Love in the Marketplace
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li (b. 1972) is a Chinese American author. Her debut short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her second collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, was shortlisted for the same award. Her debut novel, The Vagrants, was shortlisted for the 2011 international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
Sansan is known to her students as Miss Casablanca. A beautiful nickname if one does not pay attention to the cruel, almost malicious smiles when the name is mentioned, and she chooses not to see. Sansan, at thirty-two, does not have a husband, a lover, or a close friend. Since graduation from college, she has been teaching English at the Educators’ School in the small town where she grew up, a temporary job that has turned permanent. For ten years she has played Casablanca, five or six times a semester, for each class of students. The pattern of their response has become familiar, and thus bearable for her. At the beginning, they watch in awe, it being the first real American movie they have watched, without Chinese dubbing or subtitles. Sansan sees them struggle to understand the dialogue, but the most they can do is catch a phrase or two now and then. Still, they seem to have no trouble understanding the movie, and always, some girls end the class with red teary eyes. But soon they lose their interest. They laugh when the women in the movie cry; they whistle when a man kisses a woman on the screen. In the end, Sansan watches the movie alone, with the added sound track from the chatting students.
That is what Sansan is doing with her morning class when someone taps on the door. Only when the knocking becomes urgent does she pause the tape.
“Your mother’s waiting for you outside. She wants to see you,” the janitor says when Sansan opens the door.
“What for?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy with my students?”
“It’s your mother waiting outside,” the janitor says, one foot planted firmly inside the door.
Sansan stares at the janitor. After a moment, she sighs. “OK, tell her I’m coming,” she says. The students all watch on amused. She tells them to keep watching the movie, and knows they will not.
Outside the school gate, Sansan finds her mother leaning onto the wooden wheelbarrow she pushes to the marketplace every day. Stacked in it are a coal stove, a big aluminum pot, packs of eggs, bottles of spices, and a small wooden stool. For forty years. Sansan’s mother has been selling hard-boiled eggs in the marketplace by the train station, mostly to travelers. Sitting on the stool for all her adult life has made her a tiny stooped woman. Sansan hasn’t seen her mother for a year, since her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hair is thinner and grayer, but so will Sansan’s own be in a few years, and she feels no sentiment for either of them.
“Mama, I heard you were looking for me,” Sansan says.
“How else would I know that you’re alive?”
“Why? I thought people talked about me to you all the time.”
“They can lie to me.”
“Of course.” Sansan grins.
“But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?”
“Theirs.”
“You’ve never known how to spell the word ‘shame.’”
“Do you come just to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself? I know it by heart now.”
“What god did I offend to deserve you as a daughter?” Her mother raises her voice. A few passersby slow down and look at them with amused smiles.
“Mama, do you have something to say? I’m busy.”
“It won’t be long before you will become an orphan, Sansan. One day I’ll be drowned by all the talk about you.”
“People’s words don’t kill a person.”
“What killed your dad, then?”
“I was not the only disappointment for dad,” Sansan says. Hard as she tries, she feels her throat squeezed tight by a sudden grief. Her father, before his death, worked as a meter reader, always knocking on people’s doors around dinnertime, checking their gas and water meters, feeling responsible for the ever-rising rates and people’s anger. One evening he disappeared after work. Later he was discovered by some kids in a pond outside the town, his body planted upside down. The pond was shallow, waist deep at most; he had plunged himself into the mud, with the force of a leap maybe, but nobody could tell for sure how he did it, or why Sansan’s mother believed that it was Sansan’s failure at marriage that killed him.
“Think of when you first went to college. Your dad and I thought we were the most accomplished parents in the world,” her mother says, ready to reminisce and cry.
“Mama, we’ve been there many times. Let’s not talk about it.”
“Why? You think I toil all these years just to raise a daughter to shut me up?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” Sansan says.
“Don’t go yet. Stay with me longer,” her mother says, almost pleading.
Sansan tries to soften her voice. “Mama, I’m in the middle of a class.”
“Come home tonight, then. I have something important to tell you.”
“Why don’t you tell me now? I can spare five minutes.”
“Five minutes are not enough. It’s about Tu.” Sansan’s mother steps closer and whispers, “Tu is divorced.”
Sansan stares at her mother for a long moment. Her mother nods at her. “Yes, he’s unoccupied now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sansan says.
“His parents want you to go back to him.”
“Mama. I don’t understand.”
“That’s why you have to come home and talk to me. Now go teach,” Sansan’s mother says, and pushes the wheelbarrow forward before Sansan replies.
Sansan discovered Casablanca the year Tu wrote a short and apologetic letter from America, explaining his decision not to marry her. Before the letter’s arrival, she showed The Sound of Music to her students, humming with every song, ready to abandon the students for America at any minute. After the letter, she has never sung again. Casablanca says all she wants to teach the students about life.
Sansan goes back to the classroom and resumes her place on the windowsill, letting her legs dangle the way she remembers her American teachers did in college. At the end of the Paris scene, when Rick gets soaked on the platform in the pouring rain, and then boards the train, a boy says, “How funny. His coat is dry as a camel’s fur now.”
Sansan is surprised that she has missed the detail all along. She thinks of praising the boy for his keen observation, but changes her mind. “One of life’s mysteries is its inexplicability,” she raises her voice and says.
The students roar with laughter. Certainly the line will be passed on, along with the nickname, to the next class, but Sansan does not care. The students, recent graduates from junior high, will be teaching elementary students after the two years of studying in the Educators’ School. Most of them are from villages, and the school is their single chance to escape heavy farm labor. English is taught only to comply with a regulation set by the Education Department; they will never understand what she means, these kids living out their petty desires.
After two classes, Sansan decides to take off, complaining to her colleagues of a headache. Nobody believes her excuse, she knows, but nobody would contradict her, either. They indulge her the way people do a person with a mild and harmless craziness, whose eccentricity adds color to their otherwise dull lives. Among the few people in town who have college degrees, Sansan is the best-educated one. She was one of the two children from the town who have ever made it to the most prestigious college in Beijing, and the only one to have returned. The other one, Tu, the childhood companion and classmate and boyfriend and fiancé at one time or another in her life, is in America, married to a woman more beautiful than Sansan.
And divorced now, ten years too late. Back in her rent
ed room, Sansan sits on her bed and cracks sunflower seeds. The shells rain down onto the sheet and the floor, and she lets them pile up. She craves the popping sounds in her skull, and the special flavor in her mouth. It is the sunflower seeds, sweet and salty and slightly bitter from the nameless spices Gong’s Dried Goods Shop uses to process its sunflower seeds, and the English novels she bought in college – a full shelf of them, each one worthy of someone’s lifetime to study – that make her life bearable. But the sunflower seeds taste different today, Tu’s divorce, like a fish bone stabbed in her throat, distracts her.
Tu would never imagine her sitting among the shells of sunflower seeds and pondering his failed marriage, but she still imagines him on a daily basis. Not a surprise, as she promised Tu at their engagement ceremony. “I’ll be thinking of you until the day when all the seas in the world dry up,” she said. Tu must have said something similar, and Min, the only witness of the ceremony and then Tu’s legal wife on paper, hugged both of them. It was odd, in retrospect, that Min did not take a vow. After all, the engagement between Sansan and Tu, just as the marriage between Min and Tu, was the contract for all three of them.
Min was the most beautiful girl Sansan had met in college, and is, ten years later, the most beautiful person in her memory. In college they lived in the same dorm with four other girls, but for a long time in their first year, they were not close. Min was a city girl, attractive, outgoing, one of the girls who would have anything they set their eyes on, and of course they only set their eyes on the best. Sansan, a girl from a small town, with a heavy accent and a plain face, was far from the best for Min, as a confidante or a friend.
Toward the end of their freshman year, the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square disrupted their study. Min became an active protester in the Square. Miss Tiananmen, the boys voted her; she dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and gestured victory to the Western reporters’ cameras. After the crashing down, she had to go through a difficult time, being checked and rechecked; she ended up belonging to the category that did not need imprisonment but did not have a right to any legal job after graduation, either. When Min came back to school, still beautiful but sad and defeated, Sansan was the first and the only person in the dorm who dared to express sympathy and friendliness toward Min. Sansan was among the few who had not attended any protests. She and Tu had been the only students showing up for classes when their classmates had gone on a strike; later, when the teachers had stopped coming to classes, they had become intimate, falling in love as their parents and the whole town back home had expected them to.
Sansan never thought of her friendly gesture to Min as anything noble or brave; it was out of a simple wish to be nice to someone who deserved a better treatment from life. Sansan was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, then, when Min decided to return the goodwill and become her best friend. Sansan felt a little uneasy, too, as if she had taken advantage of Min’s bad fortune; they would have never become friends under normal circumstances, but then, what was wrong with living with the exceptional, if that’s what was given by life?
At the end of their sophomore year, the Higher Education Department announced a new policy that allowed only those students who had American relatives to be granted passports for studying abroad, something that made no sense at all, but such was their life at the time, living with all the ridiculous rules that changed their lives like a willy-nilly child. Min’s only hope for her future – going to America after graduation – became a burst bubble, and Sansan, when she could not stand the heartbreakingly beautiful face of Min, started to think and act with resolution.
“Are you out of your mind?” Tu said when she announced to him her plan – that he would apply to an American graduate school and help Min out through a false marriage. “I don’t have any American relatives.”
“Your grandfather’s brother – didn’t he go to Taiwan after the Liberation War? Why couldn’t he have gone to America later? Listen, nobody will go to America to check your family history. As long as we get a certificate saying that he’s in America…”
“But who’ll give us the certificate?”
“I’ll worry about that. You think about the application,” Sansan said. She saw the hesitation in Tu’s eyes, but there was also a spark of hope, and she caught it before it dimmed. “Don’t you want to go to America, too? We don’t have to go back home after graduation, and work at some boring jobs because we don’t have city residency. Nobody will care about whether you are from a small town when you get to America.”
“But to marry Min?”
“Why not?” Sansan said. “We have each other, but she doesn’t have anyone. The city boys – they all become turtles in their shells once she’s in trouble.”
Tu agreed to try. It was one of the reasons Sansan loved him – he trusted her despite his own doubt; he followed her decision. Persuading Min seemed easy, even though she too questioned the plan. Sansan alone nudged Tu and Min toward the collective American dream for all three of them; she went back to her hometown, and through bribing and pleading got a false certificate about the American grand-uncle of Tu. The plan could have gone wrong but it went right at every step. Tu was accepted by a school in Pennsylvania; Min, with the marriage certificate, got her own paperwork done to leave the country as Tu’s dependent. The arrangement, a secret known only to the three of them, was too complicated to explain to outsiders, but none of the three had a doubt then. One more year and the plan would be complete, when Min would find a way to sponsor herself and Tu, with a marriage and a divorce under his belt, would come home and marry Sansan.
It did not occur to Sansan that she should have had sex with Tu before he took off. In fact, he asked for it, but she refused. She remembered reading, in her college course, Women in Love, and one detail had stuck with her ever since. One of the sisters, before her lover went to war, refused to have sex with him, afraid that it would make him crave women at a time when only death was available. But Tu was not going to a war but a married life with another woman. How could a man resist falling in love with a beautiful woman whose body ate, slept, peed, and menstruated in the same apartment, a thin door away from him?
Sansan started to imagine the lovemaking between Tu and Min when, after the short letter informing her of their intention to stay in the marriage, neither would write to her again. She stripped them, put them in bed, and studied their sex as if it would give her an answer. Min’s silky long hair brushed against the celery stalk of Tu’s body, teasing him, calling out to him; Tu pushed his large cauliflower head against Min’s heavy breasts, a hungry, ugly piglet looking for his nourishment. The more she imagined, the more absurd they became. It was unfair of her, Sansan knew, to make Tu into a comic image, but Min’s beauty, like a diamond, was impenetrable. Sansan had never worried about the slightest possibility of their falling in love – Min was too glamorous a girl for Tu, the boy with a big head, a thin body, and a humble smile. She had put her faith in the love between Tu and herself, and she had believed in the sacrifice they had to go through to save a friend. But inexplicable as life was, Min and Tu fell in love, and had mismatched sex in Sansan’s mind. Sometimes she replaced Min with herself, and masturbated. Tu and she looked more harmonious – they had been playmates when Sansan had been a toddler sitting by her mother’s stove, where Tu had been a small boy from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son; the sex, heartbreakingly beautiful, made her cry afterward.
Sansan took up the habit of eating sunflower seeds when she could no longer stand her imagination. Every night, she sits for hours cracking sunflower seeds; she reaches for the bag the first thing when she wakes up, before she gets out of bed. She calms down when the shells pop in her brain, and is able to imagine Tu and Min in their clothes. The fact that they both broke their promises to her, hurtful as it is and it will always be, no longer matters. What remains meaningful is Tu and Min’s marriage vows to each other. She was the one to make them husband and wife, and even if they would be too ashamed to a
dmit it to each other, she would always hover above their marriage bed, a guardian angel that blesses and curses them with her forgiveness.
What, then, has led them to end their marriage, ten years too late? Once they broke their promises to her; twice they did. With a divorce, what will become of her, when neither of them will be obliged to think about her nobleness?
When the bag of sunflower seeds runs out, Sansan decides to go find her mother and ask about Tu’s divorce. The marketplace, the only one in town, is next to the railway station. The trains running between Beijing and the southern cities stop several times a day at the station for ten-minute breaks, and many vendors rely on these trains for their businesses.
The one-fifteen train has just pulled into the station when Sansan arrives. A few passengers show up stretching their legs and arms, and soon more flood into the marketplace. Sansan stands a few steps away and watches her mother hitting the side of the pot with a steel ladle and chanting, “Come and try – come and buy – the eight-treasure eggs – the best you’ll ever taste.”
A woman stops and lifts the lid, and her kid points to the biggest egg in the pot. More people slow down at the good smell of tea leaves, spices, and soy sauce. Some take out their wallets to pay; others, seeing more egg sellers, walk on without knowing they’ve missed the best hard-boiled eggs in the world. When Sansan was young, she was infuriated by the people who did not choose her mother’s eggs – the other vendors were all stingy, never adding as many spices and tea leaves to their pots as her mother did. But when Sansan became older, she grew angry, instead, at her mother’s stubbornness. All those people who buy her eggs – strangers that come and go and will not remember this place or her mother’s face even if they remember the taste of the eggs – they will never know that her mother spends more money on the best spices and tea leaves.
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