A Free Life

"Our agent didn't think this had anything to do with our baby's identity either. She said it was just bureaucracy."

"Zere will be a lawt of heartaches once you become parents," Nan put in, "so don't get distressed too easily."

"Well," Dave said, "I guess this is just the begi

They all smiled. Dave lifted the teapot in front of him and refilled his cup. A black woman holding a toddler stepped in and ordered two panfried noodles, so Nan went back into the kitchen after giving a lollipop to the baby girl, who clutched a nub of carrot.

A few days later, Janet enrolled in a parenting class and went to Atlanta to take the lessons two evenings a week. Whenever there was news about Hailee, she'd share it with Pingping.

2

"TURN your heel toward me," Pingping told Nan, holding a pair of large scissors in her hand, which was sheathed in a latex glove. She was scraping his feet for him. Both of them were sitting on low stools, a stainless-steel bowl between them. His left foot was steeped in the warm water while his right one rested on her lap covered with a khaki apron. It was early morning and their son had just left for school. A cuckoo cried from the depths of the woods across the lake and set the air throbbing. Between the pulsing calls surged a scatter of birdsong. A flock of mallards was quacking in the backyard, waddling around, and some flapped their wings so vigorously that they sent out a faint whistle. Two ducks had been hatching eggs in the monkey grass along the lakeside, so these days the Wus didn't go there for fear of disturbing them. On the dogwood tree near their deck two squirrels were chasing each other, shaking dewdrops off the branches in full flower.

"Your athlete's foot looks better than last time," Pingping said. "Be careful. It can easily get worse in the spring."

Nan nodded, still immersed in a volume of selected poems by Auden, whose photo appeared on both the front cover and the spine of the book. He loved Auden and had learned some of his lines by heart when he was in China. Yesterday morning he had chanced on this copy of poetry at the Goodwill store on his way to work and had bought it for a quarter. To his delight, he found the poem "September 1, 1939" within, a poem Auden himself had excluded from most of his collections. Nan was still happy about the bargain. In Gwi

Since they had married, Pingping had scraped Nan 's feet five or six times a year, because he couldn't do it thoroughly by himself. In the begi

"Ouch!" Nan cried.

"Did I hurt you?" Pingping stopped the scissors. "Don't scrape too hard."

"All right, but I won't be able to scrub your feet again this spring. We'll be weak until summer."

Indeed, pollen had already set in and had begun to torment them. From now on they had to conserve their energy and keep all the doors and windows shut. These days they each carried a bottle of nasal spray in a pocket to prevent their allergies from becoming fullblown. The miserable season enervated and even pacified them-they became more gentle to each other, as if too tired to raise their voices.

On top of that, Pingping was no longer worried about Nan 's obsession with his first love. Seldom did she see the woeful clouds that used to darken his face. She was right: Nan had indeed mellowed a lot. He hadn't often thought of Beina in the past two years, although she'd appear in his dreams now and then. The numb pain still lingered in his chest, but it was no longer as acute as before. Every day he was too occupied to indulge in fantasies. When he got home at night, he'd go to sleep within an hour after taking a shower and reading a few poems. He felt that physically he was strong now, but his mind was empty. He simply didn't have the energy to think of ideas, much less write anything.

To some extent he was pleased by this state of affairs. In his mind would rise the lines by the ancient poet Tao Chien: "Human life runs the same course, / Whose end is to secure shelter and food." Nan was peaceful, determined to stand on his own ground and willing to be a devoted family man.

3

SHUBO GAO had received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia the previous fall. He was still looking for a teaching position in sociology, but so far without success. He often talked with Nan about job hunting and would joke that he was ready to "turn a new leaf," meaning to abandon his sociology specialty. The past winter he had gone to six interviews at a convention held in San Francisco, but the interviewers had all found that he spoke English with a grating accent, so despite his impressive resume that boasted a book published in Chinese, none of the schools invited him over for a campus visit. Afterward, Shubo mailed out more than a hundred applications. He would receive a batch of refusal letters every week, which didn't bother him much, though Niyan couldn't stand it anymore. During the day she would not check the mail for fear of spoiling her appetite.

Despite his bad English, Shubo was fond of cliches. He'd use all kinds of sayings, some of which were Chinese expressions he translated into English, such as "one hill ca

Though a Ph.D., Shubo respected Nan and often bantered with him, saying that Nan was a sad case and shouldn't waste his talent by ru

Nan rejoined, "Why don't you go back to Szechuan? With your Ph.D. from UGA, I'm sure you can get a professorship at a Party school or a police academy."