by Yiyun Li
Strangers’ executions: Such stories are only pertinent when shared with someone close. I remember taking the train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with Sidelle reading aloud to me a French aristocrat’s account of a Frenchwoman’s execution. Court gossip and sensational descriptions. The woman had poisoned her husband and father-in-law (separately, so there was no mistaking her intention), and all the way up to the guillotine she was certain that she would be reprieved. Poor little murderess, so miserable in her marriage that killing the husband alone was not sufficient vengeance.
We colonists should remember that as a lesson. The natives are never married to us willingly.
* * *
BENJAMIN READ THE NEWS aloud at breakfast that his former colleagues at Stanford had discovered bacteria that can live on arsenic. Is that something worth celebrating? I asked. A mistake. It led to a lecture. What I meant was, Should we congratulate the bacteria for being so peculiar in their diet? But, of course, Benjamin was thinking of man’s brilliance. I was so bored that I wrote on a piece of toast with jam: arse. He looked it over. Arsenic, he said, showing me the word in the paper like I didn’t know how to spell. I told him that there was not enough space on the toast. He took a second piece and wrote the last three letters. Anything that is not complete bothers him, he explained to me. Like I care!
People love to think themselves smarter than others. I let them—until they try to enlighten me. I don’t have any extra letters attached to my name, but that doesn’t stop me from ticking the box saying I have an advanced degree. An advanced degree in living, that’s what I have. I’ve educated myself about the world since the days when Mr. Williamson subscribed to the newspapers for the guests. Gilbert, too, was an avid reader of newspapers, but he was looking for connections between himself and events. All his life he followed the annual meeting of the UN in September, as if he had contributed in some way, making it possible for all those politicians to gather. Wrong way to think about the news, if you ask me. I read the papers to see how many disasters I have escaped. All those fires and earthquakes and wars and assassinations and terrorist attacks, all those crashed trains and collapsed bridges and exploded gas tanks and contaminated lettuces, or those bankruptcies and stolen identities and losses of money or faces. Thank you but no thank you. Dear life, I have no interest in being any part of your drama. I can make my own drama if I want it.
Did you see today’s news, someone walking into the Chapel of Chimes and stealing a backpack? Turned out there was a memorial service planned, and in the backpack was the urn containing the ashes. The family and the friends of the deceased, the police and the security monitor…so on and so forth, but I think the reporter missed one very crucial point. What disappointment for the thief when he opened the backpack. What bad luck. When a good deed is not rewarded we call life unfair, but at least it gives all those do-gooders an opportunity to feel martyred, to wail against injustice, to add something glorious to their histories. What do you call life when a bad deed, which is done purely for some gain, is not rewarded? When you steal but the only booty is a jar of ashes? When you set a bear trap and catch only an anteater? When a selfish man doesn’t get what he wants? Don’t call it justice. A slap in the face is a slap in the face. No, I’m not defending horrible people. All I’m saying is, life is unfair to everyone.
Roland’s complaint about the news growing old was really about something else. All news grows old. It would be hilarious if it didn’t, like a garden of flowers refusing to wither. It would be a garden of fake flowers.
What was difficult for Roland was that what he read in the newspaper had nothing to do with him. That’s difficult for many men. Benjamin would’ve had much less to say had the overachieving bacteria not in some way been connected to his wife. Ohhhhh, I miswrote. I meant to say his life!
19 JUNE 1931.
I have lapsed in keeping this journal. No new pages added to the novel since I left New York. No real friendship formed on this island. (Or any island. It only recently occurred to me that I have mostly lived an island life: Nova Scotia, Manhattan, Hong Kong. England, too, if that is my destination. The only time I wasn’t on an island was when I travelled with Sidelle.)
I have had no romantic encounter worth recording, unless one counts my expeditions to an opium den. A dispiriting experience, in more than one sense. Someday I shall entertain a woman with an account of my failure here. But that day shall wait. That day can only exist on a foundation of triumphs.
Later.
Triumphs. What triumphs, Roland?
A dark mood. Dark enough for me to look around and see if there is a pistol lying by my hand.
For the past ten minutes I have been watching the mongrel dogs across the street. Two yellow and one black, languishing in the heat, tongues too long, too lopsided. And the bare-butt baby sitting on the three-legged stool, with his sister, four or five years old at most, guarding him, not knowing that when the sun moves, they should move to stay in the shade. Oh, dogs and children, creatures who can’t construe a way to escape their paltry existence. How I envy you.
Sidelle has settled back into her marriage, dispatching affectionate letters, seemingly out of friendship (or, possibly, maternal feelings?!). Hetty loyally sends news of Nova Scotia. Nothing seems able to jolt me out of this apathy. Not even the news of my position in Shanghai, which seemed to induce a certain amount of jealousy among my fellow clerks.
[In August 1931, I took a post with the Maritime Customs Service in Shanghai. I believe it was in Shanghai that I started the habit of assigning only a single letter to most of the women with whom I had an encounter. In retrospect, this generosity, which equates to throwing veils indiscriminatingly over faces both meant to be remembered and meant to be forgotten, is among my regrets. I do wish, at times, to be able to remember a full name, a real person beyond a few sketched moments.—RB, 23 November 1989]
* * *
WORDS ARE OF NO help if you want to remember something. I haven’t put anything on the page until now. But everything I need to remember Lucy or Gilbert or Roland or the others by is with me. Ask me about any person in my life, and I can tell you a few stories. It’s not just that I have a good memory. I keep people. Not out of greediness. And I’m not a hoarder. I keep people because I like living among them. They don’t always know that. I have my pride.
What you don’t forget makes who you are. Poor Roland—he kept his diary like a diligent farmer, never missing a season. But what did he reap but forgetfulness?
2 SEPTEMBER 1931.
Met K at the party a few nights ago and already we have seen each other twice. She is married to that bore LL. I do not think she is in love with him at all.
With K to the Russian place for tea this afternoon. From a certain angle her face can almost pass as beautiful. But one looks again and wonders if the face, colourless, is truly ugly. What a strange woman.
She was in Hoihow before Shanghai. There are only a handful of Europeans there, she said, mostly missionaries, fighting among themselves about religious doctrines. The only thing that could unite them was me, she said, because I’m an atheist.
Did they do anything to save you?
When I got sick they competed to feed me fresh milk they could get hold of, K said. Fresh milk for an unsalvageable soul.
When K was too sick to stay on the island, they transferred LL to Shanghai so she could get access to Western doctors. On the day we left, K said, I was so weak that the Ukrainian harbourmaster had to carry me aboard. She described how she leaned onto the Ukrainian’s shoulder and watched LL walk in front of them onto the gangplank. I thought to myself: If the harbourmaster misstepped and we fell into the water together, it might not occur to my husband to turn back and see what the havoc was about.
I asked her how she and LL met. She said she had left England for Asia with the thought of becoming a travel writer. She sold a few pieces in Eng
land and was able to get a column with a newspaper in Singapore. Then I got sick, she said. I’m not the marriageable type to start with, and who wanted to marry a sick woman?
Certainly LL did.
Later when we were in bed I asked her if I was the only man outside her marriage to have held her in an immoral embrace. Oh, but there was that harbourmaster, she said. I kissed him on his mouth before he put me down onboard.
* * *
AN AFFAIR? IT DIDN’T sound like this woman was ever interested in any man, and she was dying now. Was she cheating on her husband or her death?
I suspect Roland sometimes revised his diaries for dramatic effect. Perhaps playing a rival to a husband was not enough for Roland. He had to create one episode in which he was more powerful than the grim reaper.
25 SEPTEMBER 1931.
The military tension in Manchuria, a daily topic here, seems to be largely unfelt in other continents. At least that is my impression from reading the English language newspapers. Of course there will be war, in Asia, in Europe, everywhere. Nothing has been learned since the last war. We as humans share a love of repetition. No one can refrain from joining the refrain when the music starts.
Later.
Dear lord. Matthews just came in with the news that K died last night. Dead? I was planning to see her later this week. Her death did not come as a surprise to anyone else. Was I the last straw she grasped at, trying to hold on to life?
* * *
YOU SEE WHAT I mean? I think Roland added things when he typed out his diaries, making himself the last man in this woman’s life. Roland was good at rewarding himself through his own imagination. Well, who’s not!
12 OCTOBER 1931.
How odd to have seen my name in the newspaper, even though it was not my real name. The whole situation was serendipitous. One’s wish is that serendipity will bring joy or wealth but neither was destined in this case. If anything, simply a feeling of futility. I was at the Cathay for a drink with Miller last week, and with him was a man named Morris. Typical colonial material. While listening to them argue about the imminent war, I doodled on a napkin. Morris, who turned out to be a sub-editor at The Shanghai Evening Post, asked me if I was interested in trying my hand at political cartoons, as the Post’s chief cartoonist had decided to return to London. I did not take the conversation seriously, as anything suggested over drinks should not be. But the following day, after thinking things over, I thought why not. Pencils and paper and time I have aplenty at work. I sketched two drawings along the lines of John Knott and two in my own style. To my surprise, Morris liked the one with a Japanese sword and a Chinese silkworm, and the other one with a Chinese pedicab driver pulling a cart of globes, all haphazardly cut open and bleeding like wounded watermelons.
They ran the one with the watermelon globes in the paper today. They even gave me a Chinese name to go with the cartoon:卜罗阑. I was told it sounds close to my English name, and with three well-chosen characters that are archaically poetic.
I have always wanted to make a name through my words, but it is my childish doodling that triumphed. The irony stings. In my novel I will not put any one of my characters through a war. A war is too facile a setting. Yet it is from the coming war that I have already profited. Well, there was no profit really, but one cannot discount any small achievement. A drink will be on me when I meet Miller tonight.
* * *
LUCY WAS GOOD AT drawing, too. I didn’t know where she got that from until I read Roland’s diary. It’s never too late to solve a mystery.
I don’t have a single drawing of hers. She chalked up fingers on the sidewalk and doodled in the margins of Gilbert’s newspapers, but they were meant to be forgotten the next day. I was wrong yesterday to say I never forget. I don’t remember what those drawings were like. They made her happy is what I know. Lucy was happiest when she could stay quiet and do something that took all of her concentration: drawing, sitting on the armrest of the sofa and reading the newspaper over Gilbert’s shoulder, cutting and pinning old newspapers into dresses for her dolls or herself. But these moments were rare. More often she flitted around like a hummingbird. Have you watched a hummingbird for a long time? It makes you both tired and nervous.
I didn’t have enough reason to worry then. But even if I had, what could I have done? You can’t put a hummingbird in a cage and feed it sugar water.
12 DECEMBER 1931.
Yesterday morning, when I walked to the office I saw a little girl beggar, no older than six or seven, sitting outside the apothecary’s. I’ve got used to seeing the other beggars coming to the International Settlement during the day and disappearing to their native habitat (wherever that is) at night. But this girl was new. I thought of stopping and asking what her story was, if she wanted money or the baguette I had just picked up at the bakery.
I did not, of course. There is not a shared language between us, and whatever I could have given her would not save her from this miserable existence.
This morning I didn’t see her. I paused at the place where no one was standing with open palms. What if she had died overnight. The thought was surprisingly agonising.
* * *
I MARKED THIS FOR YOU because this may be the only time Roland experiences some paternal feelings. Isn’t that extraordinary? Sometimes I wonder what happened to him that day.
12 MARCH 1932.
War is not for me. Perhaps for some people, war is a splendid banquet, a marvellously rare occurrence. Something to relish. To prolong the night into day. To turn the day back into night again. Me, I would rather my simple fare, water and bread if need be. Dear mankind, thank you but no thank you.
I cannot stop thinking about the League of Nations. How did they fail so wretchedly with China? What is the next country where they will fail humanity?
[I stayed through the January 28 incident and the six-week battle in Shanghai, shaken by the bombardment and the carnage. The failure of the Western powers to stop the Japanese invasion, the cease-fire badly negotiated by the League of Nations, and the daily life scarred and charred by war—all these precipitated my decision to leave for London. If I have to witness a war, I thought, I want to do it with my own people.
A more dedicated chronicler of history would have kept a record of those weeks. One with a heart more susceptible to suffering would have found the images of the dead and the wounded etched in his memory. I did not. And when I did write I only wrote about myself.
I drew a number of cartoons, though none of the originals survived the war. I would encourage any interested reader to look through the Post’s archive in a library, presumably in Shanghai or Hong Kong. They were my effort to reduce the horrors in the Far East into bite-size tidbits.
I gained nothing from my Shanghai experiences but an inoculation against what was yet to come in Europe: When one walks down a street and sees dozens of bodies, one does not look for anything in common with them. I have no doubt that I loved my fellow human beings then. I still do. But I do not feel ashamed to admit that I love myself more. That’s my magic trick. Rabbit after rabbit after rabbit out of my hat. A self sustaining itself: There will always be rabbits. And roses and silk handkerchiefs.—RB, 1 January 1990]
* * *
RABBIT AFTER RABBIT AFTER RABBIT. I’m glad I made this decision to skip a little in the book. I can’t possibly comment on every page. It’s like one person always writing too much in his letters, and the other running out of words to reply.
This morning I wondered whether another person reading Roland’s diaries would be as patient with him as I am. But who would read him? Not a random stranger. Anyone who reads him would have already made some allowance for him.
Had Roland died before Hetty, she might have kept to his wishes and printed the three volumes as he had planned, rather than cutting them down. Would she have read them? Unlikely. Would she at least have done something to
surprise the world? Like going through his address book and sending a copy of the diaries to every woman in it? Or making a bonfire of all the copies she printed?
There is no point in thinking about how Roland would look in a stranger’s eyes. Just as I don’t imagine people who didn’t know Lucy would see anything in her pictures. They would think she was an innocent child and then an attractive woman. She was always good at pretending there was something loving and lovable in her eyes. I don’t know where she got that. Did she think she could fool all those around her, or was her deception only meant for strangers, as her love was only for them?
She didn’t deceive me. No, I loved her dearly. I still do. But what was in her eyes was something else—a wildness. I saw it, but I didn’t understand where it came from. That was why I had to bear the brunt of that storm called Lucy.
I wonder what it would’ve been like if that storm had raged longer. I suppose I would’ve become a storm shelter for the family. Or I would’ve become a storm myself! A hurricane. A tornado. A typhoon.
I’m telling you, the most deadly natural disaster that can befall anyone is family. And where can you look for a shelter when that disaster hits?