by Yiyun Li
What do you want to be when you grow up, Boyang sometimes wanted to ask Coco, but the line did not belong to that of a sugar daddy: he should feel no responsibility for her misspent youth. Shoo, Boyang said in his mind now, shoo, shoo, while waving at Coco, who, even in her resentment, did not forget to blow him a kiss—a kiss which, sadly, unbeknownst to her, landed nowhere in this indifferent world.
Boyang was glad that no child had been produced in his failed marriage. He would not have been able to protect his child from the harm of the world unless he raised him or her to be the first to inflict pain; he would also have had to become more successful at his business, so that his child could have a chance to at least become a decent person without being trampled by others. But imagining a child—his child—being a good person was as upsetting to Boyang as imagining that child being evil. Of course there was a wide range between good and evil, but could one be both callous and kind—callous enough to be immune to worldly hurt, yet with enough kindness to be spared the possible divine repercussions for that callousness?
Boyang had not hidden his disinterest in having a child from his parents, and as far as he knew, they were fine with it: his sister had—as efficiently as befitted their parents’ standard—given birth to a pair of brilliant twins. His ambition, he knew, sufficed only to provide himself a comfortable life and allow him to be near his parents as they grew older. He did not feel stuck in the middle of the ladder; if anything, he felt lucky because of his track record of doing the right thing at the right time. He had taken his second year of college off to start a printing company when digital printing had just emerged in the country; after college, he had spent a couple of years working on a software program that input Chinese characters into computers, which he had sold to a big company when he became bored with programming; the stock market and the real estate market he had entered earlier than his peers, and now, with a real estate development project under his name and a couple of unrelated businesses he backed—an organic lavender farm on the outskirts of the city, with single-story vacation rentals nearby to attract trendy urbanites, and an oxygen bar in the central business district, where condensed air imported from Japan was offered at a high price to those who could afford its cleanness—Boyang felt complacent enough. He could see himself climbing a few more rungs, but he did not feel the urge to be in a different place from where he was now: purposefulness, in his view, was overrated. He had none of the potentially bad habits for a man of his status: he drank but not excessively; he was not into drugs; he kept a girl he could be rid of easily; he had little interest in anything with ideology behind it—he had declined to support a group of underground documentary filmmakers, and he had not bitten, either, when a so-called independent artist approached him for a photography project that involved placing naked men and women in orgiastic poses in various heavily contaminated industry sites.
A beep brought a text message from Coco. “Do not go out and find another woman,” it said, followed by a laughing emoticon, a scowling one, and a parade of kisses.
Poor Coco, already learning to turn everything into a joke at an age when living should be a more serious business for her. At Coco’s age, the girl Boyang had been dating, who would later become his wife and then someone else’s lover, had still been holding on to a belief in love and loyalty. At least Boyang should give his ex-wife credit for earning the right to laugh at her own past, as she had gone through the proper stages of dreaming, wakening, and being disappointed by a world that would never meet a young person’s expectations. What would Coco laugh at in ten or twenty years—her own inept jokes? Or worse, would she have to constantly focus on things that were laughable in others, so that she did not have a free moment to dwell upon her own foolishness? Boyang did not think Coco was heading toward a promising future, but there was little for him to do. He himself would not be in that future, and besides, he was not her savior.
His ex-wife had suffered remorse after the divorce. He was lucky to have not loved her sufficiently, luckier to have provided more than sufficiently: the apartment he had left her, unless the city’s real estate market completely crashed, would offer her enough if she was hit by hard times, and that alone had cleared him of any unease. Boyang did not mind being seen as a cad, but he would have liked to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on others. He would have liked to be, as the old saying goes, a bandit with principles.
And now, what a perfect message Coco had sent. All day he had been hesitating, going over the pros and cons of making a phone call to a stranger—a woman Coco’s age, a girl really. But now the message arrived, a plea masked as a warning that sounded to him more like an encouragement. Without further delay, he dialed the girl’s number.
After four rings, the girl picked up, sounding younger on the line than in person. He heard only her thin voice; there was no noise in the background. Where was she—in the small art shop not many people visited, or already off work, spending a quiet night in a rented room somewhere? Boyang gave her his name, and added that he was the one who had come into the shop the day before and bought, upon her recommendation, the double-dragon kite. “Or maybe you sold many kites yesterday,” he said. “In that case I’m one of the people who you convinced to buy a kite.”
“No, I remember you,” the girl said. “I only sold one kite yesterday.”
“Sold more today?”
“Not really,” the girl said, her voice low, as though apologetic. Or perhaps she was beginning to feel suspicious about the call? The day before, when she had gone into the storage room to find a matching case for the kite, Boyang had grabbed her phone from the counter and made a quick call to his phone, so he’d have her number. He wondered if she had noticed that. He did not know her name.
“Um, listen, I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in flying the kite this weekend,” Boyang said.
“But I don’t know how to fly a kite.”
A kite seller, Boyang wanted to say, should at least pretend to know how to fly one. He wanted to make a joke that she should deliver a more complete service package but decided it would sound too familiar, off-color even. The girl, as he remembered, had not responded well to any kind of glibness. He had noticed that she had the habit of looking into people’s eyes when she listened; her pupils, dark, rarely out of focus, made her look at once innocent and composed.
It didn’t matter that she did not fly kites, he told her. He himself was good at it; he only needed a helper. The girl hesitated and said she wasn’t sure. She had agreed to go to see an art exhibition with a friend on Saturday.
“What kind of exhibition?”
“Oh, nothing big,” she said, sounding embarrassed. By what, he wondered—by being caught lying, or by being chased, which she was not used to? “It’s only a small show about ancient architecture, and I thought it would be good to see it for work.”
The day before, between a business lunch and a meeting at a bar near the Front Sea, Boyang had wandered into a side alley where he knew there was a quaint old house, part museum and part retail space, associated with a folk arts and crafts organization. Possibly it would be a good place to look for some birthday presents for his mother, and, walking off the wine from the lunch, he could not find a better way to kill an hour. Boyang did not care much for ancient folk art, nor did his mother, but, as far as he could tell, she already had everything he’d normally offer. Vaguely he imagined finding her a useless replica of a pottery figure from the Han Dynasty, or a cast of miniature poets drinking at a famous party from the Jin Dynasty, carved exquisitely from walnut shells—something his mother would appreciate only because he had gone out of his way to get it for her. Love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.
The salesgirl had been the only one in the shop when Boyang entered, and when he said he was looking around, she asked him if he would like a tour of the exhibition of artisan kites. She had memorized the material and at times invited him to come closer to inspect one kite or another, to app
reciate the fineness of a dragonfly’s transparent wings on a small, palm-sized silk kite, or to see the calligraphy on another—wild, dancing characters, which, if not for the girl, Boyang could not have deciphered. Secretly he slid a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, feeling bad for the girl, who had to pretend that he did not reek of alcohol. The girl’s hair was not dyed, and Boyang could not remember the last time he had seen such natural black in a girl’s hair. Coco’s was dyed reddish blond.
“Are you one of the artists?” Boyang asked as they exited the exhibition, pointing to a poster of names on the wall, a list of the folk artists belonging to the organization.
The girl said of course she was not. Why not, Boyang asked, and the girl said that most of the artists were men, because they came from prominent families in which the secret of their trades could only be passed from father to son—and in rare cases from a father-in-law to a daughter-in-law—to ensure the purity of the art. “The rule is to teach a son but not a daughter, to teach a daughter-in-law but not a wife,” she said, no doubt quoting from her textbook. She sounded ridiculously serious and reverent of the rule.
“Then why are you here, if they are not letting you in on their secrets?”
She had been hired because she had studied the history of ancient folk art in college, the girl said. He could see that she was no more than a well-educated salesgirl, and he was also certain, from her clothes and her outdated cell phone, that she was not paid well. “What does one do after getting a degree in art history?” he asked.
“Nothing, really,” she said, slightly dejected. She was lucky to have a job, she added.
“What do your classmates do now?”
All sorts of things, the girl said, though he could see that she was not keen for the conversation to go in that direction. He would know more about what her classmates were doing than she did: those from well-connected families had gone on into a different phase of their lives, their education the perfect decoration on their résumés; then there were those who, like the girl in front of him, would have to become another Coco, or stay a salesgirl. “Why did you go to school for it if there are no good jobs?” he asked.
“But I like it,” the girl said, looking up, as if surprised by the irrelevance of his question.
“I see,” Boyang said, though he did not see. She must have been asked that question all the time by her parents and relatives; was that the only answer she could come up with?
Somewhere at the back of the house, a microwave dinged, and then a door was opened and banged closed. He imagined the girl’s days, spent in a shop that was out of the way and never advertised. Did she find this a lonely job, or did she enjoy the companionship of the objects more than that of people? Perhaps it did not bother her when no one came in, but people must inevitably stop by, an idle man like Boyang, with nothing or too much on his mind, or the old men on the artists’ roster, who would clasp her young hands in theirs while talking at length about their glamorous histories. What kind of a future did the girl envision for herself? “Maybe you can become the daughter-in-law of one of those people, to learn the secrets of a trade,” Boyang said. You are one of those girls old men love, gentlemanly or otherwise, he thought.
“But I don’t want to be locked into one trade,” the girl said with a seriousness that made him feel he had to either laugh at her or feel bad for her. Had he not drunk a bit too much at lunch, had he not just taken a sentimental walk by the lake he had often visited with Moran and Ruyu, he would have dismissed the girl as ludicrous. But he had been touched by her obstinacy, enough that he had bought the most expensive kite in the shop and later had made a secret call from her phone to his so that he could carry with him something that belonged to her.
“I could tag along with you and your friend to the show if you don’t mind,” Boyang said now. “And we can go out and fly the kite afterward.”
“But my friend won’t like it.”
“You mean you don’t like it?”
“No, my friend won’t like to have a stranger to come with us. She might want to talk about things she doesn’t want you to hear.”
“What about Sunday?”
“I have to work on Sunday.”
That seemed to have concluded their conversation; Boyang felt the girl waiting for him to hang up. He could not tell if she was alarmed or annoyed by his call, but her voice indicated neither suspicion nor impatience. “What’s your name—may I ask?”
“Wu Sizhuo.”
“What time do you get off work on Sunday?”
The girl paused and said seven o’clock.
“Can I come and meet you when you’re off?”
“Seven is too late to fly a kite.”
“But not too late for a simple dinner—if you don’t already have plans?”
The way Sizhuo said okay, without hesitation or curiosity, made Boyang’s heart sink a little. He’d been prepared for a courteous rejection, which would not have stopped him from stepping into the store a few minutes before seven on Sunday evening and saying he had reserved a table nearby, just in case she had changed her mind. Used to elusiveness and evasiveness in interactions—at least at the beginning of a game, whether it involved money or women—Boyang, like many, considered chasing and being chased the only validation of a person’s value. Slightly disoriented, he could not think of more to say when the girl confirmed the time and said good-bye.
Boyang tried to recall whether there had been any enthusiasm or readiness in Sizhuo’s voice that could have given him an excuse to cancel the dinner, but there was none. “But I like it,” he remembered her saying, looking up at him with a candidness that was at once transparent and unreadable. Oddly, he felt as though he had returned to his second-grade physical education class on the day they had been practicing hurling hand grenades. When it was Boyang’s turn, he perused the long row of hand grenades, all an old Soviet model with wooden shafts and black metal heads; he chose one carefully, and with all his might hurled it. He had been a tall boy then, athletic, and he had expected to set a class record with his throw, but the metal head, loosened after years of use in training children to become militants, dropped behind him with a thud, while the wooden shaft made a less than confident trajectory across the sky, flipping and falling before its intended target. It was the first time Boyang had understood the meaning of overreach, not in his twisted eight-year-old shoulder but somewhere inside of him, an unfamiliar befuddlement, and that was how he felt now: he had not known—or had not had the desire to know—what he had wanted when making the phone call, and now it seemed too late to go back and figure it out.
Boyang wished he had someone next to him at this moment with whom he could talk while thinking—not about the girl on the phone but about the memory of his failed grenade throw. What do children throw in their physical education classes these days, he wondered—baseballs, or a different kind of hand grenade in the shape of angry birds? He could ask Coco about it, but she would make it into a joke about something else. No, Coco was the last person with whom he could share that memory. He wanted someone to see the seriousness behind the giddy chaos: the teacher had turned pale at the accident, though, luckily for her and everyone else, the metal head had not landed on and cracked open a child’s skull; the children had gotten overexcited, as though an unexpected holiday had befallen them; Moran had looked concerned as she gently tapped his arm and shoulder to assess how much he had hurt himself, then all of a sudden broke into uncontrollable laughter. Yes, he wanted someone to see his past with him, the children in blue gym uniforms—the most unsavory kind of blue, not light enough to be associated with anything delightful, not dark enough to confer dignity; he wanted someone to laugh with his childhood friend and himself but not at them, ugly ducklings who, not knowing their lots, wholeheartedly embraced everything coming their way. But beyond that, he wanted someone to understand that a moment, even a trivial one, could in time accumulate weight and meaning. Looking back, wasn’t it a befitting role for him to b
e the hero whose only real accomplishment was to sacrifice himself, and those around him, too? The intention to do good, the intention to do the right thing—who could say with certainty that these were separate from the intentions to do harm, to diminish? In allowing a bedridden woman not only to exist in his life as a secret kept from his family, but to dictate how he treated the world—with distrust and aloofness—he had pushed his ex-wife into another man’s arms. In turning away from Aunt now, when she was completely alone in this world, he must be crueler than Moran and Ruyu, who had turned away long ago.
“Remember the disassembled hand grenade in second grade?” he imagined starting an email to Moran—with an appeal to nostalgia she could not possibly ignore. Would she feel the obligation to write him back if he did not mention Shaoai or Ruyu but made the note about him and her? Once upon a time—if he tried to convince himself, could he convince her, too?—there had been a tale, or a tale in the making, about them: did she forget that? No, she couldn’t possibly.
Violently he erased the maudlin note from his mind. To have treated someone badly and to have refused to acknowledge that mistreatment—Boyang wondered if in his friendship with Moran he saw the nascent self he would eventually turn into: selfish but not enough to be immune to the pains caused by his selfishness; adamant in refusing to suffer yet not blind enough to others’ suffering.
Boyang had known, even when they were young, that Moran’s feeling toward him had been more than a friend’s or a sibling’s. That he had never encouraged her was his excuse to forgive himself; all the same, when the poisoning had happened, when madness and loss had overtaken their lives, he had not suppressed his urge to hurt Moran—to punish her for her love, for being alive, healthy, and for being a good person.