by Yiyun Li
The Thai couple looked away, as though embarrassed on the sheriff’s behalf. When he asked if anyone wanted to have a go at a straitjacket, which had been left outside the cell, neither of the sanguine Indian boys volunteered. A detour led them to the office, where the sheriff gave yet another long speech. By the time the group was released onto the chilly, empty sidewalk, it was dusk. In the orange light of the street lamps, big flakes of snow fell soundlessly, and already the world was covered by an undisturbed layer of whiteness.
It was the first time the Indian boys and the Thai couple had seen snow, so they all perked up, as though the afternoon had been a test they’d had to pass to earn this marvelous sight. The two parties soon disappeared, one trudging uphill, the other heading to the lake. For a moment, neither Moran nor Josef moved, both frozen in the dread of their separate loneliness. Then he asked her if she was all right, and suggested a cup of hot chocolate to recover from the dreadful tour.
At the café, Josef asked Moran where she had come from, what she was studying at the university, and whether she had experienced any cultural shock in America; Moran had a stock of ready answers to these questions, replies that would deter further questioning. When Josef ran out of questions, he told her that he did not belong to the church group, but that a couple who were longtime friends of his had been trying to interest him in the group’s activities. “I hope you’ve enjoyed others more than today’s,” he said.
Moran said she had not been to any other event.
“So you wanted to see a jail?” Josef said. “But not a football game? Not Oktoberfest?”
Moran did not have an answer prepared, so she only shook her head, as though she, too, were baffled. She had made acquaintances in the new town but had been unwilling to befriend anyone; another girl from her college had come to Madison, too, for engineering school, but Moran had declined when the girl had asked her to be her roommate. When Josef continued waiting for an answer, she said that perhaps she had a negative view of life, and was drawn to the dark side of the world. She did not say that Oktoberfest and college football games did not interest her because they were things you went to with other people.
Josef looked at her more attentively. She wondered if he would ask for explanations, which she could not, and would not, give him. But Josef only gestured at her name tag and asked if Lara was a common Chinese name.
She’d decided to give herself an English name when she’d arrived in America because she thought it might be hard for Americans to pronounce her name, Moran replied, though that was only partially true. In the program where she was studying for a PhD in chemistry, she was known as Moran; in the Westlawn House, a three-story building offering rooms to women in science and technology, where Moran had a bedroom and shared a kitchen, bathroom, and living area with eight other women—two from Poland, three from Ukraine, two from Jordan on an exchange program, and one Canadian Korean—no one had any trouble saying her Chinese name. She used Lara only with strangers, like the young man managing the grill at the student cafeteria, and the cashier at the grocery store who had a hook for a hand and who so loved waving at Moran that she could not avoid checking out at his register. He had once been an alcoholic, he told Moran; he had lost both children to his ex-wife when they divorced, but before that he had lost his arm when he drove his car into a wall. Never touched a drop after that, he had said cheerfully, and always wished Lara a good stay in America as he punched her total into the register with his good hand.
Josef asked her something, and Moran, having missed the question, asked him to repeat it. “How did you decide on the name Lara?” he said again.
“I wanted something simple.”
“But why Lara? Why not Lily or Nancy?”
Moran wondered if Josef was one of those tedious people who could grasp only things for which there were ready explanations. In college, Moran had halfheartedly dated two boys, and both had bored her with their efforts to reduce the world to a heap of things in need of sorting out. Moran wondered if Josef, in his youth, had likewise exasperated girls his age, but the man, unaware of Moran’s scorn, waited patiently, his eyes limpid. It was the first time Moran had seen a pair of blue eyes at close distance.
“I borrowed the name from a Russian novel,” Moran said.
“Not by any chance Doctor Zhivago?”
Moran looked up, surprised. “I wondered when you said your name,” Josef said, and started to hum “Lara’s Theme.” His voice, just loud enough for the two of them to hear, astonished Moran: its beauty and sadness seemed to belong to a different era, when men were handsome and women were beautiful and romance was accompanied by its own tune and a well-timed fade-out was the only trace of death.
“A song from my youth,” Josef said when he finished.
“From mine, too,” replied Moran. In her bedroom in Beijing, there was a box of novels, Doctor Zhivago among them, that she had been unwilling to sell but that she knew she would never go back to reread. The books had been her loyal companions for the last two years of high school. By then, Shaoai and her parents had moved away from the quadrangle. Ruyu, still attending the same high school, had become a boarding student and never said a word to Moran when they saw each other at school. Boyang’s parents had taken him away, sending him to the high school affiliated with their university; on weekends, when he came to the quadrangle to visit his grandmother, Moran would either make up an excuse to be absent, or else stay in her bedroom, burying herself in one of the bulky novels translated from Russian or French. She had never been much of a reader of fiction before, but those novels, whose characters bore long and unmemorable names, had comforted her: even the most complicated stories offered a clarity that she could not find in the world around her, and each character came to an uncomplaining end, Doctor Zhivago giving up his life when he could not catch up with Lara in the street, Lara giving up happiness.
“You’re still young,” Josef said.
Moran wanted to retort that only a fool would look at age in such a simpleminded way. But the stranger was being kind, and being true to his observation. Moran was two months short of twenty-three. To be admired for one’s youth when one had seen the dead end to which youth led—one might find solace in the admiration, yet it was not a sufficient diversion. Josef, at his age, could withdraw to the sanctuary of his memories, but Moran still had years, decades, ahead of her. She wished she were as old as Josef—having to live on when one had lived enough made one a weary impersonator of all that she was not.
Moran wiped the tabletop around her cup with the paper napkin, thinking that there must be a right reply to Josef’s comment; only she did not know what it was. When she looked up again she realized that Josef must have said something, but the look on his face said that he didn’t want to embarrass her by repeating it. To fill the silence, she asked him if he had been to a jail before.
It was his first time visiting a jail, Josef said; he and all the people he knew were law-abiding citizens. “Not that there’s much worth to it,” he added.
A man like Josef would find amusement in looking into another world, feeling complacent in a life safeguarded by sensibility. But life was never as secure as he thought. A crime could be committed, or worse, half-committed, and an unfinished murder could be worse than a murder plotted out and accomplished coldheartedly. But all this Moran had not said to Josef then, or later.
After a moment, Josef started to talk about Alena, of his and her being crowned as the Bohemian prince and princess at a Czech festival in 1952; of her winning the state championship at an accordion contest the year after. Accordion? Moran murmured, not saying more, and Josef nodded and said accordion indeed, not your everyday instrument in this country, but both he and Alena played the instrument, like every child of Czech immigrants. Their grandparents had come to the new continent from nearby villages; their fathers had been drinking buddies, both fond of pickled cow tongue. The marriage between Josef and Alena, Moran could tell, had been a good one, children raised
with their best interests in mind, friends maintained with loyalty, the history of the older generations treasured, decades of memories dutifully deposited in family albums. When Josef spoke of Alena’s accident, Moran watched his eyes dampen. Certain things are easier to share with strangers when one feels the nearness of farewell; death casts less of a shadow in the heart of a passerby.
Before they parted, Josef asked Moran if she had any plans for her first Thanksgiving in America. She said no, and he asked her if she would like to join his family for the holiday. He had not mentioned that it would be the first one for him and his children without Alena, but Moran had guessed it. Had she accepted the invitation because other people’s wounds had always been more of a calling, a reason for her to be? After the divorce, Moran acquired the habit of looking at everything in their relationship with scrutiny. After all, their two years of dating and three years of marriage—a story preserved completely as though in amber, which had no connection to her life in China—was the only one for which she could find a beginning and an end; yet even this simple tale made little sense when she studied it closely. What if she had found an excuse to decline Josef’s invitation, as she had always done with similar invitations in those days, and ever since?
But back in that coffee shop, it had felt only natural to say yes to Josef, because it had been good of him to think of inviting her, a newcomer in a foreign land. When she gave him her phone number, she told him her real name.
“Which name would you prefer to go by?” Josef asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, though she knew it did.
“Well then, we’ll call you Moran,” Josef said, and she noticed that he had included his family in the sentence. “Does your name have a meaning? I heard every Chinese name has a meaning to go with it.”
There could be many different Chinese characters for a name like hers, she explained. The characters her parents had chosen for her meant quietness. “Silence?” she tried again, sounding out the word, but then said the meaning was more like reticence. “It means for someone to choose not to express an opinion, to refrain from speaking.”
What an odd name to give to a child, she waited for Josef to say, but he only nodded, as though there were nothing strange about it. She wished, then, that she had insisted on Lara, who would have been a different person: attractive, impertinent, mysterious.
When Moran had left China, she had known that she would never return, though this she had not told her parents; nor had she revealed it to Boyang, when she had asked him to arrange for her to see Shaoai a few days before her flight. They had been strangers to each other then: Moran had chosen to go to a university in Guangzhou, the farthest she could get from Beijing; Boyang and Ruyu had enrolled at the same university in Beijing, though in their second year, Ruyu had abruptly given up her study and married a man to go to America.
Uncle and Aunt must have been told about Moran’s visit that day, as they had both left before her arrival, leaving Shaoai in the care of Boyang, who helped her move around with his strong arms and coaxing words. The chemical, having destroyed much of Shaoai’s brain, had left her near blind and with the intelligence of a three-year-old. Unable to see well, Shaoai had come to where Moran was sitting on the edge of a chair and put her face close, as though she could only see a mouth, a nose, or a patch of skin at a time. Shaoai’s mumbling was incoherent, and her mood swings—from laughing to crying to whimpering—seemed neither to embarrass nor to distress Boyang. His face, having a harshness Moran did not remember seeing before, was no longer boyish, and she felt intimidated by what she sensed behind his tender authority toward Shaoai and his flawless courteousness toward Moran herself: this was someone who had found all the solutions he needed for his life, and she, among others, would be sacrificed if she hindered him in any way.
The visit had not lasted long. Shaoai’s dangerous plumpness, and the unexpectedness of her bumping from one corner of the room to another, made Moran jumpy, and she could see that Boyang had no intention of helping her; rather, he seemed to take a kind of vicious pleasure in Moran’s discomfort. Years ago he had given her the ostensible reason for the end of their friendship: she had loved him more than as a childhood companion, and in doing so she had been the one most responsible for an unresolvable crime.
Had Moran been a different person she would have confronted his injustice in that apartment: it is easier to hold a person accountable for a tragedy than to hold fate, which defeats everyone impartially, accountable. But pride held her back. She did not want to be seen as begging for forgiveness.
When he saw her to the door, he slipped her his business card. “Don’t ever forget us,” he said slowly, and before she said anything, he closed the door behind her.
He had known her well enough to put such a curse on her, and all she could come up with in her own defense was not to think about what she could not forget. If forgetting is the art of eliminating a person, a place, from one’s history, Moran knew she would never become a master at it. Rather, she was like a diligent craftsman, and never gave up a moment of vigilance in practicing the lesser art of not looking back, not thinking about the past.
But it would have been different for someone named Lara, who would choose what to forget from her past, and what to carry on for a better life. Long after the divorce, Moran maintained the habit of giving her name as Lara to the Starbucks baristas. She had once met another Lara at Logan airport, both of them waiting for their coffees, both stepping forward when summoned. The other Lara said her parents had gone through a period of thinking that everything Russian was holy, and had named her Larissa—Lara—after the heroine of a Russian novel. Later, her parents left their hippie-hood behind and gave her younger sisters more normal names: Jennifer, Molly, Aimee.
It was odd, Moran thought as she buckled herself in and waited for the plane to take off, how one could become a collector of irrelevant memories. Easily she could recall the other Lara from the airport: her full head of red hair, her tired eyes when she talked about her parents, who were “wintering”—Lara’s word—in Florida. She was not particularly close to them, Lara had said; none of the four siblings was. “A psychologist friend keeps telling me: the refrigerator is empty; stop going to it,” Lara had said, gulping down her coffee with a hungry vehemence.
10
Sister Lan and Brother Zechen,
Your two letters, written respectively on August 5 and August 17, have reached us safely, and we have read them with care. We thank you for receiving Ruyu into your family, and all arrangements are more than satisfactory to us. We have sent two hundred yuan for October and November via postal order. Do not feel obliged to telegraph unless the money does not arrive.
Ruyu has written us, and we believe she is happily settled. As you said, she is an easy child to care for, but we would appreciate it if, from time to time, you remind her of her goal. Regarding her future, nothing matters more to us, and thus to her, than that she goes to America; we would be grateful if you ensure that she spends enough time studying and practicing the accordion. We are not particularly interested in the so-called well-roundedness of a person’s character, as the schools these days seem to advocate, but we must stress that good grades and special talents in music are essential in her case.
We thus conclude our letter with our best regards. Seeing our words is like seeing us in person.
Sister Wenlu and Sister Wenshu
2nd of September, ’89
Ruyu,
Your letter, written on August 24, has arrived safely, and we have read it with care. We are pleased that you have settled down, and that Aunt and Uncle and Shaoai are nice and caring, and that you have made friends.
Once again, we would like to remind you that, since the day you were sent to us, you have been a chosen child of God. We trust that you understand your purposeful journey henceforth, and that you know how to live discerningly among people who do not understand this about you.
All is well here; hence no need
for you to worry about us. Seeing our words is like seeing us in person.
Grandaunts
2nd of September, ’89
In separate rooms, Aunt and Ruyu read the letters that had arrived in the evening post. Both put the letters away afterward, yet neither was able to shake off the mood brought about by the correspondence. Instinctively Ruyu knew that the last—and the only—letter she had sent to her grandaunts had disappointed them. It was the first real letter that Ruyu had written—if one did not count the school assignments to write holiday greetings to conscripts at the local military camps or the House of Glory, where veterans from the Korean War and earlier conflicts aged and died. She would not have written had it not been for the repeated urging of Aunt.
Ruyu had not known what to say to her grandaunts, as they had never relied on her words to know her. In the end, she had sung the praises of her hosts and neighbors and asked about her grandaunts’ well-being, as she imagined a letter should. But her grandaunts’ words succinctly reminded her of her place in life, as they had always done when she had been younger and had been caught in an excessive expression of her feelings. With a gaze or a shake of the head, they would stop her from laughing or fussing or crying; any emotion—be it happiness or sadness, anger or contentment—was a sign of human arrogance. Think about how you appear to the eyes above us, they would say, neither gently nor harshly, and afterward they would direct her to a quiet corner. A moment of reflection, they said, was not a punishment but an opportunity for her to learn to put some distance between her and whatever triviality had made her laugh or cry. One is always watched, they explained to her; one’s life is lived under all sorts of eyes, but only one pair counts.
That she modified her behavior according to her surroundings, and wrote a letter that could only be written by someone like Moran, who seemed to consider it a paramount goal to please everyone around, must have dismayed her grandaunts. Ruyu wished she had had a stronger mind than a foolishly impressionable one: everyone she met in Beijing seemed keen to change her somehow, as though what mattered was not what she was but the possibilities she offered for others to imagine another person. Even Watermelon Wen’s twins had told her that she would look exactly like the young actress in a popular TV program for children if she smiled more. Sister Ruyu, maybe you could be a TV star and we could go on the program with you, the boys said aloud, and Ruyu wondered why not a single grownup in the courtyard would stop their nonsense.