by Yiyun Li
As the winter drew on, the town started to take on a grimier look. People, though tired of the snow, never seemed to tire of talking about it. At a café where they had gone a few times, the owner, Dave, joked about putting up a sign that said “no whining.”
Moran asked Josef to spell the word “whine” for her, and asked for the meaning. He thought for a moment and then took on a high-pitched voice: “Everybody crowds round so in this Forest. There’s no Space. I never saw a more Spreading lot of animals in my life, and all in the wrong places.”
She looked at him: the first glimpse of his jocular self changed him into a different person. When he asked her to guess to whom the lines belonged, she shook her head.
“Here’s the clue. I only did that to give you a sense of a whiny voice. What he really sounds like is this—” Josef pulled both sides of his face downward with his hands and lowered his pitch into a grumbling voice. “There are those who will wish you good morning. If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”
Moran smiled. There was a mischievous light in his eyes when he made his face morose.
“Have you heard of Eeyore?” Josef asked when she could not guess the answer.
“Eeyore?” she said.
“Or Winnie-the-Pooh?”
Moran shook her head again, and Josef seemed to be at a loss for words.
It must be a boring business for him when every subject needed an explanation, Moran thought, feeling self-conscious. So much could be left unsaid between herself and Boyang, as must have been the case between Josef and Alena, though the analogy made Moran uneasy. Neither she nor Josef had designated these weekend meetings—movies and coffees and sometimes a visit to a local museum—as anything consequential. She liked to believe that she was an international student he was helping to get to know America better. She could see, when she and Josef ran into his friends in town, that they approved of this side project of his because it was a distraction from grieving.
Josef explained that Winnie-the-Pooh was a character from a children’s book. He had read it so many times to his four children at bedtime, he said, that he could not help memorizing many parts. She imagined him acting out the book, though she could not envision him as a young father, nor his children at a young age. At Thanksgiving she had met his family, three sons and one daughter: Michael, whose wife’s name was Sharon, and whose children were Todd and Brant; John, who had come with his fiancée, Mimi; George, by himself; and Rachel, the only one still in college. They, including the two boys, both under age five, had intimidated Moran. She had tried to explain to herself that it was only her diffidence about her English that had made her ill at ease, though she knew that was not the only reason.
“If you like,” Josef said now, “I can bring the book to you next week. Or else we can stop by the bookstore to get a copy for you.”
How befitting, she thought, and all of a sudden felt angry. In his eyes, she must be a young woman raised in an underdeveloped country, exotic but also pitiable in her ignorance. Do you have chocolates in China? a friend of Josef’s had asked her once, with perfect kindness; or else: Did your parents bind your feet when you were young? Will they arrange a marriage for you?
Moran said that if Josef wrote down the title of the book, she could find it in the library. She did not know if he could detect the change in her voice.
Josef found a pen in his jacket pocket and wrote the title and the author’s name on a napkin, doodling a plump animal at the bottom. She watched him, both annoyed by him and ashamed at her annoyance. Her graduate advisor had been lending her the picture books his two children had outgrown—the best way to improve her English was to start with children’s books, he had said, and added that when he had been in graduate school, a woman from China in his lab, who had since become a professor at Arizona State, had read through the entire children’s section at the local library.
Moran had not minded her advisor’s giving her the exquisitely printed cardboard books. He was a good man, she knew, and he wanted her to thrive in this country. But to be offered a children’s book by Josef seemed a different matter. What happened to Doctor Zhivago, she wanted to ask. In her backpack was an English translation of the novel, which she had checked out from the university library; the last stamp had been from nine years ago. On the previous Sunday, they had talked about the novel. She had told him that there was a line toward the end of the novel that she had underlined many times in the Chinese translation, though when he had asked her what it was, she could not answer, and said she would look for it in the English translation.
“He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others.” Reading it for the first time in English had been a bit of a shock. The words had lost their meaning; the line she’d underlined in her Chinese translation was, in English, an ordinary sentiment; or else something had caught her attention at seventeen but had lost its impact. Still, she had brought the book to show the words to Josef, though she wondered, after Winnie-the-Pooh, if it was pointless to do so. To start a life with a new language is like being returned to childhood—no one is really interested in your thoughts; all the world wants is for you to be contentedly occupied or else safely tucked away. Perhaps Josef was no different.
He seemed not to notice Moran’s change of mood. He asked her if she had plans for the Christmas break; she said no, and he said that if she liked, he would bring her to his friends’ house—a couple—as they always had the best gatherings on Christmas Eve, everyone singing Christmas carols at the end of the evening. Would his children come to the party, too? Moran asked, and Josef said that Thanksgiving was their family holiday. John and Mimi were planning to spend the week in Hawaii. Michael and Sharon were taking the children to see Sharon’s parents in Memphis. George and Rachel? Moran asked, and Josef said that they might or might not come. “I don’t want them to feel that they have to spend the holidays at home for my sake.”
Each member of the family, Moran thought, had a position in the world, and everything they did—working, raising children, partying, vacationing—added more assurance to that secured place. Even Josef, who hadn’t yet recovered from the most difficult year of his life, could rely on the consistency of his days—staff meetings at the library, choir practice, dinners with friends, and a meeting with Moran on Sunday afternoons. At Thanksgiving dinner, Moran had been impressed by the certainty of everyone in his family; no matter what the topics had been—college basketball, Bill Clinton’s second term, the different ways to cook a turkey, Rachel’s internship applications—the family members all seemed to have opinions, none of them shy to state his or her own. At times the back-and-forth had become a verbal game among the siblings or between a couple, and the ease with which they had carried on had given Moran an unreal sense that they lived in a TV show. But it must be her misimpression: what’s wrong with a family gathering around a table full of food and conversing in a lively way? In a parallel world, if things had happened differently, Moran herself could have belonged to such a scene: she would have remained friends with Boyang, and they would have bantered as easily—she dared not imagine them as a couple, but they would remain affectionate as siblings. In a parallel world Shaoai would have made a brilliant career for herself, as government permission was no longer required for working; Ruyu—what would have happened to her?—perhaps she would have moved out of their lives as abruptly as she had come in, but Boyang and Moran might not have felt the loss acutely: even someone like Ruyu could be replaced or forgotten, if one made the effort.
But there was only this one world, in which Moran had no position to claim as hers. This was not because she was a new immigrant; some of the other Chinese students she ran into on campus seemed as confident about America as they were about China. To have a position—any position—requires one to have opinions: Moran had none of them. What she did have were observations and questions—
those that she asked Josef, to which he would provide answers, and those that she kept to herself, each unanswerable one pushing her further away from the world: sometimes she felt as though she was living from a long way off. Why couldn’t anyone detect the hollow echo of her voice when she spoke?
There was no reason not to accept Josef’s invitation to the Christmas gathering; perhaps she could play the role of a happy audience. When they left the café that day and reached Josef’s car—a Ford Taurus, as he had pointed out to her when he had learned her birthday, which made her a Taurus, too—Moran kicked the mudguards of both wheels on the right side. Chunks of frozen slush dropped to the ground with dull thuds, which strangely cheered her up. She had noticed other people doing that, and sometimes when she saw a car with too much accumulation behind the mudguards, she had an urge to give them a kick.
Josef looked at her oddly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it a bad thing to do?”
Of course it was not, he said, though he looked distracted. She wondered if the action was unladylike in his eyes, but he did not know her: he would never envision her riding a bicycle down an empty stretch of road in Beijing with both hands off the handlebars, or pedaling alongside Boyang, whistling a John Denver song in duet: Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong—years later, when a colleague of Moran’s whistled the song in the hallway, Moran would quietly weep into her hands, because a heart is always short one piece of its armor.
Josef drove quietly, and sensing his moodiness, Moran wrapped her scarf more tightly. He turned the heater up a notch, and then, without Moran’s prompting, he said that Alena used to do that, too. She could not stand even the smallest gathering of mud or slush, and it used to baffle him that she could feel so strongly about something trivial.
“Did you ask her why she did it?”
“Yes, but she didn’t know, either. She said she couldn’t help it.”
Moran had seen pictures of Alena at Josef’s house, looking down at one of her children, or, in a photo from their wedding, laughing away with a childhood friend. Had she kicked the mudguards for the simple satisfaction of getting rid of something unsightly, or had there been something within her that could only be expressed by a violent yet harmless action? Thinking about another woman’s past when the woman was no more had made Moran ashamed. That secret had belonged to Josef and, before that, to Alena.
A phone rang somewhere in the condo. Josef shifted on the sofa but did not wake up at once. Moran found the phone on the kitchen counter. She wondered if it was Rachel, and after a moment of hesitation, she took the call.
Rachel sounded flustered. “Oh, good, you’re still there with Dad,” she said.
“He’s taking a nap.”
“Will you be able to stay with him for a while? I promised I would come over, but the school just called. I think Willie is coming down with some sort of stomach bug.”
“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Moran said. “Go ahead and take care of everything. I’ll be here.”
When she turned around, she saw that Josef had woken up. Was everything all right, he asked, and she repeated Rachel’s words. He nodded and said that Rachel had been stretched thin since his diagnosis.
If Moran tried again to talk about her plan to move back, it would be taking advantage of his guilt, though what if she talked to Rachel instead? Would her approval change his mind? But the thought of stepping from her hiding place behind Josef and speaking to Rachel made Moran uneasy. During her marriage to Josef, she had gotten along all right with his three sons, who had been living farther away; Rachel, who had stayed, had never liked Moran. Of course there were reasons for Rachel’s animosity: the protective instincts of a daughter toward her widowed father; her loyalty to Alena; Moran’s age—she was only three years older than Rachel; and Moran’s foreignness. Josef had only hinted at these things, though Moran had not needed him to spell them out; he had said that by and by Rachel would come around, and all they needed was a little patience.
To accept these reasons was to agree that everything could be explained by a few generalized statements: a stepmother is evil, a foreigner is not to be trusted, a dubious woman taken in by a good man will repay his kindness like the viper in Aesop’s fable, roses are red, violets are blue. But Moran found it hard to fit herself, or anyone for that matter, into a space secured by such unwavering convictions.
“You look pensive,” Josef said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Rachel,” Moran said honestly.
“She’s not what you remember from before.”
The last time Moran had seen Rachel, she had been engaged to Matt; the prospect of a happy life had made Rachel more resentful of Moran’s pending divorce from Josef. Certainly she was the only one who knew this was how things would turn out, Rachel had said then; her dad and her brothers had all let themselves be deceived. There had never been any scene between Rachel and Moran, but all the same, Rachel’s words had made Moran wonder if indeed she had used Josef, mistaking him for the starting point of a new story, abandoning him when that script had failed—one’s life could have only one beginning, and that happened at birth. When people talk about starting over, it’s only wishful thinking: what came before, what happened yesterday, did not come or happen in vain.
“How’s Rachel these days?” Moran asked. Earlier on the phone, she could hear in Rachel’s voice the weariness of middle age setting in. “And her family?”
It made Josef happy to talk about his children and grandchildren. Apart from George, his children had all settled down in the Midwest: Michael worked in hospital management in Omaha, and Sharon, after the two boys had started school, had gone back to graduate school and become a middle school teacher; John, who had trained as a child psychologist and had become the headmaster of a private school in Chicago, had three children with Mimi, and together he and Mimi had overcome some rocky patches in their marriage; Rachel and Matt had their own optometry business, where Matt worked as the optometrist while Rachel ran the business. Even George, who had moved away to Portland, Oregon, to be the co-owner of a food truck and who had stayed single, seemed to make Josef proud, if only because he found George’s life a little mysterious.
“So you see, everyone is in good shape. I’m lucky that way,” Josef said.
There was a solidness to Josef’s children that Moran felt attached to from afar, the way a traveler feels drawn to a fireplace seen from outside a window and between half-pulled curtains. Every time Moran walked past a party, she could not help but take a look: people in twos and threes chatting or smiling or sipping from near-empty glasses. Moran did not want to be there, but she held on to the belief that they were happier than she herself was. Of course there were dramas known only to themselves, but she believed that if they were troubled or distressed, they had sound reasons to feel that pain: when Rachel had broken up with her college boyfriend, it had been a volatile period filled with tears and then parties that had made Josef worry, but it was at one of those parties that she had met Matt, and all of a sudden things had been better; the six-month separation between John and Mimi, after Mimi could not continue her career as a vocalist when she had moved with John for his job, had for a while been disheartening, but she had since found enough to do with the church choir and an after-school program that she now felt fulfilled—no doubt Mimi’s word, as Josef had explained to Moran at one of his birthday lunches.
“You certainly should take some credit,” Moran said now. “Are you hungry? Do you want some food? Or a cup of tea?”
Josef looked at her as though he had not heard her questions. “Except—what do we do with you, Moran?”
“What’s there for you to worry about?” she said, and regretted right away that her voice sounded stern.
“You’re slow to move on, you know?” Josef said gently.
Moran wondered if he was speaking of her inability to move on from their divorce—or could it be that he was speaking of his own death? To ask a person if she could survive one’s
death indicates a kind of arrogance, or else a love so deep that no one but a dying man would admit it.
“Moving on? That’s an American thing I don’t believe in,” she said. If one starts without a position, it’s meaningless to think about the next point in time and geography. The last Thanksgiving that Moran had been Josef’s wife—in 2001, not long after 9/11—the subject at the table had been moving on. Moving on—to where, or to what? she had thought to herself. She had seen the phrase often in the newspapers around that time and had found it more than baffling, though only Moran seemed to have doubts about what it meant for the country, for its people, to move on.
So much confidence, and where could one find evidence to prove that their optimism was justified? Even Alena’s senseless accident had not cast a single shadow of fatalism in her family’s hearts. When Josef had married Moran, his friends, despite their doubts, must have been comforted by the fact that he had moved on; after their divorce, moving on would have been part of what people had said to Josef—or had not even needed to—to make her stop mattering to him.
16
On the Sunday after their visit to the university Moran woke up with a start, as though something had happened and she was already late. The night before, she had told her parents that she was exhausted and gone to bed right away, but for a long time she could not sleep. The emotions that had stormed through her and left her mind a devastated land came back to her now, all pointing to that unmistakable fact: Boyang was in love with Ruyu.