by Yiyun Li
“Why?”
“I didn’t turn out as they wished, and then they also found out that their little brother was alive in Taiwan, with a full family of children and grandchildren. So everything worked out just fine.”
“For whom?”
“For them, and for me too,” she said. “They didn’t raise me to be someone’s wife, nor did they raise me to defy God’s will by speaking of suicide. But then they didn’t expect to find their brother, so I suppose they were two happy women in the end. Perhaps their god did see how much they sacrificed to raise me and grant them something better than me as a reward. Who knows? They might have told each other that God had other plans for me, and it was good for them to wash their hands of me.”
Boyang shifted in his seat. He had once wanted so much to ask Ruyu about her grandaunts, but being young then, he had not found the courage or the right words, and now the women were just two anecdotal names in her life. If he asked about her ex-husbands, would she shrug and say there was little to tell? Did everyone in her life end up like that—had he himself already been in that position? No, he denied this violently: she would not have come back to see him if he had already become a fossil.
“Does this make you uncomfortable?” Ruyu asked. “Shall we order something so the poor girl doesn’t have to stand there all night?”
He ignored her prompting. “Did you … love them?”
“My grandaunts?”
“Yes,” he said. “Did they love you?”
“I’m afraid that was beyond their capacity. I don’t think they loved me more than one would love a pig one raises as a sacrifice. Why? Do you think I’m unfairly harsh toward them? Perhaps I should withdraw that comment. No, they might have loved me in a way I didn’t understand. As for me, they were the only family I had, but I wasn’t raised to love them, or any mortal.”
“That must be a difficult place to be in.”
“I would say there’s no better place for anyone.”
“Do you really believe that?” Boyang asked, looking into Ruyu’s eyes.
She did not avert her eyes from his gaze. “At least I want to believe it.”
“Have you ever wondered if that’s unnatural?” Unnatural—Sizhuo’s word, but what could he use to protect himself but the younger woman’s willfulness?
“Nothing,” Ruyu said, “is natural with my life.”
“Including coming back?” he said.
“In fact—you don’t have to believe it—but coming back seems the most natural thing that has happened to me.”
“Did you come back because Sister Shaoai died?”
Ruyu’s eyes looked strangely out of focus for a brief moment. “No,” she said. “I’d have come back earlier, in time for her funeral, if it were for her.”
“Her ashes are not buried yet.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps Aunt is not ready to bury her yet.”
“How is Aunt?”
“I can take you to see her tonight,” he said. “Or tomorrow. Or anytime.”
“I think we should order now,” Ruyu said and leaned over to tap the window. The waitress came in right away. Ruyu, without consulting Boyang, asked for enough food for two.
“Why change the subject?” Boyang said, watching the waitress close the door behind her. “You don’t like to hear about how Aunt has been struggling all these years?”
“I’ve not seen one person in this world who’s not struggling,” Ruyu said.
“That is quite a coldhearted comment,” Boyang said.
“Yet it is true. You’re implying that I’m responsible for Aunt’s struggling and should feel some sort of guilt. But the thing is, if it weren’t this struggle, it would have been another. If Shaoai had not taken ill, she would have turned out to be a pain for Aunt still.”
“Shaoai did not take ill. She was poisoned.”
Ruyu remained silent, her expression frosty—a more familiar face to Boyang.
“What? You don’t like me to remind you of that fact?”
“What,” Ruyu said, turning her eyes to Boyang and for the first time looking baffled, “do you want me to say?”
“Did you poison Shaoai?”
“Is that all you want to know?”
“I suppose, in a way, everyone wanted to know,” Boyang said. “I’ve never stopped wanting to know.”
“Who is everyone?”
“Me, my parents, Aunt and Uncle, the neighbors.”
“Moran, too?”
Boyang had been wondering when and how this would happen—he had not had the courage to bring Moran’s name into the conversation. “I suppose she must want to know, too,” he said.
“How is she doing these days? Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t keep in touch with her?”
“The way I’ve kept in touch with you, yes, but I’ve never heard from her.”
“Are you not curious about how she is? Are her parents still around?”
“Yes, but I’ve never asked them about her. I haven’t talked to them for years.”
“Why not?”
“She has a right to stay away.”
Ruyu smiled. “How sad for her.”
“Why?”
“If she mattered to you more than she does, you’d have sought her out,” Ruyu said. “It’s not as though this is a world where a person can hide away forever.”
“Perhaps I have reasons not to seek her out.”
“That’s why I feel sad for her.”
“Why?”
“She was quite smitten with you, wasn’t she?”
“Everyone has an adolescent crush. But that’s not a reason for me to continue being in her world,” Boyang said.
“I remember that Shaoai once said Moran was only a child,” Ruyu said, the expression on her face turning hazy. “Poor child.”
“What do you mean?”
“She really was a child when we knew her, no?” Ruyu said. “I always feel bad about all those things happening to her.”
“To her only?” Boyang said, feeling a sudden rage. “But was I not a child? For heaven’s sake, Shaoai was only twenty-two. Was she not still a child, in a way?”
Ruyu looked at Boyang as though amused by his anger. “Oh, don’t look like your life’s been destroyed. I imagine you’ve come through with little harm—right?”
He wanted to argue that that was not the case. He wanted to list the years of care he had dedicated to Shaoai, watching her deteriorate and hiding her from his ex-wife and friends, separating his life into two compartments, neither of them real enough. But whatever he said would only amuse Ruyu more. “So you did poison Shaoai, didn’t you?” he said. He had only that question as a weapon.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Ruyu said. “Though I should say, I didn’t mean to not kill her and leave her as a burden for you and the others. But is either statement true? No, I would say no. I didn’t even know if I wanted her to take the poisonous drink or not. She had drunk it before I made up my mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“If there was a cup of orange juice in a room that she shared with another person, she would think she had the claim to it. Why didn’t she ask me first if I wanted it? She felt entitled to everything.”
“So it was the Tang you used,” he said. “I always wondered.”
The door was pushed open, and the waitress wheeled in their dishes. Boyang looked at the food; it occurred to him that this would be the second meal of the day that he would pay for without touching. Ruyu signaled to the dishes, and he shook his head.
“I didn’t put poison in them,” she said with a smile.
Boyang felt an urge to hit her, to make her repent, but more than that: to make her cry, to make her feel the pain, to leave her wounded and never healed.
“Go ahead,” Ruyu said, watching him calmly. “If it would make you feel better.”
“What?”
“You look as th
ough you want to slap me.”
Boyang felt a pang. It was the same indestructible Ruyu no matter where their encounter occurred in life. Could it be that his youthful love for her had been a desire to weaken her so that she would need him? His desire to hurt her now—could it be his only way to love her? “I don’t hit women,” he said.
“Or perhaps you want to kill me,” Ruyu said. “Which is understandable, too.”
“Why would I want to kill you?”
“That’s one way to destroy me,” Ruyu said. “There aren’t many ways. If I were a real killer—you see, I’m not defending myself in any way, but I can say with absolute honesty that it was partly an accident with Shaoai due to my indecision—but if I were a real killer, I would seek out someone like me. Shaoai was not that kind of person. Yes, I despised her, and I pitied her, but you have to know that neither would be a sufficient reason for one to kill a person.”
“You mean you’d kill yourself? Didn’t you use that once as your defense?”
“You could call that a lie. I’ve never been suicidal. You either have that in you, or you don’t,” Ruyu said. “I don’t have that. All I’m saying is, I would have been much less lenient if I’d found someone like myself.”
“Have you ever found anyone like yourself?”
“People in general are kinder than I,” Ruyu said.
“But have you ever felt guilty?”
“About what?”
“About Shaoai,” Boyang said. And about Moran, and himself, all these people left behind.
“All I wanted to do was to mind my own business. If there was a poisonous drink I mixed up and left on my desk, it was my own business,” Ruyu said. “Shaoai’s problem, like many people’s, was not knowing how not to mind other people’s business.”
“Yes, she could be bossy. She could be unfriendly. But was that enough for her to suffer the way she did?”
Ruyu paused. “That, I have to say, was her bad luck.”
“Do you have a heart? Do you not have any remorse in you?”
“Point out to me one person who could benefit from my having a heart.”
Boyang stared at Ruyu. Her look, candid, without animosity, could have belonged to the most innocent person.
“Would you feel better if I lied, and said I felt some remorse?” Ruyu asked gently.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ruyu said. “No, nothing can be changed. You asked me to go visit Aunt. Do you think seeing me would do her any good? No, I don’t think so. What people deserve is peace, and I’m afraid I am not a person who can leave anyone in peace.”
“Then why did you come back to see me? Do I not deserve peace?”
“Would you prefer that I hadn’t come back?” Ruyu said, her voice softened. “Have you already found peace? Have I disturbed it by coming back to look for you?”
Boyang shook his head. Peace, he knew, was the last thing he wanted at the moment.
19
“It’s a good story, Moran,” Josef said.
“But?”
He sighed. “It’s a very good story,” he said. “It’s romantic and melancholy. But it’s not a real story.”
They were sitting on a lakeside bench. An early heat wave had confused all the trees and flowers into blossoms. Wait until the next snow, people kept warning one another, as though they needed to remind themselves, before hope was taken away, that it would not last. Yet the daffodils and tulips did not heed the warnings. There is no point in waiting, as every moment is the right moment.
“Why does it matter?” Moran asked. She had told Josef the story of Grazia, of her childhood in Italy, of her cold death—too early, too quiet—in Switzerland. It was the details she liked to describe to Josef: the dolls Grazia’s nanny had made for her; her French governess’s face, small and heart-shaped; the German musician who came to the house to give piano lessons to her and ended each encounter with a severe bow. In the days and weeks to come she would tell Josef other stories, too, of the Parisian cobbler and the Bavarian peasant, of the Russian maid riding in a coach with her mistress to Baden-Baden. “I like the stories.”
“I like them, too, but I would like it more if you could tell me something else.”
“About what?”
“Things I don’t know about you. Your parents, for instance. Your traveling with them.”
When they had gotten married she had told him that her parents had not been able to get visas; her father worked for a government ministry, which made traveling to the States complicated for him. Later, still in the marriage, the 9/11 attack made their traveling even less practical. She would not want them to go through stringent security checks, she had explained. Josef had agreed because it had seemed as though there would be plenty of time.
“But there is little to say about them,” she said.
“That must not be true,” Josef protested mildly.
Moran thought about it, and told Josef about when she and her parents were on a tour in Central Europe. In the old town of Zagreb a man was playing a Soviet song on the accordion, and her parents had come over to sing along, her father in Russian, her mother in Chinese, and the musician in a language none of them understood. “The Night in the Suburb of Moscow,” she said, a most romantic song that her parents had sung when they had been in their early twenties.
Josef waited for more, and Moran smiled apologetically. “This doesn’t work. I don’t think I can make up a good story about real people.”
“I’m not asking you to make up a story.”
“But I like myself more when I make up those stories,” Moran said. They were not her stories. They were not about her time, or her people, but what she had once found in these stories—escape—would eventually become her wisdom. Perhaps if she kept these tales going Josef would one day forgive her stubbornness in choosing solitude, because he, kinder than solitude, was always here for her.
20
On an overcast afternoon in late March, Sizhuo stood in front of the shop and watched a pair of swallows fixing their nest under the eave. Swallows were monogamous birds, she remembered reading, and a couple would return to their old nest year after year.
Stubborn creatures, she thought. Why come back to this polluted city when there must be a better place—fresher air, bluer sky—for their offspring? Yet at least they were bound to an old home. She herself had not grown up here, and she had little to claim in this place; still, she resisted decamping, struggling to make this unkind city her home.
A couple walked close. Sizhuo turned, and her face paled momentarily before she regained her composure. Boyang, accompanied by a middle-aged woman, had stopped a few steps away, both studying Sizhuo.
“Are you closed today?” Boyang said.
“No,” Sizhuo said.
A few months ago, after their disastrous meal at a countryside pub, she had sent him a text message, saying she had decided that it would be best for them not to see each other again. She had thought that he would call or stop by, to plead for himself, and she had been disappointed when he had sent a one-word reply: “agreed.” She had refused to believe that he had hurt her feelings, but now, facing him, she felt the coldness in her fingertips.
Boyang introduced the woman as an old friend, Ruyu, who had lived in America but who had come back to settle down. They had taken a walk around the Back Sea, he said, and he thought he would bring her to see if there was a new exhibition here.
There was, Sizhuo replied, and led the way back to the shop. She pointed out to Boyang and the woman the collection of minute crystal vases, with miniature still lifes of butterflies and orchids painted inside. She did not ask if they needed a tour, and they did not request one. From the way they walked together Sizhuo could see that they must have an intimate connection. If she herself had ever occupied any space in Boyang’s heart, she knew it was no longer there.
They did not stay in the shop for long, and before leaving, the woman looked into Sizhuo’s eyes and
wished her good luck. Why, Sizhuo thought after they left; what would she need good luck for? She did not know that Boyang had presented her to the woman as a girl he might have loved; he could have made a life with the girl, Boyang had admitted.
Not anymore? Ruyu had asked.
Not now that Ruyu had come back, Boyang had answered.
Out of curiosity Ruyu had requested to meet the girl, and afterward they walked along the lakefront, not saying much. There would be a time when the girl’s face would come back to them, as every one of us has to unearth, at times, a face or two from the past—that of an earlier love, of a lost friend, or of ourselves from a bygone time, when we hadn’t learned that our faces could haunt others’ hearts, too.
He was wise not to fall in love with the girl, Ruyu said eventually. The girl deserved a happier life, and he was right to leave her alone.
To Dapeng, Vincent, and James
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Cressida Leyshon, Sarah Chalfant, Jin Auh, Kate Medina, and Andris Skuja for their support, and to Mona Simpson and Tom Drury for reading the manuscript.
This novel could not have been written without Brigid Hughes and Amy Leach.
BY YIYUN LI
Kinder Than Solitude
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
The Vagrants
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YIYUN LI is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and a MacArthur fellowship. Many of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, which named her one of the top twenty writers under forty. She teaches at the University of California, Davis, and lives with her husband and two sons.