Free A Free Life by Ha Jin Page A

bouquet of carnations that had turned fresher and crisper in the rain. In the distance, horses' hooves were clattering on an asphalt road, the sound mixed with a muffled jingle of harness bells; a horn boomed from a ferryboat in the north as if to announce a solemn ceremony. He had been waiting more than three hours, but that wild-eyed woman never showed up. He guessed she must have gone to a beach resort to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday with another man. How Nan was crushed! Why? Why? Why? His heart writhed with endless questions. He felt maimed, as though all of a sudden drained of lifeblood. When he met her two days later, she said with that impenetrable smile on her plump lips, "I just didn't feel like coming out on that wet day. Didn't I tell you it was over between us?"
    "Then why did you hint you were expecting a birthday present?"
    "That's not what I meant." She laughed that ringing laugh and swung her waist-length hair. "I just said, A real man should be fierce like an eagle and gentle like a dove. Give me a man like that. That would be a real gift.' I didn't mean I wanted something from you." She kept her eyes up to the starlit sky as if speaking to someone up there.
    Too sick to listen to her anymore, Nan strode away and left her alone waiting for the bus to go home. For a long time afterward he lived in a daze, his heart often gripped by paroxysms of pain. Later he learned that Beina's new lover, a translator of Japanese who worked in the same information office as she, often went to Japan on behalf of their sewing machine factory and brought back fancy merchandise. The man had presented her with a red Yamaha scooter, which she rode to work, catching envious eyes on the streets. By contrast, Nan couldn't even buy her a new bicycle. Never had he thought she could be bought that way. He felt as if she had stolen his heart, crushed it, and dumped it somewhere he couldn't find it. If only he could shut her out of his mind. If only he could get her out of his system!
    Two years later, after his son was born, Nan ran into a former classmate who talked at length about the wild Beina, who had recently gone to Beijing to take a test for an English interpreter position at the UN but hadn't even made the first cut. Nonetheless, that impressed Nan, and coming home, he couldn't help but confess to his wife that he still missed his ex-girlfriend terribly. Pressed by Pingping, he admitted he had married her not out of love but out of convenience and compassion. "No," he confessed, "I have no strong feelings for any woman except for Beina. If only I had never met her."
    Wordlessly Pingping turned her face away. Tears, as if forced up from her constricted chest, rolled down her cheeks. His confession upset her so much that her breasts, swollen with milk, went dry the next day.
    After coming to America, Nan lived alone during the first one and a half years. He assumed that the distance of an ocean and a continent might help develop his affection for his wife into love, since sometimes he did miss her, but the numbness in his heart never went away. He also thought he'd forget Beina; yet she wrote to ask him to help her pay application fees at some American universities. He did that, but afterward he never heard a word from her. Obviously no graduate school admitted her. Somehow even her failure gave him more pain.
    Every once in a while he felt attracted to women, especially if they had red hair, but he knew he couldn't love anyone ardently. He had desire, yet little passion. So he didn't try to know any woman. As a matter of fact, as far as desire was concerned, he was normal and strong. Pingping often said he was good in bed, yet he knew that wasn't the reason she had stayed with him: it was because of their child. And he was grateful for that, since he too wanted an intact family for Taotao. In this place neither he nor she had another person to turn to. They were stuck together and had to depend on each other to