by Yiyun Li
Ruyu returned to her practice and launched into a maddeningly paced polka. Moran understood that she was not a welcome companion on the porch. Pride would have required her to apologize and to absent herself, but whether she left or not seemed to matter little. Of course Ruyu could do many things that no other person could do: it was not because she was an orphan—had Moran been an orphan, she would have been one of those shivering and begging by the roadside; it was not because Ruyu was beautiful—she was, but there were other girls more beautiful, better built than she, yet at times they, too, were susceptible to the uncertainties that Ruyu was immune to; no, Ruyu could do anything she wanted, to others, to the world, because she knew she was someone destined to be special. She felt no burden to prove it to herself or to anyone, nor had she any tolerance for those who were not chosen as she was. What was Moran like in Ruyu’s eyes? Years later, it would strike Moran as either the most fortunate or the most unfortunate happening in her life that the first time she looked at herself through someone else’s eyes, she had chosen Ruyu’s: who was she to Ruyu but someone so ordinary that neither her joy nor her pain would amount to anything but the dross of everydayness?
A few days later, Boyang told Moran that Ruyu had asked to see the university where his parents taught. “Saturday afternoon,” he said. “Shall we go together?”
The university, on the west side of the city, was not far from the Summer Palace, and its campus had been, in its previous incarnation, a residence for the closest cousins and allies of the emperors of the last dynasty. It was said to be one of the most beautiful places in Beijing, yet in all the years Moran had known Boyang, she had never once visited the campus. It was part of the world he did not want to share with her; nor would she have found herself at ease near it. His parents, she knew, had little regard for her and her parents and people like them.
Ruyu’s request did not come as a surprise. Still, it agonized Moran that what was forbidden for her was something ordinary for Ruyu, who had only to ask to be handed the entry pass. Was Boyang aware of the difference? She looked at him, and he seemed excited by the plan. “Of course we’ll put her on a bus and we’ll meet her at the university. But do you think she’ll handle the bus ride all right? She’d have to change to another route midway. Alternatively, you could ride the bus with her. But then we won’t have the two bicycles, and it’s an awfully big campus to walk around.” Boyang stopped. “What? Did you already plan something else for Saturday?”
“No, not at all,” Moran said. She sounded too eager, she thought, but she did not want to disappoint him.
“Would your parents be okay if we have dinner there? Not with my parents. Ruyu asked if we could see my mother’s lab, and I thought we could have dinner in a dining hall and then go there after hours, so we won’t have to deal with talking to people.”
“Will your mother be there?”
“Oh silly, don’t you worry. She wouldn’t stay for us. She wouldn’t change her plans for the prime minister.”
Despite Moran’s misgivings, as the day came nearer, she, too, started looking forward to the outing. There was little doubt that Boyang would attend his parents’ university—he was a top student and would not even need to claim family privilege to get in. He had always believed that Moran would attend the university, too, though she wasn’t so sure herself. She would have to improve her academic standing and score perfectly on the entrance exam, but when she voiced such doubts to Boyang, he only teased her for being overcautious. Of course things would work out, he told her; she was better than she allowed herself to think. Imagine the freedom they would have when they went to the university, he had said, and she had seen no option but to trust his enthusiasm, and had, up till now, enjoyed his vision.
“So,” Shaoai said on Friday evening at dinner. “Did I hear right about some visit to a university tomorrow?”
Ruyu did not raise her eyes to acknowledge the question. These days, dinnertime was a torment for her, worse than bedtime, because by then she had an open battleground separating her from Shaoai. Only once after that night had Shaoai tried to touch Ruyu again, but she had, with the most even voice she could manage, told the older girl to leave her alone. No more words had been said afterward, no more advances made, and every night Ruyu wrapped her blanket tightly around herself and stayed alert by only sleeping shallowly.
Ruyu had sworn, and had so far kept her word, that she would never lay eyes on Shaoai’s face again. The presence of Aunt and Uncle, though, made things harder. At dinner, with the older girl sitting across the table, Ruyu had to either look into her bowl of rice or, when Aunt talked to her, look up at Aunt, yet willfully blur her peripheral vision.
“What university?” Aunt said, bristling. University was one of the words they did not want to bring into the household lately.
“Ruyu here,” Shaoai said, “is going to check out where she’s going to spend her bright future studying.”
What was worst was that there was no way for Ruyu to shelter herself from the noises the other person made: the clinking of chopsticks, the scraping of chair legs on the floor, the grunts in place of answers to Aunt’s questions, and the various comments hurled at Ruyu to provoke a reaction.
Aunt looked at Ruyu, was about to ask something, but then changed her mind.
“And I just heard that our dear old Yening got an internship at Sino Oil and Gas,” Shaoai said.
When no one responded right away, Aunt sighed and asked what kind of job Yening would be doing.
“Learning how to be a charming and accommodating young woman in the real world,” Shaoai said. “What else would she be doing?”
If only Shaoai would shut up, Ruyu thought, but these days it was Shaoai who led the dinnertime conversation, as though her topics were harmless, everyday subjects. No doubt she was aware of—perhaps even enjoying—the pains she was inflicting on her parents, who were unable to stop her from tormenting them. Already Ruyu could see Shaoai slowly losing her place everywhere but in her parents’ hearts—not a prospect for a job, less sympathy from the neighbors, fearful looks from Moran and Boyang. But why should one feel sorry for Shaoai’s parents? It was their doing, bringing a person like that into the world, and they were not to be spared from living under her despotism long after she ceased mattering to the world.
“Are you all right, Ruyu?” Aunt asked.
From the look on Aunt’s face, Ruyu knew that she must have missed a question, asked by Aunt to avoid carrying on a difficult conversation with Shaoai. Ruyu apologized, and said she was wondering if she had forgotten to bring an important test prep kit home.
Aunt looked worried; Ruyu wondered if secretly Aunt welcomed the opportunity for a manageable misfortune. “Do check your school bag,” she said. “If it’s not there, Boyang or Moran must have theirs with them. Is it something you have to finish tonight?”
Ruyu said she would check and excused herself from the dinner table. In the bedroom, on the narrow desk, was the folder of the test kit, and mechanically she picked up the top page and started to read the first question; halfway through she got lost, but she kept looking engaged, lest Aunt look in. On the chair was her book satchel, a new one that Aunt had insisted on buying, as she said no high school student should use a child’s satchel like the one Ruyu had brought from home. In the corner of the room was an old chest of drawers, the bottom two drawers belonging to Ruyu. A glance at the top drawers, where Shaoai kept her underclothes, made Ruyu recoil violently, tearing the paper.
Her grandaunts’ willow trunk was under the bed, and Ruyu had covered it with an old shawl to keep the trunk free of dust. Her accordion was at school, locked in a place that looked as if generations of monks’ ghosts visited at night. These were all the things she owned in life—not much, but enough for her not to be a disposable being. When her parents had left her on the doorstep of her grandaunts, had they thought of the possibility that she might have died of hunger or cold before the two sisters discovered the bundle? In her grand
aunts’ eyes, God had made them find her before bad things had happened, but Ruyu understood now that their god had no more wisdom than whatever words they put in his mouth. If Ruyu packed everything and left at this moment, she would leave no trace in these people’s lives, yet she would have no place to go but to jump into the river with the trunk. If she killed herself, her grandaunts could ask and ask, but neither their god nor any mortal would have the simplest explanation.
Yet people do not die until they are made to. An infant for whom no love can be found in her parents’ hearts, if left in the wilderness, will cry until her voice grows hoarse; it is not in our nature to expire quietly.
The next day, Ruyu took the bus to the west side. It was the first time she had ridden a bus since the day she arrived. Just a little over two months, but already so much had changed. The men and women around her could not harm her because she had learned the secret of willing herself out of their sights and thoughts. Invisible, she felt indestructible.
Halfway to the destination, two children, a boy and a girl, not older than ten, came up and stood next to her. Neither reached for the back of a seat but swayed back and forth, keeping their balance. They were talking about rocks, using the terms sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic with such ease, as though they had no other reason to be in the world at that moment than to understand how millions of years had made one piece of rock different from another. A few stops later, they got off the bus. Through the window Ruyu watched them cross the street, threading between honking cars that did not slow down for them. That must be how Moran and Boyang had once looked. So much confidence in their ability to keep the dangerous world at bay; so little doubt about their futile efforts.
The university campus was indeed as beautiful as Boyang had boasted: a tree-lined lake, where the supple branches of weeping willows, their leaves barely turning yellow, reached for the water’s surface to touch their own reflections; a boat carved out of stones, forever moored next to an island; a pagoda, a temple, an ancient bell sitting on a hilltop; a bronze statue of Cervantes as a skinny man holding a broken sword; a few graves of famous people, both Chinese and Western, who had died long ago—neither Moran nor Ruyu had heard of any of them, though what a place to be buried in, their ancient solitude pleasantly interrupted by the hustle and bustle of the college students on foot or on bicycles. Toward the end of the day, many students were heading toward the dining halls, spoons clanking in the metal pails they carried in their hands or in the carriers wired to their bicycles.
Moran felt shy sitting at one end of the long table in the dining hall, with Boyang and Ruyu across from her. Some college boys whistled at them, finding them laughable in their high school uniform perhaps, yet this did not seem to bother Boyang or Ruyu. Once in a while someone would come over and pat Boyang on the back, girls and boys alike—they were his parents’ students, he told Moran and Ruyu. His mother had left the keys to her lab with one of her graduate students, he said, who would meet them at the entrance of the old chemistry building.
“Is there a new chemistry building?” Moran asked, but Boyang, who was saying something to Ruyu, did not hear.
Ruyu turned to Moran, waiting for or daring her to repeat the question, but Moran looked away as though she was studying a young couple at the other end of the table, who were gazing at each other without touching their food. The hunger in their eyes made Moran feel like an intruder—and perhaps she was, there and elsewhere. She thought about the people who welcomed her as an audience: Boyang’s grandmother when she reminisced about the famines in ’41 and ’58; Watermelon Wen’s two boys, who mimicked the quirks of the neighbors with exactitude; strangers in the alleyway, who had this or that complaint to make; her parents, who never tired of repeating the lessons they had learned from living humbly. If only it were that easy to be around those she wanted to be closest to; but they, it seemed, only wished her to be absent: Ruyu did not like her around when she was practicing the accordion, and now, sitting across from her friends, Moran wondered if Boyang was only trying to be nice by including her.
The laboratory was on the top floor of a three-story building. The hallway was cramped with old equipment, rolled-up posters, three-legged chairs leaning on rickety tables, and other nameless things that seemed to have been sitting in the dust for years. The graduate student with the keys looked introspective, and he said a few words about locking up before disappearing down an unlit hallway.
Boyang unlocked the door and turned on the fluorescent lamps. “Not much to see, really,” he said. Still, he walked the girls through the aisles, opening a cabinet here and there to show where the chemicals and supplies were stored, flipping on the switch for the fume hood to show off the toxic signs with grinning skulls on a few brown bottles.
Later they sat in the office adjacent to the lab. Boyang boiled water on a hot plate to make tea. It was oddly formal, as none of them drank tea at home. Still, it seemed to make him happy to play the host. There were two chairs in the office, a tall spinning one for his mother and a small wooden one. Moran hesitated when Boyang asked them to sit and took the wooden chair. Ruyu sat down behind the desk and looked at the titles of the papers in front of her.
“I wouldn’t touch them if I were you,” Boyang said.
“Why?” Ruyu said. “Will your mother notice?”
“Notice? There is nothing she doesn’t notice.”
“Will she mind?”
“No, she won’t. Rather, you might give her the wrong idea that I’m into her research now, and who knows, maybe the next time I see her, she’ll give me a whole folder of papers.”
“What kind of research does she do?” Ruyu said.
Boyang shrugged and said it was too complicated a subject to be interesting to anyone but his mother.
“Will you study chemistry when you go to college?” Ruyu asked.
“No,” he said. “Too boring.”
“What subject will you major in?”
“I don’t know. Something useful. Engineering. Or something with computer programming. What will you study?”
Ruyu did not answer, and turned to ask Moran what she was planning to study. Until recently, Moran had thought she would major in whatever Boyang chose. It had seemed sensible, as he knew these things better, but now it would sound ridiculous if she said engineering or computer programming. “Maybe chemistry,” she said. “I don’t mind boring subjects.”
Boyang laughed and said that statement alone would set his mother off. “But since when have you thought about studying chemistry?”
Moran shook her head confusedly, aware that Ruyu was watching her with an intensity she did not understand. She changed the subject and asked Boyang a few questions about his mother’s graduate students, but she could see that his heart was not in the topic. He was uncommonly quiet.
Their conversation lagged a little, though neither Boyang nor Ruyu seemed in a hurry to leave. The sun had set, and from the only window in the office they could see the slanted roof of the neighboring building, its terra-cotta tiles, once painted golden and green, all faded now. A crow croaked in a nearby tree, and immediately someone cursed loudly the bad luck a crow’s cry would bring.
Something about the evening—the dinner away from home, the closeness of the world that carried on its mundane business outside the window, their freedom unintruded upon—made Moran feel as though at long last she had arrived at the threshold of her real life, for which she had been rehearsing as a diligent child. Trust and loyalty, disappointment and resignation, happiness and sadness, friendship and love—in this new life, unlike in a rehearsal, everything was in place, and nothing would stop the play from moving toward curtain fall. Moran looked at her friends: confident, they appeared better prepared.
What if nothing could be changed, and she would always be given that minor role? What if there was nothing in her that made her lovable? But there must be something lovable in every one of us, or else why would we go from one day to the next? In her despondence
, unknown to herself, Moran held out seeking hands to her friends: a smile, an affectionate gesture, a wordless affirmation—it does not take much to save one from despair, but they, untouched by the urgency devouring her, watched the dusk fall in their intimate obliviousness.
Moran wished she could be part of that quietness; her own, forced upon her, only made her heart ache for words. But if she spoke, she would be a thoughtless crow, disturbing a dream, gaining nothing but a silent curse.
Ruyu stood up and said she would be back in a moment, and Boyang nodded, saying that the ladies’ room was down the hallway. When she left, Moran turned to him, but he was still looking at the roof across the yard, and she knew that he had something on his mind. She wished she were the same person she used to be, the one who would not hesitate to ask him. There had never been secrets between them.
“Isn’t she a special person?” Boyang whispered, turning to Moran with a pleading look, as though by not mentioning Ruyu’s name, she would be kept a treasure.
Moran smiled and agreed.
“Do you really think so, too?” Boyang asked eagerly.
“We’ve never met someone like her,” Moran said.
Boyang looked happy. “I wonder what she would study at the university.”
“I think she wants to go to America.”
“I know. We can go, too.”
It both comforted and pained Moran that, like a sibling, she was still included in every plan he made. “And then what?” she said.
Boyang seemed not to detect any change in her mood. “We could rent a house together,” he said. “Imagine that, a real house, with a yard and an attic. I know you can do that in America.”
Innocently—yet with the cruelty that only the innocent can execute—Boyang had made Moran see herself as a chair in that house, a poster on the wall, a curtain half-pulled. They were good matches for each other, she thought, both handsome, smart, both special in ways that she herself would never be. She should count herself lucky to be invited into their lives in any manner, but when the time came, there would not be a place for her in that house. She had enough pride not to be a piece of furniture or a decoration in anyone else’s life, but it would not be her pride that separated her from them but the truth he was unable to see now: when the time came, she knew, he would have forgotten that he had ever issued the invitation.