by Yiyun Li
What kind of man would it make him if he insisted on bringing the past into fresh focus? Boyang had not been in touch with Moran’s parents over the years but had heard from old neighbors that they were well traveled, so Moran must have had a solid life elsewhere with enough good things—a husband, a career, two or three children (as she had loved children, and had always been patient with the younger kids in the neighborhood)—to prefer not to share his retrospection.
On Sunday, Boyang decided to arrive a few minutes late for his date with Sizhuo. He had taken a taxi, not wanting to risk having to drive the girl home—or to his place. The latter was unlikely, he decided: the right thing was to see her off to her place. Coco had left plenty of traces in his car as she had done in his apartment, an animal marking its territory. It would be a hassle to have to clean up for a first date.
Boyang asked the driver to drop him off on the opposite bank of the Front Sea. He took a walk near the water, then crossed the arched stone bridge, where a tour guide was speaking a memorized script, explaining in heavily accented English to a group of foreigners the origin of the bridge’s name—Silver Ingot—with such seriousness, as though it mattered to those pale-skinned foreigners that the bridge had been built in the Yuan Dynasty, when the Mongolians ruled Beijing, and not (as usually and mistakenly thought) in the Ming Dynasty.
To whom did the dynasties matter now? Boyang thought of pointing out to the tour guide the misjudged faith in her audience. For Coco and her friends, what happened twenty years ago was as ancient as the events of two hundred or two thousand years ago.
In middle school, Moran and Boyang had become intensely interested in their city. They had combed through the used-book market near Confucius Temple and had pooled their allowances to buy all the books they could afford on the subjects of Beijing’s history, architecture, and generations of anecdotes. Some of the books were fifty or sixty years old, some over a hundred, their thin yellow pages brittle to the touch; many bore personal stamps or signatures of their former owners inside the covers. Moran and Boyang had been eager to know their city in a way that their peers would find strange, or even perverted, as the youthful slang had it then, yet they had been proud of themselves, as though they alone had discovered the city, and they alone lived in it. After school, they would hide in Boyang’s bedroom and tell everyone they were doing homework, while they were reading through the old books, relishing the illustrations of different decorations on old, latticed windows, memorizing histories and tales associated with streets and plazas and temples. To whom had those books belonged before they had come to them, Boyang wondered now. He was surprised such a question had not occurred to them at the time; they had taken the books as their own with the same ease—perhaps known only to youthful minds that are not tainted by self-doubts or corrupted by the distrust of the world—as they had taken the histories and beauties of the city as their own.
The summer Ruyu arrived seemed the perfect time for them to show off their expertise: they brought her to see the execution crossroads, where a hundred years earlier people had gathered to watch a public beheading, applauding when the feat had been completed; they showed her a run-down temple where two pine trees, nine hundred years old, had grown into a pair of inseparable twins; they pointed out the earthen sculptures at the eaves of old houses, different patterns indicating the different statuses of the owners. And above all, they spent long afternoons under the willow trees here on the waterfront of the Front Sea or Back Sea, talking—about what, Boyang had no recollection now. What could have made them think that Ruyu would one day love what they had passionately loved? What had been on her mind that summer when she had come to them? Pompous, incurious, he and Moran must have made the mistake that almost every young person makes at one time or another: they had never for a moment seen Ruyu as anything other than what they wanted her to be, an orphan whom they would adopt with their friendship. They had both been enchanted by her, captivated even, and they had been in a rush to offer all they had—the long history of the city, the short history of their own existence—because they could not see any other way to be of consequence to her.
First love is at times dangerous, opening in our hearts an abyss of uncertainty and despair; or else it is uncomplimentary—how many of us can look back at our first loves without laughing at our foolishness, or else cringing at our insensibilities? But most first loves peter out without dragging a life down with them. A death, though twenty-one years too late, had nevertheless become part of his first love; it was like having died from losing one’s virginity—Boyang thought with sarcasm—unfortunate to the extreme of being comical.
A young couple walked past him, a Chinese woman hanging on to a white man’s arm with both hands, he keeping his hands stubbornly jammed in his coat pockets. The woman said something to the man, looking up at him with the eagerness of a child seeking approval, and the man only nodded absentmindedly. In the light of the street lamp, she looked not much older than Coco, and she looked very much like Coco, with her hair dyed blond, her face and neck powdered too pale, and her facial expressions exaggeratedly dollish. Boyang had a friend who ran an unofficial agency that pimped foreigners to businesses needing a white face or a cluster of white faces to impersonate potential collaborators and funders from abroad. At least he should give Coco credit for not being so stupid as to bet her future on some useless white man mining for gold in this city—though, to think about it, what difference did it make, since Coco had put her stakes on someone both she and he knew was not to be trusted?
Even though Boyang himself had foreseen the development of this place long before it had taken off, he felt resentful looking at the lakes and surrounding areas, which had become a sort of cultural magnet, where chic white-collar workers, expats of all nationalities, tourists, and imitators of every kind converged—youths with boldly dyed Mohawks or dreadlocks, fashionable women toting designer bags and openly assessing the authenticity of one another’s possessions, an avant-garde artist dressed in a gray monk’s robe and wearing a long beard, looking sagely ancient, except that he made sure to always be seen with two or three beautiful young women fluttering around like butterflies. What draws you here, Boyang wanted to grab someone’s shoulder and ask; what makes you leave your country, your city, your neighborhood, and come here to be part of this display of self-importance? Once upon a time, this had just been another neighborhood where people lived out their minor tragedies and comedies. Now it was called the sexiest spot in Beijing, as Boyang had read in tourist brochures. He wondered what Moran would have thought, had she come back and seen their childhood place transformed into the center stage of a masquerade party. But she must have been to other places like this, participated in the same nonsense shows elsewhere. He imagined her sitting in a plaza in Rome, or at a sidewalk café in Paris: she would have read enough about those places, and would idly tell an anecdote or two to the person next to her, laughing more than smiling because she was not the kind of woman who constrained her joy just to look elegant. To passersby, she would be the face of the carefree, and in someone’s memory of that city she would live on. Why not come back then, Boyang wished he could ask her now. Why not sit by the Front Sea and tell a visitor about the princess whose arm the emperor had cut off when the rebels entered Beijing because he could not stand the thought of her falling into the hands of savage creatures? He had meant to kill the fifteen-year-old princess, but she had raised an arm in defense and had begged for her life; at the sight of her gushing wound he had cried and said it was her misfortune to be born into the imperial family. Boyang remembered Moran telling the story to Ruyu that summer. They had been standing next to the tree where the emperor had hanged himself when he could not bring himself to kill his favorite daughter. The end of the Ming Dynasty, he remembered the exact words Moran had used, her solemnness too sincere even for him to laugh at her now. Ruyu had acted nonchalant; all the same she had reached over the perimeter fence, trying to pick a leaf off the ancient tree, but it
was too far for her to reach.
Why not come back now, you two deserters? One life has ended because of you and you—and yet, Boyang knew, he himself could not be exempted. One life had ended, and none of them was innocent. That must be something, no? How many people by the waterfront had murderous thoughts now and then, dark ghosts casting shadows on their minds, from which they had to look away? How many had succeeded in a murder?
Boyang walked for an extra few minutes to calm himself and turn his attention to his upcoming date. When he finally approached Sizhuo from the unlit side of the street, he could see that she had already locked up the shop. Standing right outside a pool of orange light from a nearby street lamp, she was not sending text messages on her cell phone; nor was she impatiently looking left and right for his late arrival. From her posture—straight backed, still as a statue, her eyes looking ahead although they must be seeing little in the darkness—he could not tell if she was used to waiting for others, or if she had never been in that position, waiting not having worn out her patience.
8
“Please know that every day I live for when I come to you. Please let the strangers around me remain strangers. They don’t know you, and they pity me because they don’t know you.”
Ruyu stopped, sensing something had gone awry. She used to love this last moment of her day, when nothing stood between God—her future—and herself: even her grandaunts, who had retreated behind the curtain to have their private conversation with him, did not matter for the time being. Ruyu did not know, however, that believing was the only way for her grandaunts to maintain their dignity in a life that had taken too much from them: the death, too early, of a weak-willed mother, the disappearance of a brother for whom they had exhausted their love and hope, properties confiscated, privilege of belonging to the Church deprived. The world was a bleak stopover for the sisters, in which they, armed against it with a religion that had become more of their own making as time passed, were either unaware of the shadow they had cast in an orphan’s life or else regarded it as irrelevant; she, in turn, her pupils adjusted to a perennial dusk, deemed what she perceived in their formidable shadow the only life worth living, sterility mistaken for purity, aloofness for devoutness.
Since Ruyu had come to Beijing, however, the calm brought by her conversation with God had vanished. Could it be that he was keeping himself distant just as a test? Or was it possible that he had stayed behind, leaving her among strangers? Pleas made to him, love and loyalty expressed repeatedly and desperately—these, unacknowledged, were strewn around her, corpses of unwanted words like those dead flies when summer ended. How odd, Ruyu thought now, that other insects would disappear when winter came, but flies would drop dead on windowsills or at the corners of a room, not allowed to escape, even in death, their ugliness displayed publicly.
Perhaps there’s a reason for that, as there’s a reason for anything; her grandaunts would say God alone knows what it is. But if God could forsake the flies and deprive them of private deaths, how could she know if she was different in his eyes from those flies? Her grandaunts had never had doubts in God, but what if they had made a mistake—what if he, like her parents, found little merit in her to keep her?
A panic hit Ruyu with such violence that she felt as though she were being attacked by a physical force, her breath taken away by an acute pain. She opened her eyes and unclasped her hands, yet nothing had changed in her surroundings: the lamp on the desk was shining steadily; the gloved hands of Mickey Mouse on the clock face moved forward by even leaps. She was alone in the bedroom she shared with Shaoai, her back to the entrance, the curtain undisturbed. Uncle and Aunt had already gone to bed. Grandpa had been fed the sleeping pill that would keep him quiet through the night. Shaoai and a friend of hers from college were in the living room watching TV with the volume turned low. From the open window, Ruyu heard the startled cry of a cicada, with desperate urgency, before it went silent. The first autumn crickets chirped in the grass, their night song melancholy.
Ruyu ordered herself to focus. Any minute now, Shaoai and her friend Yening might turn off the television and come into the bedroom. Yening had returned from her hometown on a late-afternoon train for the new semester at the university, and she was going to spend the night with them before moving back into her dorm. It had seemed natural to all that the bed Ruyu shared with Shaoai—a double bed—would be just fine for the three girls.
“Please forgive me, and please give me courage to be worthy of your love,” Ruyu started again, though her fear that she was a nuisance to him was growing more intense. She remained in the same position without opening her eyes, waiting for the fierce pain she was experiencing to pass, all the while knowing that the pain could be nothing but his punishment. He had seen all there was to see, and he would be seeing to it that all would be well for her. Why, then, was she still asking him every day for strength, which she should have had by now? Wouldn’t he be irritated by her failure to live up to his standards; wouldn’t he be burdened by her neediness; by her love, which she did not have a way to show; by her constantly asking more from him, always asking, always?
Soundlessly someone entered the room, but only when she dropped a pillow on the bed did Ruyu sense her presence. Ruyu turned around abruptly to face Yening, who was sitting on the bed, her eyes fixed on Ruyu yet unfocused, perhaps seeing nothing but phantoms in her own mind. At dinner, Ruyu had noticed that Yening, a tall and wispy girl, had been courteous toward everyone but had not eaten or talked much. Aunt had not bombarded her with questions, nor had she pushed more food onto the guest; though, nervous, with her incessant chattering, Aunt had been stupider than ever. Ruyu had noticed—and having a visitor among them confirmed her observation—that Aunt seemed superstitiously fearful of quiet, as though any moment not filled with some kind of back-and-forth indicated a failure on her part, or worse, some sort of impending disaster.
“I thought you were watching TV with Shaoai,” Ruyu said when the older girl did not speak or avert her stare. There was something in Yening that Ruyu found unsettling, but she was too young to know the reason: the older girl occupied the same impertinent role in life as Ruyu did; the hardest loss is to be defeated by one’s own strategy in others’ hands.
Yening shrugged. From the living room they could hear Shaoai change channels. “What were you doing when I came in?” Yening asked.
“Nothing.”
“You can’t be doing nothing.”
“I was only sitting here and thinking.”
“Thinking of what? Or whom?”
Ruyu shrugged, then realized that she had just learned the distasteful gesture from Yening.
“Were you, by any chance, talking to your god? Shaoai said you conversed with your god more than you conversed with us mortals,” Yening said, choosing her words with a malicious care.
Ruyu stared back. Yening waited, and when no reply came, she pointed to the accordion case in the corner of the room with her chin. “Is that your accordion?”
“Yes.”
“I heard no one around here could make you condescend to play.”
Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had sent her friend in to humiliate her. Why else would Shaoai even talk to her friend about Ruyu? Shaoai did not like Ruyu, that much was clear: she seldom talked to Ruyu, which was, in fact, fine because Shaoai rarely talked to anyone these days without making sharp comments. But at night she never seemed to tire of putting on a show of hostility and disgust. She waited until Ruyu went to bed and then would turn off the light while continuing to read with a handheld lamp, furiously turning pages and sometimes ending her reading by throwing the book out of the mosquito netting so that it dropped on the floor with a thud. Ruyu, who got up as early as possible—fortunately, Shaoai never woke up early enough to trap Ruyu with another round of confrontational displays—sometimes stole a glance at the book on the floor if the cover was facing up. For several days in a row it was a book called The Second Sex by someone named de Beauvoir; the book’s tit
le made Ruyu uncomfortable, and once she knew its yellow spine and dog-eared look, she avoided looking at the title even if it was staring back at her from the floor. There were other books too, thinner, all with disagreeable titles: Nausea, The Flies, The Plague. One book, though, had caught Ruyu’s attention—The Confessions of a Child of the Century; she would like to know what the book was about, but she dared not move a page for fear that Shaoai would wake up and catch her.
“I played the piano at your age,” Yening said. Ridiculous, Ruyu thought, her speaking as though they were from different generations. “I practiced all the time. I didn’t have enough time, though, and wouldn’t have minded having forty-eight hours a day for piano. I’m surprised, according to our friend out there, that you haven’t touched your instrument since you came.”
“The accordion is a loud instrument.”
“All instruments are loud.”
“I don’t want to disturb Grandpa.”
“How do you know you can even disturb him?” Yening said, and then softened her voice. “I’m worried that you’ll lose your touch if you don’t practice every day.”
“I can wait until school starts. Moran said there’s a music room in the school.”
“Still, your neighbors must think you’re too haughty to play for them.”
“Nobody thinks that,” Ruyu protested.
“How can you be so certain?” Yening asked, opening her eyes innocently before narrowing them again. “You’re too young to know anything. You don’t know half of what people think of you,” she said with the dismissive gentleness people reserve for crippled animals and dead babies.
Ruyu flinched. Indeed, quite a few neighbors had asked her to perform an evening concert for the quadrangle. She’d shaken her head politely at the requests and wondered why people were persistent in their efforts to make her do things that she had made clear she would not do. She neither liked nor disliked the accordion, which had been chosen for her by her grandaunts. In fact, the instrument suited her poorly. Its bulky body felt like an inelegant extension of her chest. Sounds coming from it were too loud, the music she played—polkas and waltzes from places she imagined as being perennially sunny—too cheerful. Back home, she sometimes practiced by pressing the keyboards without unbuttoning the bellows; only then could she see herself as a musician, the silent tunes an extension of her thoughts, heard by nobody, heeded by no one.