by Yiyun Li
The vacated house had stayed empty for more than a year; bad feng shui, people would say, with two disasters hitting the family in a short time. Eventually a young couple moved in. They had been married for three years, but had been living in separate dorms assigned to them by their work units, which they had had to share with others. They were so happy to have a place assigned to them that the neighbors could not bring themselves to ruin their mood. By and by, however, the story would reach their ears, as in this city no secret would stay a secret, no history could be laid permanently to rest in peace.
After the case was closed, Moran’s parents never spoke to her about it again. They must have learned how she had wept in front of strangers because unlike Ruyu, Moran could not answer the questions. Why had she not alerted anyone about the theft? people wanted to know; had it happened before that she had witnessed other illegal actions but had refrained from telling? Why had she not said anything to any grownup when her friend had talked about suicide with her? Had she worried about her friend’s safety? Had she considered herself a responsible friend?
Moran did not know if Ruyu had been suicidal, or murderous; could it be that a person could not be one without being the other? The more she tried to understand Ruyu, the murkier her own mind became. All the same she did not protest when, in the end, blame was laid on her more than on the two other girls, as her silence could not be acquitted as their potential madness would be. People were lenient not to say this to Moran—that is, all but Boyang, who, as always, came up with his quick conclusion, and did not hold back. “You never really liked Ruyu, did you?” Boyang said to Moran in their last real conversation. He had moved away by then, and had written and asked to see her on a Tuesday afternoon. She had skipped school and met him near the Back Sea.
But that was not true, she argued weakly for herself.
“Why didn’t you say anything, then? I understand your decision not to tell a grownup, but why not tell me?”
Nothing she could say would appease Boyang’s fury now, or ever. He had lost too much—his first love, two friends, and his childhood home.
“Did you think I would love you if Ruyu had been taken out of the picture? Did you think if she killed herself we could go back to where we were?” Boyang asked.
When Moran broke into tears Boyang did not seem to soften his opinion. Angrily he sped away on his bicycle. Look at what you’ve done, a voice said to Moran, though she did not understand that it was her future self speaking: look at how you’ve destroyed everything.
17
“So,” Celia said the moment Ruyu entered the house. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing much.”
“Then who was this woman who died?”
“That,” Ruyu said, “is a long story.”
“Just as I thought, but the question is”—Celia paused and studied Ruyu’s face before handing her a clothes hanger for her raincoat; it was a drizzly morning, the fog dense, threatening to stay all day—“are you going to tell me the story? See, I knew something was up when you came over the other night. I asked Edwin, and he said he couldn’t tell. But you know how men are. Or you don’t know. In any case, they can’t see anything unless you point out to them where to look, and even then you can’t guarantee that they see what you want them to see.”
Edwin had indeed concealed part of his conversation with Ruyu from Celia, though for what reason? “Did you send him to check up on me again yesterday?” Ruyu asked.
“Yes, to look and to ask.”
Ruyu sighed. “You could’ve asked me without going to all that trouble.”
“You could’ve told me without my going to the trouble,” Celia said. “I didn’t want you to feel that I was intruding. On the other hand, I wanted to know what happened, and I thought it’d be best to have Edwin ask.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d be okay if you didn’t tell him anything,” Celia said. “And since you know he doesn’t care much, you might have chosen to tell him the truth—and I’m saying this not only about you but about everyone. Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don’t you think?”
Celia, by simply being herself, was sheltered from doubt, and Ruyu admired Celia for that: anything concealed from her was done so because she cared too much. In life we have all met those like Celia, and sometimes we have befriended one or two, but never too many: if they are not the sole reason for the events around them, they at least have a part in everything that happens or does not happen. Their commitment to life is to be indispensable, a link between one thing and another; what they cannot connect to themselves—inevitably someone, something, will fail them by falling out of their range—will stop existing in their world. But was this a bad arrangement for Celia, or for those around her? Without Celia, Edwin, who had no tentacles of his own, would perhaps have had a less solid grasp on many things, though what did Ruyu know about Edwin’s marriage? What did she know about him while he had, at least for a few days, kept their conversation a secret?
The thought that at some moment she had been on his mind was alarming in itself. Ruyu’s ease with the couple relied on Edwin’s keeping an incurious distance and Celia’s having enough drama in her life for Ruyu to watch; as much as Celia enjoyed the attention, Ruyu enjoyed watching, and at moments did not stop herself from imagining, as all audiences do at one time or another, being on stage. Without difficulty, Ruyu could see herself in Celia’s position: at the hub of things, adding, expanding, until the bubble becomes the entire universe for its maker—a world as infinite as one’s ego will allow.
Ruyu did not regret not choosing that position. If she had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.
Ruyu had thought Celia, oblivious, would be safe from that erasing. Unlike Shaoai, who had deemed it both her right and her responsibility to teach Ruyu how to feel; unlike Moran, to whom Ruyu’s happiness and unhappiness had taken on a burdensome weight; unlike Boyang and the men after him, who saw things in her that she did not care about—Celia did not mind Ruyu’s being an anomaly. Or she had not minded before today. Impatiently, waiting for an explanation, today’s Celia had dragged Ruyu off the spectator’s seat. “I didn’t think the dead woman was relevant to anything,” Ruyu said.
“But you’ve been unsettled.”
“Any death can do that,” Ruyu said. She unwound her scarf and asked if they could sit down. She could use a cup of coffee, Ruyu said, sending Celia into the kitchen ahead of her.
Was Celia right that Ruyu had not bothered to lie to Edwin because he did not matter to her? On the walk up, she had run into him at the bottom of the hill. He had stopped his car and rolled down the window. Would she like a ride to the house, he asked, and she said no, she would walk. He looked at the sky, as though disappointed by Ruyu’s decision to remain inconvenienced by the weather, so she added that she’d always liked to walk in the fog and rain. Why had she said that, Ruyu asked herself now: one does not talk about oneself without a motive. She liked the couple enough to have allowed some sort of permanency into her relationship with them, though Edwin—or Ruyu herself—had disturbed that balance, and in doing so had deprived her of what little luxury she had allowed herself in the Moorlands’ house: exemption from participating in life.
Ruyu watched Celia operate the shiny coffeemaker, which hissed professionally. “I’ve been thinking—I know this is sudden,” Ruyu said. “But what do you think of my going back to China?”
“Back to China? When? For how long?”
The thought of returning to Beijing—for what, Ruyu wondered, though that question could wait until later—had been on her mind since she had woken up this morning. “It’s only a preliminary idea,” Ruyu said.
“But why do you want to go to China now? Whom are you going to see there?”
A better question, Ruyu thought, was what she wanted to see. Over the years, she had given Celia some information about her history. With a vagueness that must have been taken as an unwillingness to stroll down memory lane, Ruyu had made Celia understand that she no longer had living parents in China; if she had friends or relatives, they were distant enough not to bind her to the place. “Not really anyone important,” Ruyu said.
“Is this trip prompted by this mysterious death that you’re not telling me about?”
One could never avoid having a history. Ruyu thought about how much truth she could give away without actually giving away anything. Such calculations had become second nature to her because she did not like to lie. Lying, like living, needs motives, however obtuse they may be. With Paul, she had had to make up stories, both about her parents’ deaths and about a childhood she’d never had: her parents had died in a traffic accident in Anhui Province, when a bus had missed a turn on a cliffside road and plunged into a river—a tragedy Ruyu had stolen from a newspaper article she’d read in college; her experience of being an only daughter she had borrowed from Moran, and a couple of childhood friends were modeled on Moran and Boyang—though naturally, Ruyu had told Paul, she had lost contact with them after so many years. What she could not produce as evidence—family pictures, snapshots of herself at different ages—she had explained as a natural and necessary loss resulting from emigration and a difficult divorce.
If Celia was right, the lies she had told Paul must have meant, somehow, that he had had meaning to Ruyu, at least more than the other men in her past. With her first husband, she had not needed to make up anything: he had known she was an orphan, which he had welcomed as a bonus because he would be free from in-laws; he had met her grandaunts—that is, he had met with their disapproval, though long before that, they had, without withdrawing their financial support of Ruyu in high school and college, made it clear to her that she had let them down. They had not questioned Ruyu about Shaoai’s case. What they had heard, they said, had been enough, though for them the unforgivable was not that Ruyu had stolen, but that the crime was motivated by the sinful thought of suicide; it was the latter that had made them shake their heads and say that she was, after all, not related to them by blood, and they had no way to understand her. That Ruyu had decided to marry at nineteen—no doubt another violation of their vision for her—they had accepted with resignation; to marry at all constituted a betrayal of them, though betrayal caused less damage than sin. What would be less redeemable: to take one’s own life, or to take another’s life? It occurred to Ruyu that she had never really known the answer. She turned to Celia. “What is more sinful in Catholicism—suicide or murder?”
“Where did that question come from?” Celia said. “Is it inspired by this woman’s death?”
“I don’t think it’s particularly this person, or her death. I suppose I’ve always been puzzled,” Ruyu said. “Well, let’s forget about it.”
“Let’s not, yet. Is this why you want to go back now, to find out if she was murdered or she killed herself?”
“No, it has nothing to do with her,” Ruyu said.
“Then why China? Why now?”
“It’s just a mood. It’s been quite a long time since I last saw the country.”
“When was your last visit?”
“I haven’t been back since coming to America.”
“That’s what I remembered you told me,” Celia said. “And how long ago was that?”
“I came in ’92.”
“What a shame!” Celia exclaimed. Ruyu wondered what the shame was, exactly—to be gone for so long, or to be gone for so long yet still not thoroughly gone.
Celia handed a mug to Ruyu, and they carried their coffee to the table. “Now, you must say something good about this coffee. Edwin roasted the beans himself, the first batch.”
“When did he start getting into coffee?”
“Only about two weeks ago.”
“What happened to beer making?” Ruyu asked. For the past two years, Edwin had been experimenting in the basement with his home-brewing kit; there were a couple of bootlegging tales about his granduncles he liked to tell at parties, and Ruyu was certain she was not the only one to have heard them more than once. She had wondered why no one ever told him not to repeat the tales, but perhaps others, kinder than herself, believed that having anything to say was better than having nothing to say.
“Going well,” Celia said, “though a man is always in need of new things. Or else he’ll feel stale. A man is not like a cat that you can leave to its own entertainment. You have to help him find things to do. Speaking of cats, where’s Scooter?”
“He was by the garage door when I came in.”
“I just warned him this morning not to bring another dead bird into the house, though I’d bet ten dollars he didn’t hear me. Sometimes I think my problem is that I’m outnumbered in this household,” Celia said with an exasperated glance at the framed family pictures on the sideboard—a look that could only belong to a contented woman. “Technically speaking, Scooter can’t be called a man anymore, but he’s in every sense your average male. And how they can make you talk all the time without hearing a word you say. If you decide to stay quiet just for one moment, they say, Mom, you didn’t tell me where my gym clothes were, or, You didn’t say the violin lesson was rescheduled. Or, like last night, Edwin said you looked terrible. I said, Oh, did she, and he said it surprised him that I hadn’t noticed your mood, or asked you more about your friend’s death. What friend, I said, and he said you told him yesterday that a friend in China died. He said he thought I had heard all about it, but wouldn’t I have told him if that had been the case?”
Ruyu sipped the coffee. It occurred to her that she would one day miss Celia’s company—or perhaps she had already begun to miss Celia, and the time sitting at this table, listening to Celia talk about her family trips and this or that complication with her sister and parents. Scenery that Ruyu had not seen with her own eyes she had seen through Celia’s; people Ruyu did not know—and did not mind not knowing—she had met in Celia’s tales. But all the same, the thought of leave-taking, once formed, pointed in one direction only; she had left plenty of people behind, and it did not bother her to add Celia and her family to that roster. Though Celia, the most unsuspicious one among them, gave Ruyu an odd feeling that she was burying something alive.
Celia observed Ruyu’s expression. “Is the coffee not so good?”
“It’s good.”
“You don’t look like you’re impressed.”
“You can’t rely on me for any judgment,” Ruyu said.
“That I already know,” Celia said and leaned closer, propping her head on her hand. “Seriously, is the dead woman an enemy of yours or something?”
Ruyu thought about it. “Not really. I don’t think I care enough about the world for anyone to be my enemy,” she said honestly.
Celia shuddered—or was it only Ruyu’s imagination?—and at once recovered. “But with her gone, are things going to be easier in China for you? Is that why you want to go back now?”
“What do you mean?”
Celia sat up abruptly, as if she could not contain her excitement. “So, this is my hypothesis—and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the most reasonable version of the story Edwin and I could come up with.”
“Whose story?”
“Yours. But before I start, you have to know I’m not the judgmental kind, so you don’t have to feel uncomfortable. For all I care, you could be anyone, or anything, and I would be your friend.”
Ruyu looked at Celia curiously. “For all I know, I’ve always been nobody and nothing.”
Celia ignored Ruyu’s words. “I’ve read in the newspapers that rich people and high-ranking officials in China keep their mistresses in California—have you heard of such a practice?” Celia said, looking into Ruyu’s eyes.
“Or New Jersey,” Ruyu said. “Yes, I’ve heard of it. But car
ry on.”
“You’re not uncomfortable where I’m going.”
“No.”
Celia nodded and said she was only making sure. “So my guess is that, however it happened, you met a married man when you were young—eighteen? nineteen?—and got yourself involved, but when things became complicated, he arranged for you to come here. And now, this woman—whoever she was, the wife most likely—died, and the hurdle is gone.”
“Did you and Edwin come up with this last night?”
“No, I always wondered, but Edwin never bought my theory until he saw you yesterday. I suppose what you said about the dead woman convinced him that I was right. Why, which part doesn’t make sense?”
“It all makes sense,” Ruyu said. “Except, how do you fit my two ex-husbands into the story?”
“Were you really married twice?”
“I see that you have started to question everything I’ve said.”
“We only have your word about the marriages.”
Ruyu sighed. “Why did you help me move if I looked so suspicious in the first place?”
“I didn’t know then!” Celia said. “But I wouldn’t have minded helping in any case. I thought you were only trying to move out. That arrangement with your former employer did look suspicious to me, though.”
“So how do you fit that part into your story?”
“That seems to make more sense than your marriages. I would say, unless you show me evidence, I prefer to believe that your marriages are not real.”
“Why? Do I look like the kind of woman who could only be a mistress?”