Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel

by Yiyun Li

  “Is this how a man of your status courts a woman?”

  He looked into her eyes but could find neither malice nor irony in them. “What kind of status are you referring to?”

  “You have a car and an apartment, so you must also have a good career?” she said, asking more than stating, and he nodded to confirm her guess. “Does that mean when you court a woman, you can always find something to do with her?”

  “To do?”

  “What if you lived in a basement with three other provincial boys, and you did not have any savings? You worked six and a half days a week, and yet you knew you would never be able to afford the cheapest apartment in this city. What if all you possessed was your being, and there was nothing you could do but be yourself? Would you still be courting a girl?”

  No, he thought; this was not a welcoming world for young men without any means. A few weeks ago, a woman in her early twenties had said in a TV interview that she would prefer an unhappy marriage with a BMW to being in love with a young man who could afford only to carry her on his bicycle. Boyang mentioned the name of the young woman—already her bold practicality had made her a national celebrity—and asked what Sizhuo thought of the woman’s preference.

  Sizhuo looked agonized. She crossed and uncrossed her fingers, the first time he had seen her lose her equanimity. “I wish she were completely wrong about everything. I don’t think she was, though,” she said. “This is not the kind of world I thought I’d grow up to live in, you know?”

  She was not the first to have realized that, he wanted to point out. What made her different from other disillusioned souls? All young people start with untainted dreams, but how many would retain their capacities to dream? How many could refrain from transforming themselves into corruptors of other untainted dreams? We are all wardens and executors biding our time; what’s taken from us, what’s killed in us, we wait for our turn to avenge. Such wisdom, had Coco ever been interested, Boyang would not have hesitated to share: he would have sneered, laughed, enjoyed his position the way a cat gently plays with its prey. But what made Sizhuo different—what made him pensive now—was that he wanted a better answer for her; he wanted a better world to offer her. Was this how a father would feel toward a child? He made a face, the question conjuring the most farcical: paternal, he thought, a paternal sugar daddy.

  Sizhuo did not take her eyes from his face. “You must find my ranting laughable,” she said, though her face showed no sign of unease due to self-consciousness. “Sometimes I think so, too, but the moment I think that way, I know I’m wrong.”

  “I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “More at myself because, you know, I’m one of those people who have made the world a bad place for you, and in turn I’m asking you to like me, even to fall in love with me.”

  “What do you do that for?”

  “To ask you to like me?”

  “To help make the world a bad place, if what you said was true.”

  “What else can I do?”

  Sizhuo looked baffled, as though he were asking her for an answer.

  “Nobody can refrain from doing things,” he said. “You see, a child can get by with just being, but we aren’t children forever. We must live by doing things. And either we do harm, or, if we are extremely lucky, we do some good. The problem, as you know, is that the world is an unbalanced place, and it requires more bad than good to maintain that unbalance. If you want to do one good thing—say, if you give money to a beggar child—no big deal, right? But no, it’s not that simple. To be able to do that, you have to deceive yourself into believing that a bill dropped in her basket is going to help her, to give her one more morsel of food, to spare her one beating from her parents. While in reality, you and I both know that she might have been stolen or rented or sold to the begging ring; by giving her money, instead of doing anyone any good, what you’re really doing is contributing to criminals, helping them profit from doing damage, and encouraging more criminals to steal and sell babies into that trade. So what do I do? I either give her the money, or I don’t, all depending on my mood that day. But either way, I have no illusions about doing anything good for her, or for anyone. I’m sorry, is this too bleak for you?”

  Sizhuo shook her head. “Why is the world unbalanced?” she said. “Why does it require more bad than good?”

  He could give her his hypothesis about the connection between human hearts and entropy that he sometimes played in his head, but he would have to be drunk to go on with such nonsense. Already he regretted that their conversation was going off on a tangent. He was here to woo a woman. He was not here to be baffled and defeated by the world alongside her. “Why that is,” he said, “I truly don’t know.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  No, he did not, he thought, though he knew that was only wishful thinking. The real question was, can anyone afford to know? “Do you?” he asked.

  “I do,” she said. “That makes me a fool in people’s eyes, I know, but I don’t mind being a fool.”

  “What do you mind?”

  “Not knowing, and making do with not knowing.”

  14

  After the celebration on October 1, life went back to the old routines, nearly normal again, though Moran no longer knew what kind of normalcy she was thinking of. There was little hope in the case of Shaoai, who no longer belonged to any school or work unit. Neither Moran nor Boyang had the courage to ask Shaoai about how she spent her days. In the evenings, she could be seen in the house or in the courtyard, moody and distant.

  Uncle was no more reticent than before, bearing his trademark smile without fail, and Aunt was as chatty as ever. Yet their stoic efforts could not dispel the despondent fog hanging over their faces. They looked older now, and were sometimes distracted when they tried to follow the neighbors’ conversations. More than before they seemed intimidated by their daughter.

  Hardships in lives, Moran was raised to believe, are like unpleasant weather, which one endures because bad weather will break as inevitably as bad luck will run its course. Hope is the sunshine after the storm, the spring thawing after the bitter winter; the goddess of fate, capricious as she is, has nevertheless an impressionable mind, as any young female does, who would smile at those who have perseverance.

  Moran’s nature was to find hope for others before she could feel hopeful herself. To stay silent was the first step in resigning oneself to hopelessness, so armed with inherited and wishful thinking, she repeated the stale wisdom to Shaoai when they found themselves alone in the courtyard. It was a Saturday afternoon, a half day at school, and both Boyang and Ruyu disappeared around noon. Moran wondered if Ruyu had a rehearsal; as for Boyang, he must have gone to a basketball or soccer game with other boys.

  “Things will become better, Sister Shaoai,” Moran said. “Don’t lose heart. Remember the tale in which the man lost one horse only to find that it brought another horse back to the stable?”

  “Since when did you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the wise and the optimistic?” Shaoai said, looking at Moran askance.

  Moran blushed. “I don’t want you to feel alone in your situation,” she said.

  “You don’t want me to feel alone, huh? And I bet you want many things for others, too, right?”

  Moran shook her head confusedly. Too young to know that her affection was the kind that made a child revolt against a mother, she was disheartened by Shaoai’s punishing words.

  “It’s ambitious of you to want things for me,” Shaoai said. “But let me give you a solid piece of advice, the same I’ve given my parents: don’t waste your feelings on an unworthy person.”

  Moran stammered and said she admired Shaoai as always.

  “My dear Moran, in this case I wasn’t talking about myself. Sure, my parents should’ve known by now not to spend their energy worrying about me,” Shaoai said. “And you, don’t you think you’re a bit childish, following your two other friends as though you can’t see they’d prefer to be left by the
mselves?”

  It took Moran a moment to understand what the older girl was insinuating, and by then Shaoai had unlocked her bicycle, leaving Moran in an abyss. Slowly she turned toward her house, fumbling for the key.

  There was no reason not to believe Shaoai. Moran wondered if others—her parents, for instance, or Boyang’s grandmother—had wanted to warn her, too. Since childhood, Moran had seen, in the approving eyes of their elders, a future for her and Boyang. She had refrained from naming it because he had not named it. Loyalty to that future was all she had, yet loyalty to a future, unlike to the past, is a feeling both blind and arrogant. What begins with a label bears an expiration date; by defining something only after its disappearance—a sibling, a friend, a childhood sweetheart—Moran would one day understand that the loss, limited for him because he must have long ago dismissed it with a name, was for her a continuing void.

  Moran slipped into bed with her school uniform still on, and under the cover of the blanket she shed quiet tears. A small shift in the past few days, which had been so minute that she had been uncertain whether it was only in her imagination, came back to her with new significance. It used to be that Ruyu would hop on whichever bicycle was closer to her, though one morning last week she had walked around Moran and sat behind Boyang, and ever since had chosen his bicycle.

  The next day Moran proposed to Boyang that the three of them use his room rather than Ruyu’s for their night study. To give Sister Shaoai some space, Moran said. After a difficult night she had decided that her friendship with the other two should not change, but she did not want her bravery—or foolishness—to be seen by Shaoai.

  Boyang readily agreed. He must have found it hard to be around Shaoai these days, too; Moran wondered if Shaoai had embarrassed Boyang by commenting on the relationship between him and Ruyu. Moran did not detect any change in him toward herself, and Ruyu was distant but no more than before. Perhaps Shaoai had been in such a bad mood that she wanted to hurt others; what she had told Moran might not be true. This thought made Moran hopeful again, and it cast a pitying shadow over her sympathy toward Shaoai. Like anyone with a youthful mind, Moran, too occupied with her own prospect of happiness, had little capacity for real sympathy—the kind that is not perfunctorily expressed out of one’s duty toward another person’s misfortune. But how many people are strong enough to give—or to receive, even—real sympathy? In distress and in catastrophe, one often looks for the strengthening forces not in people closest to one, but in the perfect indifference in strangers’ faces, who put one’s woes back to where they belong—irrelevant to the extent of being comical.

  “Every generation has to learn this lesson,” Moran’s mother said at dinner when the topic turned to Shaoai. “Public protest will never do in this country. Unfortunately, some pay more dearly than others. Now that you’re not a child anymore, use your brain better.”

  Moran mumbled an answer. The neighbors did not discuss Shaoai’s situation. All had gone through the political “recheck” over the past few weeks, none but Shaoai with a harsh outcome. They all treated her with the same respect and patience, but behind closed doors, they must have exchanged critical words about Shaoai, as Moran’s parents had.

  A moth fluttered into the lamp above the dinner table, and Moran’s father waved his chopsticks as though the gesture alone would make the distraction go away. Moran watched the moth, its wings dusty and gray, its flight purposeless. These moths, no larger than ladybugs, seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the house. They came from the straw-colored worms that lived in the bags of rice her parents had scrambled to buy out of fear of the ever-worsening inflation; it was Moran’s job to winnow out the wiggly worms before cooking the rice. Unlike the mosquitoes and flies her mother hunted down with a single-minded determination, the moths, doing no harm, were left to live and die on their own.

  Moran sighed, and her mother, as though she had been waiting for the opportunity, launched into a speech about why a young person like Moran felt she had the right to sigh. Moran listened with an obedient expression. These days, the moths, along with supplies her parents had stored in their battle against inflation—bars of alkaline soap, drab yellow and wrapped in straw paper, boxes of matches that had become damp and became harder to strike by the day, toilet paper, laundry detergent, inexpensive tea in the form of crude bricks, all growing stale, collecting dust—these made Moran’s heart despondent: every time she turned around, she seemed to bump into another pile of things, stirring another moth from its repose into a frenzy of blind flight. The world had become smaller, dimmer, but was it for her alone?

  Such despair Moran had to hide from her parents. Hadn’t her mother survived an impoverished childhood among six siblings, supported by the meager earnings of their father as a pedicab driver? Hadn’t her father weathered years of humiliation as the son of a petit bourgeois?

  The same gray moths fluttered in other houses, too, yet Boyang and Ruyu never seemed to be bothered. Why would they be, if life was generous and granted them all the good qualities that Moran herself lacked? But such a bitter thought made her feel guilty: certainly Ruyu had experienced bigger loss; certainly she deserved more kindness, better love.

  After the last class of the day, Ruyu went to the music room to practice the accordion. Sometimes, when she played on the porch, Moran came over to watch. She did not want to go into the low-ceilinged cottage, which was gloomy, and indeed she had no right to be in there; besides Ruyu, there were a few other student musicians Teacher Shu supervised—four violinists, two boys who played four-hands on the piano, and a middle school girl who played the xylophone and belonged to a fifty-member, all-girl xylophone ensemble in Japan, where she was the only Chinese student. How the girl could join a Japanese ensemble Moran did not know, and some days, sitting on the porch and listening to the instruments, each preoccupied with its own music, she wondered about the things she had missed or would miss in life. She had no talent for creating anything beautiful—the only music she could make was to whistle a simple tune, wobbling with uncertainty, and even that drew disapproving looks from her mother because it was unladylike to whistle; her drawings and her handwriting were childish, and she had few skills in any art; even her body and face were nondescript.

  Moran turned to study Ruyu—it was one of the best autumn days in Beijing, the sky blue in a crystal way, and Teacher Shu had driven all his charges, other than the two pianists, onto the porch to practice. In the shade of the eave, Ruyu moved her fingers up and down the keyboard in a distracted way, yet when Moran closed her eyes, she could not tell the difference between a halfhearted performance and a dedicated one, as she could not tell the difference between Ruyu’s confidence and her impertinence.

  “This must be boring for you,” Ruyu said when she finished a piece. “You shouldn’t feel obliged to wait for me.”

  “No, it’s not boring at all,” Moran said. “What is it that you just played?”

  Ruyu turned over the sheet of music as though she had not heard the question. “I can walk home,” she said after pausing to read the next sheet. “Or else I’ll catch a ride with Boyang.”

  Three days a week, Boyang played basketball, and on the other two days, he played soccer or just hung out with a few boys by the bicycle shed, exchanging tall tales. Sometimes Moran joined them, as they were all friendly with her, though their favorite topics—Michael Jackson, breakdancing, Transformers—did not interest her. Once in a while, she played Ping-Pong, but she was not a great player, and would step aside when the games became competitive. Three girls with whom she had been close in middle school stayed after class, too, talking more than doing anything; Moran’s friendship with them had not continued as easily as she’d expected: there seemed to be a dangerous undercurrent, a triangle of complications in which Moran often got lost, and their words, seemingly pregnant with meaning, sometimes sounded too assiduous or simply silly.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” Moran said. “In fact, I like to watch you
play.”

  Ruyu looked at Moran with a cold scrutiny. “Do you mean you like to watch people play music? Or do you mean you like to watch me?”

  Moran blushed. What right, Ruyu seemed to be saying, did Moran have to sit next to Ruyu, claiming to be her friend? “I don’t know. Maybe I just like to listen to real music being played on an instrument.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t play music?” Moran said, wavering under Ruyu’s steadfast gaze. “No one I know plays music.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Moran looked at the girl on the xylophone, who was practicing with such abandon that even when her eyes were open—and they were huge, almost inhuman eyes, mysteriously deep—she seemed to be seeing nothing. Years later, the girl would transform herself into the drummer for the first female rock band in China, and Moran would see her photo in a magazine: clad in a layer of shiny black leather, she had the same abandon, or exaggerated despair, in her eyes.

  Ruyu glanced at the girl. Moran wondered if in Ruyu’s eyes the girl was simply a pretentious actor, or worse, a nuisance. Yet the girl could travel with her instrument on an airplane to Japan, showing her passport to the officials in both countries. Apart from Boyang’s sister, Moran had not known another person who had left the country; none of the people in the quadrangle was even qualified to apply for a passport.

  With wordless contempt Ruyu turned to look at Moran, as though to ask her if she wanted to be the girl at the xylophone. “I do wish I could play music,” Moran said. “But not everyone can afford to.”

  “Why not? I’m an orphan, and even I can do it.”

  It was the first time Ruyu had used the word orphan. Moran did not have words to comfort Ruyu, but the claim, with its haughtiness, had been thrown more as a dagger at the world, and Moran, unable to reply, offered herself as the target.