alive now who knew.” Thereby hangs the tale.
And a complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history it is, shuttling between the twenty-first-century present and the crowded events of 1971–72, with thorough retrospectives of the narrator’s education and romantic life and the region’s development as the fiefdom of a single family, the Metareys. Eoghan Metarey and his father were penniless Scots immigrants who in 1890 opened a hardware store and by 1900 held a firm grip on the area’s wealth of hardwood forests and granite and limestone quarries. Eoghan and his younger son, Liam, successively administered the family fortune out of a “twenty-four-room brick and stone Edwardian manor” called Aberdeen West, which occupied “the apex of a hundred-thousand-acre triangle of land.” Not only that, but the streets and houses of Saline (“which if you’re an old-timer rhymes with malign, and if you’re a newcomer, with machine”) were “almost entirely built and owned” by the Metareys. At sixteen, Corey, the son of a self-educated and well-regarded plumber, is summoned by Liam to come and work at Aberdeen West. (An unassuming tycoon, Liam comes knocking at the Sifters’ back porch; his wife shops locally and his two daughters attend the local high school, “like all the rest of us.”) Corey’s story becomes part David Copperfield and part An American Tragedy, with less suspense than either. We know from the outset that Corey has survived and prospered, and how much tragedy can attach to a senator who lives to be eighty-nine?
Like Dickens, Canin has an unabashed fantastic streak. Emperor of the Air (1988), his first and best-known book, a collection of delicately soulful short stories, contains much weird behavior: a mild-mannered retired high-school teacher creeps into the night to poison his neighbor’s trees with a jar of voracious red insects; another retiree stares at fish in the local aquarium all day and reads poetry while his wife hallucinates that a man is at her window; two adult sisters cope with their mother’s incorrigible shoplifting; a boy stows away in the trunk of his golf-mad father’s car and shouts out during the man’s backseat lovemaking. As in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, unfulfilled longings twist conformity out of shape. In America America, Christian Metarey, one of the teen-age sisters, appears on the roof outside Corey’s window and, climbing by moonlight, leads him eighty feet up into a giant pine tree, and, toward the end of the novel, Corey’s father, nearing ninety, bends down and with a key scratches two sentences by Karl Marx into the wet concrete of a huge mall under construction. Such actions seem more emblematic than plausible. The characters, especially young and innocent Corey, struggle through a fog of imperfect and fitful revelation; after thirty years of hindsight, the narrator is still groping to understand the novel’s central events.
How unambiguously, in contrast, Dreiser moves in inexorable, laboriously detailed linear fashion through the interlocking steps of his own upstate tragedy, shining a glaring light of sympathy upon the motives, intentions, and hopes not only of his principals but of the secondary characters who enforce society’s unforgiving will—the doctor who denies Roberta an abortion, the district attorney who leads the hunt for Clyde and then his legal prosecution, the clergyman whom Clyde’s mother sends to her condemned son in a vain quest for a mitigating circumstance that will save his life. A ponderous weight of authorial omniscience and compassion conveys the reality—single, one-shot, claustrophobically limited—of life itself. So, too, with the other naturalists, from Jack London to Edith Wharton, of a century ago. Canin, contrariwise, pieces together, in mostly short takes, an airy collage of imperfect memory and fleeting impression, as Corey’s recollection of a bygone misfortune, half-comprehendingly witnessed in his adolescence, keeps reverting to pleased contemplation of his bourgeois present.
Of the book’s many strands, it is Corey’s boyhood in worker housing, under the protection of his two admirable parents and the patronage of the Metareys, that comes across most warmly, and the political strand, generating national headlines, that seems thinnest and least persuasive. Canin carefully wedges his fictional Senator Bonwiller into an election year, 1972, when, in fact, a Democratic field including a fading Hubert Humphrey, an allegedly weepy Edmund Muskie, and a glowering George Wallace yielded the nomination to George McGovern, who lost to an incumbent Richard Nixon in one of the worst defeats in the history of Presidential contests. Nixon, who figures in this novel as a sinister background of fathomless conspiracy, was a touching character in Canin’s short story “Vins Fins,” which appeared in The New Yorker and presented political drama as it usually is, surreally fighting for our attention in a stew of personal and domestic happenstance. Born in 1960, Canin has done his homework. To verify Bonwiller’s substance as a near President, he lists the notables in attendance at a campaign reception at Aberdeen West:
George Meany was there, and Carl Stokes, and Averell Harriman, and Senator Kennedy and Senator Mansfield and even Senator Humphrey. So were Arthur Schlesinger and Betty Friedan, and the famous young journalist David Halberstam, who’d just written a book called The Best and the Brightest.… G. V. Trawbridge [fictional] was in the crowd, too, and I assume now that both men must have agreed to take everything on deep background. I saw Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Shirley Chisholm, also, and even though now I can remember all these names and faces so clearly, the truth is that on the afternoon itself
all but Trawbridge and Humphrey and Kennedy had to be pointed out to me.… But I can also say that without any prompting I sensed instantly that there was a new sort of stature in the room.
Though it gives an old-timer like me pleasure to picture George Meany and Betty Friedan in affable discourse, to anyone under forty these names can’t spark much electricity and, in any case, paradoxically weaken Aberdeen West’s claims on the imagination. Corey, with a brand-new driver’s license in his pocket, drives Bonwiller around, but the Senator, away from a microphone, is taciturn and, until his downfall, remains pretty much a cipher. Though Corey’s father remembers him as “the best friend the working men of this country have ever had,” it is hard to believe that Liam Metarey, committing his heart and resources to the campaign, does not see the feet of clay so easily visible to, among others, his daughter Clara.
In Corey’s perspective, his patron and mentor, for all his generosity, also remains a bit remote and blank, coming to life mainly in this endearing glimpse: