Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel

by Yiyun Li

  Once a week—often on Saturday, but sometimes on Friday afternoon if he could not free himself on Saturday—he took her to one of the city neighborhoods or a village outside the city that had stayed behind the times. Authentic was the word Sizhuo used to describe these places; coming from another person, the word would have made Boyang sneer, though he felt forgiving toward Sizhuo: she was too young to immunize herself to the vocabulary of her time.

  Sizhuo had an old Seagull camera that used 120 film, an ancient machine requiring one to look down on a glass plate to see through the lens, turn several knobs to adjust the focus, and crank a handle after taking each picture to advance the film. Boyang remembered these antiques from his childhood, though they had represented a different status then, owned by people who could afford a bit of luxury. In others’ eyes, Boyang could see the absurdity of these outings: a middle-aged man with a receding hairline parking his BMW in a rundown alley, a young woman photographing the cracks in the walls and the dust accumulated on a discarded bamboo stroller. He wondered if it had occurred to Sizhuo that they were both impersonators of some sort: he played the indulgent provider and keeper of a young woman, and she, having little to claim as her own, presented herself as a nostalgic soul in search of a time long lost.

  They did not discuss any specific topic when they took these walks, partly because Sizhuo constantly had to pause and look through the camera’s viewfinder. She liked to show him the things she saw: a rusty bicycle lock with cobwebs; an old slogan haphazardly printed on a brick wall, calling for a Communist leap; a booth selling cigarettes and soda water that had been constructed from an old pickup truck.

  The things that interested her did not interest Boyang at all. They were part of his past, which was not distant enough for them to take on any beauty in his eyes. But he liked to watch her, climbing up on an overturned handcart or getting down on her elbows to read a childish curse that must have been carved fifty years ago on the corner of a door. If she was aware of his watching, she did not alter her behavior out of self-consciousness.

  At times he desired to be in her viewfinder, but he knew better than to place himself in any position that could endanger his status. If he was a sugar daddy, he was the chastest of his kind—he had not touched the girl with a single finger. He had stopped calling himself her suitor, and she did not seem to fret over the change. Were they playing a game together? Both were patient, or worse, calculating, though Boyang preferred to think that the ambiguity would sort itself out. He was not in a hurry, as he rather enjoyed these weekly outings that did not come with any burden of responsibility. For him, at least, this side project—what else could he call it?—made him more tolerant of Coco, as the vulgar straightforwardness of the latter could be refreshing, too.

  One thing that Boyang noticed, not without alarm, was that his mind often wandered to Aunt, to Shaoai’s death, and to the silence of Ruyu and Moran, when he was watching Sizhuo take pictures. He had stopped by twice to see how Aunt was doing, though he had not pressed to know more when she put up a brave show of independence in her isolated apartment. He had given an additional three months’ pay to the woman who used to come every other day to watch Shaoai so Aunt could go grocery shopping or take a walk for fresh air. The woman, middle-aged and laid off from a state-owned factory, had been appreciative of his generosity, which had turned her into a friend of sorts for Aunt. It was too late, he knew, for Aunt to make new friends or get in touch with her old ones.

  He had not heard from Ruyu or Moran. He wondered how much it would cost to hire someone to track them down—surely he could find someone inexpensive in Chinatown in New York City, or Los Angeles.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sizhuo asked, and Boyang realized that he was particularly quiet today. They were near an old village where a stretch of abandoned railway lay among tall, dry weeds. The December sun had begun to set behind the poplar trees, a few unshed leaves shivering in the wind. Earlier, Sizhuo had turned the camera upward toward half a torn kite caught between the branches; he had even made a joke about the kite having introduced them to each other, though it had not dispelled his moodiness.

  “How to be a good man,” Boyang said.

  “Are you a good man?”

  “I’m trying to be,” he said.

  Sizhuo closed the faux-leather cover of the camera, and he handed her gloves to her, which he carried for her when she maneuvered the camera’s buttons and knobs. “Do you mean that these things you do for me are part of your trying to be a good man?” she asked.

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Driving me around, carrying my gloves, making sure no one abducts me …”

  “You may not believe it, but I do much more for others than I do for you.”

  “Then shouldn’t you already be a good man?”

  Sometimes Sizhuo’s questions sounded as though she were flirting with him. He wished that were the case.

  “I wonder how boring this is for you,” Sizhuo said when he did not speak.

  “I’m more cold than bored,” Boyang said. “Do you want to stop by a pub? Ten minutes down that road there’s one that’s relatively clean.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know this area pretty well,” Boyang said, though he did not explain that he had helped a business contact close a deal that turned the land outside the village into a holiday resort with a vineyard, winemaking being part of the newest trend. At the last minute, the contract had not gone through, though it was just as well. Boyang would have hated for the city to lose another patch of bleakness to prosperity.

  “Do you know all the places you bring me to?”

  “More or less,” Boyang said. “Generally speaking, I want to know what I’m doing.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Enjoying an outing with you.”

  “But why do you agree to come, when it’s cold and boring like this? It can’t be hard for you to find a more exciting way to spend your afternoons.”

  “If you mean to kill time—yes, I have other ways, but I wouldn’t call this misspent time,” Boyang said, and opened the car door for Sizhuo.

  She ungloved her hands and put them in front of the heater when he started the car. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You could get chilblains.”

  She looked at him oddly and put her gloves back on without saying a word.

  “What? Did I say something wrong?”

  “Nobody gets chilblains these days.”

  Boyang wondered if that was true. He remembered the winters in grade school, when the boys all had swollen red fingers, and sometimes the girls, too, though Moran had never had them. She had been the one who had reminded Boyang, every time they entered a room, not to go right away to the heater but to rub his hands first. Always the one to offer a solution to any problem, Boyang thought; always there, always, counting a hundred before letting him go to the heater. What kind of comfort does a good person like that offer? Less than she has imagined, alas.

  “You look annoyed,” Sizhuo said.

  “Why don’t kids have chilblains now?” he asked.

  “Why should they? The world is enough of a bad place without chilblains.”

  Boyang looked at Sizhuo, who only looked down at the fingertips of her gloves. He wondered what had brought on her mood today. “The world would be a good place if all we had to worry about were chilblains,” he said.

  “That must make you feel good, then?”

  “What?”

  “That your only concern about me today is that I don’t get chilblains.”

  “How do you know that’s my only concern?”

  “Why do I want to know?” Sizhuo said.

  “It’s natural for a person to want to know another person’s thoughts,” Boyang said. “That is, if they’re next to each other.”

  “Natural?” Sizhuo pointed to a giant crow spreading its wings and hopping to the other side of the road, to make way rather than fly away. “That,” she said
, “is a perfect example that nothing is natural in this city.”

  “Where did that criticism come from?”

  “Shouldn’t a bird take flight when a car comes?” Sizhuo asked. Somewhere she had read, she said, that the only emotion birds felt was fear.

  “Maybe the crows are used to the cars.”

  “Does that mean they can’t feel fear anymore? That they have been robbed of their only emotion?”

  Boyang turned down a narrow lane. He had a sense that something had gone awry. He thought back to the afternoon—she had looked calmly engaged when she had photographed the kite; she had not shown any sign of listlessness when he had picked her up that afternoon. His comment on chilblains ought to have been taken as both considerate and innocuous. “I don’t know if you’re only talking about the birds or about something else,” he said.

  “There’s always something else, no?”

  What he thought of her, which he hated even to sort out in his mind, and what she thought of him, which he had no way of knowing—these questions were their companions on their outings, though they had never stopped and faced their silent followers. “And what’s that something in this case?” Boyang asked.

  Sizhuo stared ahead—the car was coming to the end of the lane, which was blocked by metal chains. On the other side of the chains was an open lot. Boyang honked, and someone looked out a window of a bungalow, and then unlocked a door. It was an older man, whose face showed no expression when he walked across the lot and told them that the place was not open. “Not open?” Boyang said. “It’s almost five o’clock.”

  “Not open,” repeated the old man, turning around the cardboard sign hanging on the chain so they could see it. Sold, it said.

  Boyang leaned over and apologized to Sizhuo, who sat straighter to make room for him as he felt around in the glove compartment. Finally he located the right pack of cigarettes, half-full—he kept three packs of different brands, which, depending on whom he was speaking with, he would choose from accordingly. “Sold to whom, Uncle?” he said, handing over a cigarette.

  The old man sniffed the cigarette—the least expensive brand Boyang carried in the car—and nodded to himself. “City Ocean,” he said.

  City Ocean, Boyang thought to himself. “Not by any chance Metropolitan Ocean?” he asked.

  The old man said yes, indeed it was Metropolitan Ocean. Boyang asked a few other questions, which the old man waved off. “Ask my son,” the old man said and turned away. Boyang wondered if the old man was playing dumb, but there was little else he could do, so he backed the car out of the lane.

  They stopped at another eatery a few kilometers down the road. When the waitress came with their menus, Sizhuo said she only wanted a pot of hot tea. “Did you get a chill?” Boyang asked. He would have made an effort to cheer her up if he hadn’t just discovered the sale of the land around the old pub to Metropolitan Ocean. Distracted more than distressed, he ordered a pot of tea for Sizhuo and some dumplings to go.

  “Why don’t you eat?” Sizhuo said. “You said earlier you were hungry.”

  “If you’re not feeling well, I’d prefer to get back to the city as soon as we can,” Boyang said.

  “Or you need to get back for a business reason, and my not feeling well provides a perfect excuse.”

  “I don’t work on Saturdays.”

  The waitress brought the tea, and Sizhuo asked if she could order the peasant stew on the menu. “That’ll take some time,” the waitress, a middle-aged woman who no doubt recognized Boyang’s role, replied with her face turned to him. He said they had plenty of time.

  “I see someone is moody today,” Boyang said when the waitress left.

  “Is that part of your being a good man, catering to every mood of mine?”

  “You’re the least moody woman I’ve met.”

  “So you’ve had your share of women with bad moods?” Sizhuo said. “How many of them have you known?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Do I not have a right to be curious?”

  In her eyes he saw defiance mixed with resignation; it was a look he hadn’t seen before. Could it be that she, being the less experienced of the two, had finally cracked, as he had feared would happen to himself? He felt a surge of satisfaction—until that moment, he had not caught any sign that he existed in her world as more than a chauffeur and a walking companion, and had been both amused and puzzled by her patience. “Of course you have every right to be curious,” he said, pouring the tea for her. “But what I don’t understand is this: my comment about the chilblains seemed to upset you.”

  “What does it matter to you if I get chilblains or not?”

  “Now, that is childish.”

  “I don’t understand why, week after week, we meet for a walk, sit down and talk about trivial matters, and then disappear from each other’s worlds for the rest of the week as though nothing happened. You don’t like my photography. You have better ways to entertain yourself. Why do you humor me?”

  “I’ve never had a chance to see the final prints. How do you know I don’t like them?”

  “You’d have asked if you were interested.”

  “Is it too late to ask now?”

  Sizhuo looked at Boyang, and he could see the confusion in her eyes. “Listen,” he said and glanced at her hands on the table. He calculated the effect of covering her hands with his, but decided against it. “You must know I like you. A lot. So however we spend time together makes me happy.” Or was it a misstep to say “happy,” when he did not really believe in happiness? “I never got the sense that you hated these outings, but if that’s the case, I will certainly leave you alone.”

  “I didn’t say I hated them,” Sizhuo said.

  “Then what’s upsetting you?”

  “I don’t know what we are to each other. Perhaps this is never a problem for you, but it’s unnatural.”

  “What’s unnatural about being friendly?”

  “We’re not meant to be friends.”

  “So we should either be lovers,” he said, and watched Sizhuo blush—“or strangers. Are those the only two options? Is there not space in between for us to be genuinely affectionate toward each other?”

  Sizhuo looked agonized, cornered by a mind more lucid than hers, though what could his lucidity do but confirm the distance between them? The truth was, wherever they were at this moment—no, before this moment, before she laid out in the open the questions they both must have been asking themselves—whatever they had been then was better. Why, thought Boyang with a weary sadness, couldn’t people stay in a place they could not name, rather than wanting to know, always wanting to know, more of the truth? Everything comes to an end when explained, rightly or wrongly.

  “Can I tell you a story?” Sizhuo asked.

  Don’t, his heart cried out. Do not tell your story to me; I’m not one to whom you should entrust your secret. When you hand it to me, you will either expect me to hold it as something precious, or, in exchange, you will expect me to offer you a story of my own. Can’t you see that I’m going to fail you on both accounts? “Certainly,” Boyang said. He had known that sooner or later one of them would have to take a step to make things go one way or another. At least he should be glad that he was not the one who’d lost his poise first. “Do tell.”

  “Yet you don’t want to hear it.”

  “Of course I do,” Boyang said, turning his eyes away from Sizhuo’s stare. This was going to be the end of something that had not begun properly; would that make everything easier for him, and for her?

  “I know you’re lying, but I don’t mind being lied to today,” Sizhuo said. “It’s time to stop this silliness of seeing you every week and pretending all is happy and normal.”

  “I haven’t been pretending.”

  Sizhuo ignored Boyang’s words, and when she spoke again there was a note of abandonment in her voice. Do not lose your composure over the past, Boyang wanted to advise the girl; what you think of as tragic will
one day make you laugh.

  The story, as he had guessed, featured a boy and a girl—Sizhuo herself—and would no doubt turn out to be a failed love story of the most heartbreaking kind. He braced himself for the moment when he was expected to offer something—comfort, wisdom, forgiveness.

  The two had been playmates, Sizhuo said, having known each other all their lives. The boy, three months older, had taken on the role of big brother—the one to provide and to protect. When their parents could not offer enough food, there had been sparrows killed by a homemade slingshot, cicadas caught with glue attached to the top of a bamboo pole, frogs, hedgehogs, grasshoppers, all roasted in hot ash. The boy had not been interested in education and had failed school early on; nevertheless, he had been called a smart boy, too smart for his own good in the eyes of his elders. When her parents’ income could not satisfy her need for more books, he had invested his intelligence in stealing: copper wires dug out of the ground, wild ginseng and rare dried mushrooms swiped from the packing factory, small items that people had left around their yards. She had not asked to whom he brought these things—at age ten he was already connected to dubious people out in the world. She had not approved of these misdemeanors, yet neither had she declined the offerings. When she had left her hometown for college in Beijing, he had followed her, discarding a network of friends that could have made his life more convenient in the provincial town. In Beijing he had become an illegal transient, working odd jobs and living a life that did not cross paths with her college life. They met once a month far from campus to take a walk, and always, before parting ways, he would put an envelope of money into her hands and tell her to buy the namebrand clothes that the other girls in the city were wearing.

  “What are you thinking?” Sizhuo stopped and asked.

  “I was thinking that in everyone’s heart, there’s a graveyard for first love.”