by Yiyun Li
They had taken some friends out for dinner the night before, Boyang’s mother explained. They had too many leftovers, so she thought Boyang might as well come and get rid of the food for them. He laughed, saying he did not know he was their compost bin. His parents had become particular in their eating habits, obsessing over the health benefits, or lack thereof, of everything entering their bodies. He could see that they would order an excessive amount of food for their friends yet touch little themselves.
The topics at dinner were his sister’s American-born twins, the real estate prices in Beijing and in a coastal city where his parents were pondering purchasing a waterfront condo, and the inefficiency of their new housekeeper. Only when his mother had cleaned away the dishes did she ask, as though grasping a passing thought, if Boyang had heard of Shaoai’s death. By then, his father had gone into his study.
That he had kept in touch with Shaoai’s parents and had acted as caretaker when illnesses and deaths had beset their family—this Boyang had seen no reason to share with his parents. If they had suspected any connection, they had preferred not to know. The key to success, in his parents’ opinion, was the capacity to selectively live one’s life, to forget what one ought not to remember, to untangle oneself from lesser and irrelevant others, and to recognize the unnecessariness of human emotions. Fame and material gain are secondary though unsurprising, if one is able to choose the portion of one’s life to live with impersonal wisdom. For this belief they had, as an example, Boyang’s sister, who was a prominent physicist in America.
“So I heard,” Boyang said. Aunt would not have kept the death from the old neighbors, and it did not surprise him that one of them—or perhaps more than one—had called his parents. If there were any pleasure in delivering the news of death it would be that call, castigation barely masked by courteousness.
His mother returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea and passed one to him. He cringed at her nudging the conversation beyond the comfortable repertoire of their usual topics. He showed up whenever she summoned him; the best way to stay distanced, he believed, was to satisfy her every need.
“What do you think, then?” his mother said.
“Think of what?”
“The whole thing,” she said. “One must acknowledge the waste, no?”
“What waste?”
“Shaoai’s life, obviously,” his mother said, adjusting a single calla lily in a crystal vase on the dinner table. “But even if you take her out of the equation, others’ lives have been affected.”
What others, Boyang wanted to say to his mother, would be worth a moment of her thought? The chemical found in Shaoai’s blood had been taken from his mother’s laboratory; whether it had been an attempted murder, an unsuccessful suicide, or a freak accident had never been determined. His family did not talk about the case, but Boyang knew that his mother had never let go of her grudge.
“Do you mean your career went to waste?” Boyang asked. After the incident, the university had taken disciplinary action against his mother for her mismanagement of chemicals. It would have been an unpleasant incident, a small glitch in her otherwise stellar academic career, but she insisted on disputing the charge: every laboratory in the department was run according to outdated regulations, with chemicals available to all graduate students. It was a misfortune that a life had been damaged, she admitted; she was willing to be punished for allowing three teenage children to be in her lab unsupervised—a mismanagement of human beings rather than chemicals.
“If you want to look at my career, sure—that’s gone to waste for no reason.”
“But things have turned out all right for you,” Boyang said. “Better, you have to admit.” His mother had left the university and joined a pharmaceutical company, later purchased by an American company. With her flawless English, which she’d learned at a Catholic school, and several patents to her name, she earned an income three times what she would have made as a professor.
“But did I say I was speaking of myself?” she said. “Your assumption that I have only myself to think of is only a hypothesis, not a proven fact.”
“I don’t see anyone else worthy of your thought.”
“Not even you?”
“What do you mean?” The weakest comeback, Boyang thought: people only ask a question like that because they already know the answer.
“You don’t feel your life has been affected by Shaoai’s poisoning?”
What answer did she want to hear? “You get used to something like that,” he said. On second thought, he added, “No, I wouldn’t say her case has affected me in any substantial way.”
“Who wanted her to die?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me right. Who wanted to kill her back then? She didn’t seem like someone who would commit suicide, though certainly one of your little girlfriends, I can’t remember which one, hinted at that.”
In rehearsing scenarios of Shaoai’s death Boyang had never included his mother—but when does any parent hold a position in a child’s fantasy? Still, that his mother had paid attention, and that he had underestimated her awareness of the case, annoyed him. “I’m sure you understand that if, in all honesty, you tell me that you were the one who poisoned her, I wouldn’t say or do anything,” she said. “This conversation is purely for my curiosity.”
They were abiding by the same code, of maintaining the coexistence between two strangers, an intimacy—if their arrangement could be called that—cultivated with disciplined indifference. He rather liked his mother this way, and knew that in a sense he had never been her child; nor would she, in growing old, allow herself to become his charge. “I didn’t poison her,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Why sorry?”
“You’d be much happier to have an answer. I’d be happier, too, if I could tell you for sure who poisoned her.”
“Well then, there are only two other possibilities. So, do you think it was Moran or Ruyu?”
He had asked himself the question over the years. He looked at his mother with a smile, careful that his face not betray him. “What do you think?”
“I didn’t know either of them.”
“There was no reason for you to know them,” Boyang said. “Or, for that matter, anyone.”
His mother, as he knew, was not the kind to dwell upon sarcasm. “I never really met Ruyu,” she said. “Moran of course I saw around, but I don’t remember her well. I don’t recall her being brilliant, am I right?”
“I doubt there is anyone brilliant enough for you.”
“Your sister is,” Boyang’s mother said. “But don’t distract me. You used to know them both well, so you must have an idea.”
“I don’t,” Boyang said.
His mother looked at him, rearranging, he imagined, his and the other people’s positions in her head as she would do with chemical molecules. He remembered taking his parents to America to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. At the airport in San Francisco, they’d seen an exhibition of duck decoys. Despite the twelve-hour flight, his mother had studied each of the wooden ducks. The colors and shapes of the different decoy products fascinated her, and she read the old 1920s posters advertising twenty-cent duck decoys, using her knowledge of inflation rates over the years to calculate how much each duck would cost today. Always so curious, Boyang thought, so impersonally curious.
“Did you ever ask them?” she said now.
“Whether one of them tried to murder someone?” Boyang said. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I think you’re overestimating your son’s ability.”
“But do you not want to know? Why not ask them?”
“When? Back then, or now?”
“Why not ask now? They may be honest with you now that Shaoai is dead.”
For one thing, Boyang thought, neither Moran nor Ruyu would answer his email. “If you’re not overestimating my ability, you are certainly overestimating people’s desire for honesty,�
� he said. “But has it occurred to you it might’ve only been an accident? Would that be too dull for you?”
His mother looked into her tea. “If I put too many tea leaves in the teapot, that could be considered a mistake. No one puts poison into another person’s teacup by accident. Or do you mean that Moran or Ruyu was the real target, and poor Shaoai happened to take the wrong tea? To think, it could’ve been you!”
“My drinking the poison by accident?”
“No. What I’m asking is: what do you think of the possibility of someone trying to murder you?”
The single calla lily—his mother’s favorite flower—looked menacing, unreal with its flawless curve. She blew lightly over her tea, not looking at him, though he knew that was part of her scrutiny. Was she distorting the past to humor herself, or was she revealing her doubt—or was the line between distorting and revealing so fine that one could not happen without the other? For all he knew, he had lived in her selective unawareness, but perhaps this was only an illusion. One ought not to have the last word about one’s own mother.
He admitted that the thought had never occurred to him. “It’s a possibility, you know,” she said.
“But why would anyone have wanted to kill me?”
“Why would anyone want to kill anyone?” she said, and right away Boyang knew that he had spoken too carelessly. “If someone steals poison from a lab, that person intends to do harm to another person or to herself. For all I know, the harm was already done the moment that chemical was stolen. And I’m not asking you why. Why anyone does anything is beyond my understanding or interest. All I would like to know is who was trying to kill who, but unfortunately you don’t have an answer. And sadly, you don’t seem to share my curiosity.”
2
When the train pulled into Beijing’s arched station on August 1, 1989, Ruyu, adjusting her eyes from the glare of the afternoon to the shadowed grayness of the station, did not yet know that one’s preparation for departure should begin long before arrival. There were many things that she, at fifteen, had still to learn. To seek answers to one’s questions is to know the world. Guileless in childhood, private as one grows older, and, for those who insist on the certainty of adulthood, ignored when they become unanswerable, these questions form the context of one’s being. For Ruyu, however, an answer that excluded all questions had already been provided.
The passengers moved to both ends of the car. Ruyu remained seated and looked through the grimy window. On the platform, people pushed one another out of the way with their arms, as well as—more effectively—their bags and suitcases. Someone—though Ruyu did not know who, nor did she feel compelled to be curious—would be waiting for her on the platform. She took a pair of barrettes from her school satchel and clipped them in her hair. This was how her grandaunts had described her to her hosts in a letter they’d sent a week before her journey: a white shirt, a black skirt, and two blue barrettes in the shape of butterflies, a brown willow trunk, a 120-bass accordion in a black leather case, a school satchel, and a canteen.
The last two passengers, a pair of middle-aged sisters-in-law, asked her if she needed help. Ruyu thanked them and said no, she was fine. During the nine-hour journey, the two women had studied Ruyu with unconcealed curiosity; that she had only taken sips of water, that she had not left her seat to use the washroom, that she had not let go of her clasp of her school satchel—these things had not escaped their eyes. They had offered Ruyu a peach and a pack of soda crackers and later a bottle of orange juice purchased through the window at a station, all of which Ruyu had declined politely. They had between themselves approved of her manner, though that had not stopped them from feeling offended. The girl was small-built, and appeared too young for a solo journey in the opinion of the women and other fellow travelers; but when they had questioned her, she had replied with restraint, revealing little of the nature of her trip.
When the aisle was cleared, Ruyu heaved the accordion case off the luggage rack. Her school satchel, made of sturdy canvas, she had had since the first grade, and its color had long faded from grass green to a pale, yellowish white. Inside it, her grandaunts had sewn a small cloth bag, in which were twenty brand-new ten-yuan bills, a large amount of money for a young girl to carry. With great care, Ruyu pulled the trunk from under her seat—it was the smallest of a set of three willow trunks that her grandaunts owned, purchased, they had told her, in 1947 in the best department store in Shanghai, and they had asked her to please be gentle with it.
Shaoai recognized Ruyu the moment she stumbled onto the platform. Who would have thought, besides those two old ladies, of stuffing a girl into such an ancient-looking outfit and then, on top of that, making her carry an outdated, childish school satchel and a water canteen? “You look younger than I expected,” Shaoai said when she approached Ruyu, though it was a lie. In the black-and-white photo the two grandaunts had sent, Ruyu, despite the woolen, smock-like dress that was too big for her, looked like an ordinary schoolgirl, her eyes candidly raised to the camera; they were the eyes of a child who did not yet know and was not concerned with her place in the world. The face in front of Shaoai now showed a frosty inviolability a girl Ruyu’s age should not have possessed. Shaoai felt slightly annoyed, as though the train had brought the wrong person.
“Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, recognizing the older girl from the family picture sent to her grandaunts: short hair, angular face, thin lips adding an impatient touchiness to the face.
From the pocket of her shorts Shaoai produced the photo Ruyu’s grandaunts had mailed along with their letter. “So that you know you’re not being met by the wrong person,” Shaoai said, and then stuffed the photo back into her pocket.
Ruyu recognized the photo, taken when she had turned fifteen two months earlier. Every year on her birthday—though whether it was her real birthday or only an approximation of it she had wondered at times without asking—her grandaunts took her to the photographer’s for a black-and-white portrait. The final prints were saved in an album, each fit into four silver corners glued on a new page, with the year written on the bottom of the page. Over the years the photographer, who had begun as an apprentice but was no longer a young man, had never had Ruyu change her position, so in all the birthday portraits she sat straight, with her hands folded on her lap. What Shaoai had must be an extra print, as Ruyu’s grandaunts were not the kind of people who would disturb a perfectly ordered album and leave a blank among four corners. Still, the thought that a stranger had kept something of her unsettled Ruyu. She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt.
“You should get some cooler clothes for the summer,” Shaoai said, looking at Ruyu’s long skirt.
In Shaoai’s disapproving look Ruyu saw the same presumptuousness she had detected in the middle-aged women on the train. So the older girl was no different from others—quick to put themselves in a place where they could advise Ruyu about how to live. What separated Ruyu from them, they did not know, was that she had been chosen. What she knew would never be revealed to them: she could see, and see through, them in a way they could not see her, or themselves.
Shaoai was twenty-two, the only daughter of Uncle and Aunt, who were, in some convoluted way Ruyu’s grandaunts had not explained, relatives of the two old women. “Honest people,” her grandaunts had pronounced of the family who had promised to take her in for a year—or, if things worked out, for the next three years, until Ruyu went to college. There were a couple of other families in Beijing, also of remote connections, whom her grandaunts had considered, but both households included boys Ruyu’s age or not much older. In the end, Shaoai and her parents had been chosen to avoid possible inconvenience.
“Do you need a minute to catch your breath?” Shaoai asked, and picked up the trunk and the accordion before Ruyu could reply. She offered to carry one of the items herself, and Shaoai only jerked her chin toward the exit and said she had helpers waiting.
Ruyu was not prepar
ed for the noises and the heat of the city outside the station. The late afternoon sun was a white disc behind the smog, and over loudspeakers a man was reading, in a stern voice, the names and descriptions of fugitives wanted for sabotaging the government earlier that summer. Travelers for whom Beijing was only a connecting stop occupied the available shade under the billboards, and the less lucky ones lay under layers of newspapers. Five women with cardboard signs swarmed toward Shaoai and, with competing voices at high volume, recommended their hostels and shuttle services. Shaoai deftly swung the trunk and the accordion case through the crowd, while Ruyu, who’d hesitated a moment too long, was surrounded by other hawkers. A middle-aged woman in a sleeveless smock grabbed Ruyu’s elbow and dragged her away from the other vendors. Ruyu tried to wiggle her arm free and explain that she was only visiting relatives, but her feeble protest was muffled by the thick fog of noise. In her provincial hometown, rarely would a stranger or an acquaintance come this close to her; when she was younger, her grandaunts’ upright posture and grave expression had protected her from the invasion of the world; later, even when she was not being escorted by them, people would leave her alone in the street or in the marketplace, her grandaunts’ severity recognized and respected in her own unsmiling bearing.
It took Shaoai no time, when she returned, to free Ruyu from the hawkers. Where is my accordion, Ruyu asked when she noticed Shaoai’s empty hands. The accusation stopped Shaoai. With my helpers, of course, she said; why, you think I would abandon your valuable luggage just to rescue someone who has her own legs to run?
Ruyu had never been in a situation where she had to run away; her grandaunts—and in recent years she was aware that she, too—had the ability to make people recede from their paths. As an infant she had been left on the doorstep of a pair of unmarried Catholic sisters, and she was raised by the two women who were not related to her by blood. Like two prophets, her grandaunts had laid out the map of her life for her, that her journey would take her from their small apartment in the provincial city to Beijing and later abroad, where she would find her real and only home in the Church. Outside of the one-bedroom apartment she shared with them, neighbors and schoolteachers and classmates were unnecessarily inquisitive about her life, as though the porridge she ate at breakfast or the mittens dangling from a string around her neck offered clues to a puzzle beyond their understanding. Ruyu had learned to answer their questions with cold etiquette. Still, she despised their ignorance: their lives were to be lived in the dust; hers, with the completeness of purity.