by Yiyun Li
The boy had Ruyu and Moran stand together. He squatted to adjust the angle and the focus of his camera and then positioned himself lower to the ground. Where did he want them to look, Moran asked, and the boy said to look forward, so they would appear as though they were women warriors.
Unlike the boys, not many girls in their class seemed to like Ruyu, and none had befriended her. It must not matter much to Ruyu, but Moran felt both offended on Ruyu’s behalf and lucky that she herself had been allowed to be, however limited, a friend.
A boom, and the sky lit up. A split second before the shutter clicked, Boyang jumped into the picture, his hands on the shoulders of both girls to balance himself. In the final print, Moran was facing forward, as directed by the boy photographer, looking more astonished than heroic; Ruyu had turned to look at the intruder, the photo capturing only the side of her face, behind which Boyang was laughing with wild triumph; on top of all three heads hung full blossoms of red and orange and purple and silver.
Eventually the boy photographer, unhappy with his altered masterpiece, would reluctantly make prints of the picture, though by then—Shaoai was already poisoned—Moran would feel differently toward the photo. She would be probing alone, half-blindly as though she were looking for a lost companion in a heavy fog: when at last she located a shadowy figure, when she reached a hand out, what she touched would be a shop window coldly reflecting her blurry image.
They returned from the celebration near midnight, tired, thirsty, yet lively, like all young people coming back from a party. On the back of Boyang’s bicycle, looking unusually flushed, Ruyu told the other two that this was the first time she had seen fireworks at such a close distance. Back home, her grandaunts chose not to participate in any festivity on the eve of Lunar New Year, their curtains always pulled closed before night fell; one time, though, someone had pointed an eight-flash-booster toward their third-floor window—it had exploded a window pane, and their curtain had caught fire.
“How terrible,” Moran said. “Did your grandaunts catch the person who did it?”
Ruyu shook her head and said it didn’t matter who had done it. She remembered the momentary fear she had felt, though her grandaunts had never lost their composure, even as they put out the fire. Through the broken window, the freezing air of the January night had rushed into the apartment. No one had stepped out of the festivities to admit the wrongdoing. As she helped her grandaunts nail a piece of cardboard over the window, she’d looked below and wondered if the people down there were laughing at her and her grandaunts. She had no doubt the accident was more than accidental.
“Why would someone do that?” Moran said. “It was dangerous.”
“People are idiots,” Ruyu said. Moran looked at Ruyu, the contempt in her face the same as when she had told the class monitor earlier that the lipstick was unhygienic. Boyang, having not discerned the coldness in her words, replied that had he been there, he would have lit and stuck a two-banger into the villain’s sleeve.
The families around the quadrangle had turned in, but waiting lamps had been left burning in the windows of all three houses for their return. When they were about to say farewell to one another, something moved in the darkness under the grape trellis. A feral cat was Moran’s thought, but when Boyang went closer to investigate, he found Shaoai sitting on an overturned bucket and sipping from a bottle of yam liquor.
“Did you all have spectacular fun?” she said, enunciating each word with care, which made her sound more drunk.
“Are you all right, Sister Shaoai?” Moran asked.
“You’re celebrating with the masses, and I’m celebrating here by myself,” Shaoai said. “The nation needs young people like you, and the dead and the forgotten, alas, have only me.” Pointing to the sky unsteadily with the bottle, she started to recite a poem by Li Po.
Amongst the flowers is a pot of wine
I pour alone but with no friend at hand
So I lift the cup to invite the shining moon,
Along with my shadow we become party of three
The moon although understands none of drinking, and
The shadow just follows my body vainly
Still I make the moon and the shadow my company
To enjoy the springtime before too late
The moon lingers while I am singing
The shadow scatters while I am dancing
We cheer in delight when being awake
We separate apart after getting drunk
There was no moon in the sky, and the flowers in the courtyard had long passed their prime. Moran looked around, fearful that Shaoai would wake up the neighbors. None of the houses seemed to be stirring—or could it be that everyone was listening, hiding behind the curtains? There was something intrusive about Shaoai’s drunkenness, melodramatic even. Moran wished she had been the only one to have seen Shaoai in this state; she wished she could put a veil over the whole scene—to protect whom, though? Shaoai never needed protection, and Moran could not help feeling embarrassed for her own timidity. Shaoai had always been the one to say what was on her mind, to do what she deemed the right thing. Uneasily Moran turned to her friends, and caught sight of Ruyu, who, standing apart from her and Boyang yet close enough to see Shaoai, looked on with an icy light in her eyes.
“You three!” Shaoai said, turning her face toward Ruyu. “Why not come here and join me?”
After a pause, Moran poked Boyang, so he shook his head and said that it was late, and they all needed to go to bed soon. Shaoai snickered and mumbled something. The three friends walked back quietly, the festive mood of the night gone, exhaustion overwhelming them like a flood.
Moran’s mother had stayed up waiting for her, and when she entered the house, her mother brought her a bowl of millet porridge with chestnuts. “What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran asked, and her mother only pointed at the bowl and said to finish it before it got cold.
Moran was not hungry, but she knew she would never get any news out of her mother if she did not convince her mother that she was well fed. At the table, Moran’s mother watched attentively her daughter’s every morsel; when she saw that Moran had eaten enough, she revealed the news that Shaoai had been expelled from the university. The notice had been mailed to her parents a week earlier, but Shaoai must have intercepted it. Earlier that day she had gone back to the university dorm and returned with two traveling bags of belongings. Only then had she told her parents the news. “Shaoai’s mother fainted and bumped her head on a table corner,” Moran’s mother said. “Good thing it was not too serious. Teacher Li and I spent some time with her this evening.”
“How is Aunt now?”
“Better, I think. It was just a moment of overwhelming distress that went to her head,” Moran’s mother said. “You know she’s not the weak kind who can’t live with a little disaster. None of our generation is that weak.”
“What will they do?”
“Who?”
“Aunt and Uncle.”
“What can they do? Shaoai was expelled for political reasons—which work unit would dare to hire her? I told her mother at least she had not been shot dead on the Square. At least she had not been arrested and thrown into a prison somewhere. You ought always to look at the positive side.”
Moran laid the spoon next to the bowl. Her mother sighed. “Between you and me—and really, don’t say this to Aunt or the others—but don’t you think Shaoai is partially responsible? What’s wrong with recanting? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would have done that. It’s her parents’ bad luck to have such a stubborn daughter.”
“But isn’t that what makes Shaoai a better person than most people?” Moran asked. Shaoai would have scoffed at the lipstick assigned to them and called it demeaning; she would not have put on a silky dress, as Moran had that evening, to follow the official order to look pretty.
“Being good means little. Trust me, being good means nothing in this country. Being right, and being on the right side of any conf
lict, is the only way to stay safe. An egg never wins when it hurls itself against a rock. Now, don’t you go to school and say anything to your classmates. It’s better to keep your mouth zipped—you know that, don’t you?”
Moran nodded. She didn’t have the heart to argue, though she knew she disagreed with her mother. It pained her that Shaoai was in such trouble; it pained her also to imagine Aunt and Uncle suffering. “What is Sister Shaoai going to do now?”
“Do? Nothing for her to do. Stay around. Be an unemployed-and-stay-at-home youth. Thank goodness Aunt agreed to host Ruyu for that extra bit of money.”
“I thought Aunt was a relative of Ruyu’s grandaunts.”
“Relative, yes, but can you just send a girl to another family for free? No. Whoever Ruyu’s grandaunts are—see, I don’t know them, so really I don’t have the right to criticize them, but between you and me, I don’t like the sound of those ladies. All the same, they are to be commended for how much they pay for Ruyu’s stay.”
Moran wondered how much it was. If she asked, her mother would tell her, though what difference would that make? She was late in understanding many things about the world, which must have always been less opaque to Ruyu.
Moran’s mother shook her head and launched into her favorite monologue about the responsibilities of parents and children. Any news or event might offer an opportunity. “Now, parents feed and clothe a child and provide an education. To repay that upbringing, a child should always bear the parents’ well-being in mind when making any decision. If you don’t excel in school, you’re not only destroying your own life but your parents’, because how can you repay your parents if you don’t get a good job? You marry the wrong person, and you’re not only being irresponsible to yourself but bringing distress to your parents. Anything you do, think of your parents first. Other than the Monkey King, nobody comes out of a crack in the rock.”
Had Shaoai been there, she would have erupted into argument, but Moran only said of course, she knew these things by heart. Moran had long accepted that she was not a special person; in fact, she was commonplace in many ways: she was not one of the top students in school, and there was never going to be anything brilliant about her career. She was not as feisty or as sharp-minded as Shaoai; at her age, Shaoai had led her debate team to the city championships twice in a row. Had Moran been a boy, she would have been more convenient to her parents when they needed someone to mend the roof or haul in the three hundred kilos of bok choy—their only vegetable for the whole winter—at the beginning of November. What she was not she could make up only in ways available to her: she was a model child who treated her parents and all the grownups around with respect; she smiled at everyone, neighbors or strangers alike, not because she wanted to be praised for her cheerfulness but because she truly believed that any bit of sunniness she could offer the world would be a comfort; she was a loyal friend, a reliable babysitter, and a good person. What else could she be but a good person? Yet being good, in the end, means little in this world. Sitting by the table and listening to her mother, Moran felt defeated, though when her mother finished, she compelled herself to smile. How lucky she was to have the porridge after such a long day, she said, and her mother said of course, who else but one’s own mother would take care of her daughter with such love.
In another house, in the middle of the night, motherless Ruyu woke up, startled by unfamiliar sensations: a hand moving ever so clandestinely underneath her pajamas, her lips pried open by a wet and warm tongue; a foreign body on her own, the weight not heavy but enough to pin her down as one could be pinned down by a nightmare, and, as in the case of a nightmare, one would afterward forever question why one had not awakened in time, why one had not protested.
Ruyu opened her eyes and saw Shaoai’s eyes hovering near hers, too near, but how could she see in the darkness, how could anyone see? There must be a lamp somewhere—or was a house, a city, the world, always lit, complete darkness a luxury available only to the dead and the unseeing?
Please make her stop, Ruyu said in her heart, though to whom? No one came to stop the hands and the tongue, nor did she believe that anyone could stop the insanity behind those unclean organs that clung to her: the inconvenient knees and elbows, the slippery fingers, the greedy lips, the unrestrained desire, unrestrainable, consummating itself and in doing so making its object abandon existing as herself—neither a girl nor a woman Ruyu felt, but a being as blind as the force driving her predator. As poisonous.
In one’s hoping for help, one becomes small; smaller yet when no help comes. Only then does one understand that this moment is always there, waiting, preying, in disguise, or even in arrogant openness. How could she have misread life with such foolishness?
Yet that was not the worst. The worst is not a moment robbed from one’s life, but what’s left in place of the moment: an abyss where all the other moments could slip in easily. One does not wake up from a nightmare unhaunted.
Clammy, cold, Ruyu did not remember falling back to sleep, though when, again, she woke up with a start, she realized that she had dozed off. Shaoai was next to her; still? Ruyu thought with dismay, but then, why not? There was no place for either of them to go, now, or ever.
“If you’re waiting for me to give you an explanation,” Shaoai said, “I can tell you that you’re hoping in vain.”
Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had been waiting for her to wake up, to beg for an explanation that Shaoai alone would have the power to deny. “Nor will I apologize,” she continued.
Is this what people do after any sort of unnatural happening—prattle, so that all will become normal after a while? Time, refusing to become memory, demands one’s attention with a suffocating grip, yet one can do nothing about time, nor can one do away with time.
“Someday you’ll be grateful to me,” Shaoai said. “I know you may not believe me now. If you’re angry, you can stay angry for as long as you’re able, but this is what I think you should know: you have a brain, which you are responsible for filling with meaningful thoughts; you have a life ahead of you, which you should live for yourself. You have not been taught to think or to question by your grandaunts. For heaven’s sake, you have not even been taught to have human feelings. Since they haven’t done that for you, someone else must.”
Do murderers expect gratitude from the murdered souls for setting them free from their earthly burdens? If Ruyu went to Grandpa’s room now, could she put her hands gently on his brittle neck and liberate him from the humiliation of being half-dead?
“You are the most unbending girl I’ve ever met,” Shaoai said, all of a sudden possessed by an anger that Ruyu did not understand. “Why do you think you have the right to be like that?”
“I don’t understand what you are asking,” Ruyu said. “I don’t see how the kind of person I am has anything to do with what happened.”
“Of course it doesn’t in your mind, but that’s what I’m talking about. Live like a real human being. Bring yourself down from the clouds. Open your eyes.”
Yet there was nothing to see, Ruyu thought, but could she be wrong? Suppose ugliness is worth seeing, too?
“Just so you know: I don’t want you to think too much of what happened. As a matter of fact, nothing much has happened between you and me. Someday, you may even shrug it off and laugh at it,” Shaoai said, and after a moment she added bitterly, “If you don’t believe me, go ask Yening. She may have wisdom to share with you.”
Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had said that out of the hope of being contradicted. Perhaps Shaoai wanted to know how permanently she had marked Ruyu’s life because she had failed to make Yening her possession. Ruyu shifted her body and felt the mosquito netting brush her face. Aunt had said earlier that day that the netting would be kept up until the end of the week. All the mosquitoes would be gone by the second week of October, she had said with cheerful assurance. One nuisance out of one’s life, Ruyu thought, feeling a dull ache behind her eyes. Was this how people felt when they wanted to
cry? Ruyu could not remember the last time she had cried.
“Why don’t you say something?” Shaoai asked.
“Do you do that to Moran, too? Do you want to do that to her, too?”
Shaoai seemed taken aback. “Of course not.”
“Why of course? Why not?” Ruyu asked. Though she knew the answer already. Shaoai’s desire would never bring her to Moran, because Moran, with her idolization of the older girl, held no meaning for Shaoai, just as Ruyu herself, and her grandaunts also, meant nothing to God. Bad things happen—wars, plagues, parents abandoning their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts—and no one, not a human nor a god, will ever intervene.
Shaoai seemed baffled. “Moran, she’s only a child,” she said after a moment.
Moran did not sleep well that night, perhaps because of the day’s excitement. When she woke up at daybreak, she could no longer stay still. She got out of bed and washed quietly at the washstand, and through the window she could see Shaoai, who’d risen early also, lingering under the grape trellis. Had Shaoai stayed outside overnight? Moran wondered; but having few words of comfort for her, Moran found herself unwilling to go into the yard, as she would have done on any other morning.
13
On their second date—five days after their dinner on Sunday—Sizhuo asked Boyang his age, and whether Boyang was his real name. Why, he said with amusement, and placed his citizen’s ID on the table. They were in a teahouse near his parents’ place, which he’d planned to stop by afterward, hoping it would seem to his parents as though they were on his mind often enough to warrant an unplanned visit. But the thought of seeking their approval, however unconsciously, made him decide at once to skip seeing them after all. On the most fundamental level, they were the best parents he could ask for: they caused him no conflict, either internal or external, while with each day’s passing he was made more aware, by his guilty glances at the calendar, that he had not visited Aunt since the day of Shaoai’s cremation. It was more Aunt’s fault than his own, he insisted to himself, turning defiant as people do when their limits are shown in unsparing light: unlike his parents, she reminded him of all the complications he was incapable of dealing with in life. Who had granted her the right to do that to him?