Since coming to the United States to pursue graduate work at Brandeis University in 1985, Ha Jin has become one of the nation’s most celebrated writers. He won the 1999 National Book Award for his novel “Waiting,” has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and has received not one, but two PEN/Faulkner Awards. Despite this laundry list of major American literary awards, Jin’s latest novel, “A Free Life,” marks the author’s first set in his adopted country.

“A Free Life,” released in paperback by Vintage ($16) in January, follows the journey of Chinese-American immigrant Nan and his family as they struggle to set their roots in the Atlanta suburbs. As Nan and his wife, Pingping, scrape together the money for a modest home and small Chinese restaurant, they are repeatedly defined as an embodiment of the ‘American dream’ by their friends, distant family and the book jacket.

Nan, however, is discontented with his success: “As time went by, a kind of disappointment sank into his heart. The struggle had ended so soon that he felt as though the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax.”

As he, his wife and teenage son, Taotao, cope with the adversity of life in Georgia, Nan remains fixated on his first love, Beina, and his fading desire to become a poet. As a result, Nan is an unloving husband to Pingping and a distant father to Taotao, whose suffering seems always secondary to his own.

In this 660-page émigré epic, Jin has revealed the minutia and adversity of one family’s immigration story, a story that, only at surface level, appears to resemble the American dream.

There is much of the author evident in “A Free Life.” As in the case of his protagonist, Jin came to the United States as an exchange student before the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre prompted him to stay.

Although the author’s works deal most often with China — the Cultural Revolution in particular — Jin has written exclusively in English since immigrating, publishing 12 novels, short story collections and books of poetry in his second language.

This authorial choice — and the difficulties inherent — seems autobiographically represented in Nan, who likewise aspires to write poetry in English.

As Nan sends his poems out to various literary journals, he is confronted by a pessimistic editor who tells him, “I admire your courage, but I should let you know you are wasting your time. English is too hard for you. You may be able write prose in English eventually, but poetry is impossible.”

Nan faces such discouragement frequently in “A Free Life,” conveying the difficulty of literary publication for a nonnative speaker. Unlike Nan, this is a difficulty Jin clearly overcame, publishing his first book of poetry, “Between Silences,” only five years after arriving in the United States.

Although he has found success ­— and a lot of it — in novel writing, Jin has not entirely dismissed poetry from his repertoire, as “A Free Life” includes an epilogue of 25 poems entitled, “Poems By Nan Wu.” This collection of verse, along with “Extracts From Nan Wu’s Poetry Journal,” reveals just how completely Jin has imagined — or, perhaps, lived — this “fictional” world.

Although, to an extent, “A Free Life” is an ironic title as Nan and Pingping labor day and night to maintain their middle-class existence, the novel is by no means cynical. Although Nan is perpetually preoccupied with his own and immediate failures, he gradually discovers that his American dream is less a matter of fact than of perception.

Reach A&E editor Joe Darda at arts@dailyuw.com.