by Yiyun Li
“People will always pay attention to a woman about to be executed,” Han said. Kai looked up at him, taken aback by the simple and cruel truth she had not known he was capable of speaking. Days after the crisis on National Day, Han had asked her what had happened; she had been worrying about the inattentiveness of the audience, Kai lied, knowing that she could never explain to Han or to anyone else the immense desolation that had engulfed her onstage.
Han assured her again that she would not lose her audience today, and Kai nodded and said she had to go into the stadium. He would see her at the banquet, he said, and she looked at the rehearsed curving of his mouth—like a teenager who was very aware of his handsome looks, Han practiced his facial expressions in front of the mirror, smiling, grinning, frowning, and staring—and felt a moment of tenderness. Had Han been born to parents of less status, perhaps the boyish innocence would have made him, in addition to being a good husband and a good father, a good person, but then that innocence might have long ago been crushed by the harshness of life. For the first time that morning, she looked into his eyes and wished him good luck for the day.
“Luck's always on my side,” Han replied.
Kai left him for the side gate of the stadium. He would be watching her until she disappeared from his sight, and she had to restrain herself from turning to see him and asking his forgiveness. She had, earlier that morning, kissed Ming-Ming with a burst of passion that had surprised the nanny. The girl had retreated to a less noticeable corner of the nursery and waited, with lowered eyes and a stoic face, to take over the position of mothering the baby. Ming-Ming probed Kai's face with his plump and soft fingers, unconscious of his mother's love or of her resolution to depart from the world fenced in by that love.
Backstage, people were busy with last-minute preparations. A colleague went over the procedure with Kai, and then invited her to rest in a small room where a mug of fragrant tea was waiting for her. A moment later a secretary of the propaganda department came in and said someone was looking for her at the side gate. Was it Han, Kai asked, and the other woman said that it was not Kai's husband but a stranger. A secret admirer, the secretary said with a grin, and Kai dismissed the joke, saying that she had no need for an admirer in her life now. The secretary said she would go and tell the man that Kai was already a happy wife and mother if that's what Kai preferred. Kai thanked her and said no, she would go tell him herself. The secretary was called then to some small task, her laughter trailing her in the hallway. The world could be as trusting and oblivious as an unsuspicious husband.
Across the street from the stadium, Jialin stood under a tree, his gray jacket blending in with the wall behind him. An old Soviet-style cotton cap sat low on his eyebrows, the earflaps let down and tied under his chin; a white cotton mask, the kind worn by men and women alike in Muddy River in the long season of winter, covered most of his face. If not for his glasses, the frames broken and then fixed by layers of surgical tape, Jialin could be as inconspicuous as a worker coming home from a night shift or a shop owner on his way to his cagelike store. Still, it was unlike him to ask to see her in public on this day.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Kai said. In the world outside the library where they occasionally met, he and she could only act as strangers.
He had come to make sure everything would be all right, he said, and then, caught in a bout of coughing, he turned his face away. She did not know what he meant, Kai replied when his coughing passed, and she wondered if he could catch the falseness in her voice.
“I was wrong to worry, then?” Jialin said. “I wanted to make sure you didn't have some secret plan to carry out all by yourself.”
“Why?”
“Any premature action equals suicide.”
“I meant why did you think I'd do something without telling you.”
Jialin studied Kai and she did not shy away from his gaze. Behind her she heard a whistle, the security guards shouting at some passerby. Soon she would have to finish this conversation with him; soon she would be expected onstage, and he, already deemed more than half-deceased by the world, would not be in the audience.
“You said something the last time I saw you,” Jialin said, and then shook his head. “I hope I was wrong.”
A revolution required some impulse, was what she had said two weeks ago, when she had been informed of the date set for Gu Shan's execution. She had come to his shack, an unplanned visit. It's time for them to act, she said, her hope to save Gu Shan's life transforming her into a more passionate speaker than she had been after leaving the theater troupe. The masses had to be motivated, public attention had to be drawn to the case; with the right action they should be able at least to impede the execution, if not reverse the sentence. The whole time she was talking, Jialin listened with a frown. It was an impulsive and unwise proposal, Jialin said afterward, and for the first time they argued.
“I want to act as much as you do,” Jialin said now.
Kai looked at his eyes behind the glasses. They seemed perplexed, as if he could not find the right words. Outraged by his reasoning, which she had not been able to argue against, she had called him a coward that afternoon two weeks ago. He was closer to his grave than most people he had known in this world, Jialin replied then, and it was not his life or his death he was concerned about but choosing the right time. The statement was delivered with a cold anger that she had not known existed behind his calm gentleness, and Kai had to leave his shack without an apology. He had informed her of his condition when they had first met, six months earlier, but afterward the tuberculosis had never been brought up. Jialin was four years older than Kai, but his ailment made him ageless, a fact that Kai was aware of when she decided to befriend him; it must have occurred to him too, she imagined—that as a dying man he was exempted from many social rules—when he first wrote her a letter that, with its talk about democracy and dictatorship, could have led him to prison. She was baffled by his faith in a stranger, a woman whose voice represented, more than anything, the government in Muddy River, though she never asked him why he had chosen to entrust not only his idealism but also his life to her in the first place. Despite their fast friendship they had few opportunities to talk in person. In their letters to each other, they focused only on political topics and social changes, sharing little about their lives.
“Why did you think I would act on my own?” Kai asked again.
He hoped he was wrong, Jialin said, but it was a feeling that he might regret later had he not come to talk to her this morning. His intuition was not wrong, Kai thought of telling him: She had decided, since they had parted the last time, to carry out her own plan; reserved as he was, she had hoped that once she initiated a public outcry at the denunciation ceremony, he and his friends would have to choose action. Like a child forced to banish his mother from his world before she turned her back on him, Kai thought that she had prepared herself for a day, a battle, a life without Jialin. That he would sense her decision and come to stop her both moved and frightened her.
Jialin studied her. “Have you already started something I don't know?”
“No.”
“And are you thinking about starting a protest without telling me?” he said. “Am I right to worry?”
A few people walked past them in the street, and both Jialin and Kai remained silent for a moment. A bicycle bell clanked impatiently, followed by a crashing noise. Neither looked away to search for the accident.
She had seen his face only once, when she searched for his address on his letter one early afternoon. The letter, delivered to the mailbox that bore her name outside the propaganda department, had caught her eye among the fan letters expressing admiration for her performance at various events or commentaries, which the letter writers hoped would be chosen and read aloud by her in the program: The handwriting on the envelope reminded her of an older man of her father's generation who had devoted himself to the lifelong practice of calligraphy, and out of curiosity she singl
ed it out before passing the others to a secretary in the propaganda department.
He answered her knock on the gate with a familiar greeting that afternoon six months earlier, and later she would guess rightly that she was not his only visitor. She pushed the gate open and let herself into a small yard, and after a while, he came out of a low shack and was surprised that she was not whom he was expecting. He was a tall man, much younger than she had pictured, his face pale and thin. As he spoke he broke from time to time into a bout of coughing, and his face would take on an unhealthy red color. He did not invite her into his shack that first time. Please come with masks and gloves next time, he said to her; when they knew each other better he suggested that they meet in the reading room of the only public library in town.
“I know I can't keep you here for long,” said Jialin now, when no one was within earshot. “But can you at least promise me not to do anything before we talk again?”
The pleading tone was unfamiliar to Kai; between the two of them he had always been the confident one. Sometimes Kai had to rewrite a letter many times for fear that she would let him down.
“Sooner or later we have to give up what we have for what we believe, no?” Kai asked.
“We don't sacrifice ourselves for any irrational dream.”
“So we'll let Gu Shan sacrifice for us?” Kai said. She wondered if Jialin would find her passion unwise and childish, as he had indicated two weeks earlier. But it was not a disagreement with his principle but more of a sense of failing that made her question him. They had done nothing to save Gu Shan's life, she said now; would they also just let her die without waking the public up to the injustice? He was not wrong that she was planning to act on her own, she said; she had her microphone and she had her voice.
Someone called her name, and Kai turned around and saw the secretary waving at her and then pointing out Kai and Jialin to the security guards. She had to go, Kai said. Could she at least think over his words before doing anything, Jialin asked, but Kai, having little time to answer, left him without the promise he was hoping for. The guards looked at her with concern when she crossed the street. One of those people who was determined to discuss political issues with her, Kai said when the secretary asked her, and no, they might as well leave him alone, she said to the guards.
SOMEDAY, SHE WOULD LOSE her oldest son, Jialin's mother thought when she left his breakfast on the tree stump that served as a table. Apart from the tree stump, a chair, and a narrow cot, there was no other furniture in the shack. A heater made out of a gas can, which Jialin's mother filled three times a day with hot water, kept the shack slightly warmer than outside, and dampness clung to the sheet and quilt all year round. On one side of the shack there were piles of books placed on flattened cardboard boxes, a plastic sheet underneath. A shoe box of wires, tubes, and knobs—his radio, as Jialin had called the crudely assembled thing—sat on his cot, and a pair of headphones, a skeleton of wires and metal rings, sat alongside.
Jialin was not in the shack, and she wondered where he could be on this morning. He did not leave home often, and she was almost happy that she had a moment alone in his shack. When he was around he was polite; he thanked her for the food and hot water and clean laundry she brought over but he did not invite her to sit down. That Jialin was someone she would never understand was a fact she had long ago accepted, but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory. She picked up a book and flipped to a random page; someone had underlined the paragraph with thick red and blue marks—Jialin perhaps, or the previous owner of the book, but she would prefer to think that the book had no history but belonged entirely to her son. She looked at the words that she could not read—she was illiterate, and it was for that reason, Jialin believed, that she had been assigned as an undertaker of banned books in the factory that produced paper products. He had begged her to save some of the books for him; he had by then been ill with tuberculosis for a year, and a son isolated from the world was enough to turn a mother into a petty thief. Every day she took a book or two from the piles to be pulped and hid them under her clothes. The books came home with her body temperature. His face brightened when he saw the books, and for that rare happiness she, an honest woman who had not cheated a soul in the world, never regretted her crime.
Someone called out from the house to complain about the late breakfast, and she hurried back to the kitchen to get the meal ready for the rest of the family: her three younger sons, aged nineteen, sixteen, and fourteen, who would do no more than pick up the chopsticks laid out for them next to their hands, and her husband, who praised the boys for behaving like men.
Jialin was a son from a previous marriage that had ended with a drowning accident; her first husband, a strong man who had grown up near the sea, had dived into the Muddy River and broken his neck, three months before Jialin's birth. A son who came to claim his own father's life, people said when they came to her with marriage offers and advice to give up the baby for adoption. She did not want to hear this nonsense, and waited for ten years before remarrying, but sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake. Had Jialin been taken in by another couple, perhaps he would have had a different life, free of illness and unhappiness, neither of which she understood. Jialin was thirty-two, old for a marriage, too young for death. She would never see him get married to a woman but she would live to see him die. She took a deep breath but tears no longer came to her eyes. She did not know where he had contracted tuberculosis, just as she did not know where his bookishness came from; his own father, like her present husband, was a man without much education. Her three other sons were all robust, rude, boisterous—each a younger version of their father, who worked as a laborer at the loading station. Jialin was different, as if he had come from a different breed, not the son of her first husband but of a kind, graceful man of knowledge. Such a thought sometimes occurred to her, too strange to articulate even to herself.
Jialin's mother had once dreamed about another man, when she had been a new wife and attended a class for illiterate women set up by Teacher Gu. She had been married less than a year. Already her husband had caused her all the pain a man could inflict on a wife. Teacher Gu was the gentlest man she had ever met, his eyes sad behind black-rimmed glasses, his shirt and trousers impeccably clean. She noticed his fingernails, kept neatly short, when he showed her the right way to grip the pencil, and the image made her blush afterward when she lay awake next to her snoring husband. She was disappointed when she heard that Teacher Gu was going to marry one of her classmates, a landlord's concubine, a used woman with a small heart-shaped face, and it was the indignity she felt, as much as her pregnancy, that stopped her from attending the classes. Over the years she caught sight of Teacher Gu in town, quiet and melancholy, as she remembered him. He did not recognize her, but the fact that she could see him from afar was strangely comforting. She imagined how the old man would feel, losing a daughter at gunpoint; even Teacher Gu's wife, once the object of her secret envy, was forgiven now because, after all, a son was what Teacher Gu needed but she had given him just a counterrevolutionary daughter. If only he had a son like Jialin, who, with his pale complexion and the unhealthy blush on his cheeks, was as sad a man as she remembered Teacher Gu to be. They would understand each other, she thought for a long moment, and shook her head. She carried the food to the dining table and sat down next to her husband. Jialin would die a young man; what kind of solace would he be as a son to Teacher Gu? They had kept him in the sanitarium for some time but he had shown little hope of recovering. There was no point in wasting money on him, when the three younger boys seemed to be outgrowing their clothes overnight; she didn't need her husband to remind her of this, before she agreed to take Jialin home. Her husband had built a shack in the yard for Jialin, and it was expected, though not said, that Jialin would spe
nd the rest of his days there.
TEACHER GU LEFT HOME after breakfast, avoiding the eyes of the neighbors who were walking or riding bicycles to their work units. A few students from his school shouted out greetings to him. He nodded, unable to tell if there was a difference in their attitudes toward him. Would their parents tell them about his daughter? He wondered what the children would think of him when he returned to his lectern the next day, teaching the same lessons from which his own daughter had gone astray.
It was a half-hour walk from his house to the west end of town. When he turned into the main street, Teacher Gu was aware that his hands, thrust into his coat pockets, held no banners, and his tired legs could not keep up with the others. He decided to take smaller side streets and alleys, where, after the departure of people for the denunciation ceremony, came the chickens, cats, and dogs, as well as old widows and widowers, to claim the space between the rows of houses. An elderly man, sitting on a low stool, looked up at Teacher Gu and mumbled something through his toothless mouth; Teacher Gu nodded, not grasping what he had been told, and a woman, younger than the man but old nonetheless, stooped close and wiped the drool off the old man's chin with a handkerchief pinned on his coat, before she walked across to where she had been sitting, balancing on a chair with a broken leg and knitting something with used, rust-colored yarn.
When Teacher Gu walked past the passenger station, the train running to the provincial capital was making its brief stop. The guardian, who had been sitting in the booth during the day and sleeping in an adjacent cabin as long as Teacher Gu could remember, was yawning by the track. A girl of seven or eight was selling hard-boiled eggs through the windows to the passengers, her fingers frostbitten and as swollen as baby carrots. Teacher Gu slowed down and looked at her. Out of habit, he thought of finding out where she lived, and if she ever went to school, but he dismissed the idea. For thirty years, he had helped children from poor families, mostly girls, to go to school, paying their tuition and fees when their parents could not spare the money. He saw the joy of being able to read, in his wife's eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students—his wife and his daughter—had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn't been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses. His wife would have simply endured the loss of Shan in painful silence, as all illiterate women endured the loss of their children, surrendering them to an indisputable fate and putting their only hope in the next life.