A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

by Yiyun Li

  Mrs. Su walks to Beibei’s bedroom door, which she shut tightly so that Mrs. Fong would not hear Beibei. She listens for a moment to Beibei’s screaming before she enters the room. Beibei is behaving quite agitatedly today, the noises she makes shriller and more impatient. Mrs. Su sits by the bed and strokes Beibei’s eyebrows; it fails to soothe her into her usual whimpering self. Mrs. Su tries to feed Beibei a few spoonfuls of gruel, but she sputters it all out onto Mrs. Su’s face.

  Mrs. Su gets up for a towel to clean them both. The thought of a private detective frightens her. She imagines a ghostlike man tagging along after Mr. Fong and recording his daily activities. Would the detective also investigate her own husband if Mrs. Fong, out of curiosity or boredom, spends a little more money to find out other people’s secrets? Mrs. Su shudders. She looks around the bedroom and wonders if a private detective, despite the curtains and the window that are kept closed day and night, will be able to see Beibei through a crack in the wall. Mrs. Su studies Beibei and imagines how she looks to a stranger: a mountain of flesh that has never seen the sunshine, white like porcelain. Age has left no mark on Beibei’s body and face; she is still a newborn, soft and tender, wrapped up in an oversized pink robe.

  Beibei screeches and the flesh on her cheeks trembles. Mrs. Su cups Beibei’s plump hand in her own and sings in a whisper, “The little mouse climbs onto the counter. The little mouse drinks the cooking oil. The little mouse gets too full to move. Meow, meow, the cat is coming and the little mouse gets caught.”

  It was Beibei’s favorite song, and Mrs. Su believes there is a reason for that. Beibei was born against the warning of all the relatives, who had not agreed with the marriage between the cousins in the first place. At Beibei’s birth, the doctors said that she would probably die before age ten; it would be a miracle if she lived to twenty. They suggested the couple give up the newborn as a specimen for the medical college. She was useless, after all, for any other reason. Mr. and Mrs. Su shuddered at the image of their baby soaked in a jar of formaldehyde, and never brought Beibei back to the hospital after mother and baby were released. Being in love, the couple were undaunted by the calamity. They moved to a different district, away from their families and old neighbors, he changing his job, she giving up working altogether to care for Beibei. They did not invite guests to their home; after a while, they stopped having friends. They applauded when Beibei started making sounds to express her need for comfort and company; they watched her grow up into a bigger version of herself. It was a hard life, but their love for each other, and for the daughter, made it the perfect life Mrs. Su had dreamed of since she had fallen in love at twelve, when her cousin, a year older and already a lanky young man, had handed her a book of poems as a present.

  The young cousin has become the stooping husband. The perfect life has turned out less so. The year Beibei reached ten—a miracle worth celebrating, by all means— her husband brought up the idea of a second baby. Why? she asked, and he talked about a healthier marriage, a more complete family. She did not understand his reasoning, and she knew, even when Jian was growing in her belly, that they would get a good baby and that it would do nothing to save them from what had been destroyed. They had built a world around Beibei, but her husband decided to turn away from it in search of a family more like other people’s. Mrs. Su found it hard to understand, but then, wasn’t there an old saying about men always being interested in change, and women in preservation? A woman accepted anything from life and made it the best; a man bargained for the better but also the less perfect.

  Mrs. Su sighs, and looks at Beibei’s shapeless features. So offensive she must be to other people’s eyes that Mrs. Su wishes she could shrink Beibei back to the size that she once carried in her arms into this room; she wishes she could sneak Beibei into the next world without attracting anybody’s attention. Beibei screams louder, white foam dripping by the corner of her mouth. Mrs. Su cleans her with a towel, and for a moment, when her hand stops over Beibei’s mouth and muffles the cry, Mrs. Su feels a desire to keep the hand there. Three minutes longer and Beibei could be spared all the struggles and humiliations death has in store for every living creature, Mrs. Su thinks, but at the first sign of blushing in Beibei’s pale face, she removes the towel. Beibei breathes heavily. It amazes and saddens Mrs. Su that Beibei’s life is so tenacious that it has outlived the love that once made it.

  WITH ONE FINGER, Mr. Su types in his password—a combination of Beibei’s and Jian’s birthdays—at a terminal booth. He is still clumsy in his operation of the computer, but people on the floor, aging and slow as most of them are, are patient with one another. The software dutifully produces graphs and numbers, but Mr. Su finds it hard to concentrate today. After a while, he quits to make room for a woman waiting for a booth. He goes back to the seating area and looks for a good chair to take a rest. The brokerage, in the recent years of a downward economy, has slackened in maintenance, and a lot of chairs are missing orange plastic seats. Mr. Su finally finds a good one among homemade cotton cushions, and sits down by a group of old housewives. The women, in their late fifties or early sixties, are the happiest and chattiest people on the floor. Most of them have money locked into stocks that they have no other choice but to keep for now, and perhaps forever; the only reason for them to come every day is companionship. They talk about their children and grandchildren, unbearable in-laws, soap operas from the night before, stories from tabloids that must be discussed and analyzed at length.

  Mr. Su watches the rolling numbers on the big screen. The PA is tuned in to a financial radio station, but the host’s analysis is drowned by the women’s stories. Most of the time, Mr. Su finds them annoyingly noisy, but today he feels tenderness, almost endearment, toward the women. His wife, quiet and pensive, will never become one of these chatty old hens, but he wishes, for a moment, that one of them were his wife, cheered up by the most mundane matters, mindlessly happy.

  After taking note of the numbers concerning him, Mr. Su sighs. Despite all the research he had done, his investment does not show any sign more positive than the old women’s. Life goes wrong for the same reason that people miscalculate. Husband and wife promise each other a lifelong love that turns out shorter than a life; people buy stocks with good calculations, but they do not take into consideration life’s own preference for, despite the laws of probability, the unlikely. Mr. Su fell in love with his wife at thirteen, and she loved him back. What were the odds for first lovers to end up in a family? Against both families’ wills, they married each other, and against everybody’s warning, they decided to have a baby. Mr. Su, younger and more arrogant then, calculated and concluded that the odds for a problematic baby were very low, so low that fate was almost on their side. Almost, but not quite, and as a blunt and mean joke, Beibei was born with major problems in her brain and spinal cord. It would not be much of a misfortune except when his wife started to hide herself and the baby from the world; Beibei must have reminded his wife every day that their marriage was less legitimate. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Su thought of telling her, but he did not have the heart. It was he who suggested another baby. To give them a second chance, to save his wife from the unnecessary shame and pain that she had insisted on living with. Secretly he also wished to challenge fate again. The odds of having another calamity were low, very low, he tried to convince his wife; if only they could have a normal baby, and a normal family! The new baby’s birth proved his calculation right—Jian was born healthy, and he grew up into a very handsome and bright boy, as if his parents were awarded doubly for what had been taken away the first time—but who would’ve thought that such a success, instead of making their marriage a happier one, would turn his wife away from him? How arrogant he was to make the same mistake a second time, thinking he could outsmart life. What had survived the birth of Beibei did not survive Jian’s birth, as if his wife, against all common wisdom, could share misfortune with him but not happiness. For twenty years, they have avoided argume
nts carefully; they have been loving parents, dutiful spouses, but something that had made them crazy for each other as young cousins has abandoned them, leaving them in unshareable pain.

  A finger taps Mr. Su’s shoulder. He opens his eyes and realizes that he has fallen asleep. “I’m sorry,” he says to the woman.

  “You were snoring,” she says with a reproachful smile.

  Mr. Su apologizes again. The woman nods and returns to the conversation with her companions. Mr. Su looks at the clock on the screen, too early for lunch still, but he brings out a bag of instant noodles and a mug from his bag anyway, soaking the noodles with boiling water from the drinking stand. The noodles soften and swell. Mr. Su takes a sip of soup and shakes his head. He thinks of going home and talking to his wife, asking her a few questions he has never gathered enough courage to ask, but then decides that things unsaid had better remain so. Life is not much different from the stock market—you invest in a stock and you stick, and are stuck, to the choice, despite all the possibilities of other mistakes.

  At noon, the restaurant commissioned by the stockbrokerage delivers the lunch boxes to the VIP lounges, and the traders on the floor heat lunches in the microwave or make instant noodles. Mr. Su, who is always cheered up by the mixed smells of leftovers from other dinner tables, goes into a terminal booth in a hopeful mood. Someday, he thinks, when his wife is freed from taking care of Beibei, he’ll ask her to accompany him to the stockbrokerage. He wants her to see other people’s lives, full of meaningless but happy trivialities.

  Mr. Su leaves the brokerage promptly at five o’clock. Outside the building, he sees Mr. Fong, sitting on the curb and looking up at him like a sad, deserted child.

  “Mr. Fong,” Mr. Su says. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you come in and find me?”

  Mr. Fong suggests they go for a drink, and then holds out a hand and lets Mr. Su pull him to his feet. They find a small roadside diner, and Mr. Fong orders a few cold plates and a bottle of strong yam wine. “Don’t you sometimes wish a marriage doesn’t go as long as our lives last?” Mr. Fong says over the drink.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Mr. Su asks.

  “Nothing’s right with the wife after she’s released,” Mr. Fong says.

  “Are you going to divorce her?”

  Mr. Fong downs a cup of wine. “I wish I could,” he says and starts to sob. “I wish I didn’t love her at all so I could just pack up and leave.”

  BY LATE AFTERNOON Mrs. Su is convinced that Beibei is having problems. Her eyes, usually clear and empty, glisten with a strange light, as if she is conscious of her pain. Mrs. Su tries in vain to calm her down, and when all the other ways have failed, she takes out a bottle of sleeping pills. She puts two pills into a small porcelain mortar, and then, after a moment of hesitation, adds two more. Over the years she has fed the syrup with the pill powder to Beibei so that the family can have nights for undisturbed sleep.

  Calmed by the syrup, Beibei stops screaming for a short moment, and then starts again. Mrs. Su strokes Beibei’s forehead and waits for the medicine to take over her limited consciousness. When the telephone rings, Mrs. Su does not move. Later, when it rings for the fifth time, she checks Beibei’s eyes, half closed in drowsiness, and then closes the bedroom door before picking up the receiver.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you tired of me, too?” Mrs. Fong says.

  Mrs. Su tries to find excuses, but Mrs. Fong, uninterested in any of them, cuts her off. “I know who the woman is now.”

  “How much did it cost you to find out?”

  “Zero. Listen, the husband—shameless old man—he confessed himself.”

  Mrs. Su feels relieved. “So the worst is over, Mrs. Fong.”

  “Over? Not at all. Guess what he said to me this afternoon? He asked me if we could all three of us live together in peace. He said it as if he was thinking on my behalf. ‘We have plenty of rooms. It doesn’t hurt to give her a room and a bed. She is a good woman, she’ll take good care of us both.’ Taking care of his thing, for sure.”

  Mrs. Su blushes. “Does she want to live with you?”

  “Guess what? She’s been laid off. Ha ha, not a surprise, right? I’m sure she wants to move in. Free meals. Free bed. Free man. What comes better? Maybe she’s even set her eyes on our inheritance. Imagine what the husband suggested? He said I should think of her as a daughter. He said she lost her father at five and did not have a man good to her until she met him. So I said, Is she looking for a husband, or a stepfather? She’s honey-mouthing him, you see? But the blind man! He even begged me to feel for her pain. Why didn’t he ask her to feel for me?”

  Something hits the door with a heavy thump, and then the door swings open. Mrs. Su turns and sees an old man leaning on the door, supported by her husband. “Mr. Fong’s drunk,” her husband whispers to her.

  “Are you there?” Mrs. Fong says.

  “Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong, something’s come up and I have to go.”

  “Not yet. I haven’t finished the story.”

  Mrs. Su watches the two men stumble into the bathroom. After a moment, she hears the sounds of vomiting and the running of tap water, her husband’s low comforting words, Mr. Fong’s weeping.

  “So I said, Over my dead body, and he cried and begged and said all these ridiculous things about opening one’s mind. Many households have two women and one man living in peace now, he said. It’s the marriage revolution, he said. Revolution? I said. It’s retrogression. You think yourself a good Marxist, I said, but Marx didn’t teach you bigamy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to have a concubine.”

  Mr. Su helps Mr. Fong lie down on the couch and he closes his eyes. Mrs. Su watches the old man’s tear-smeared face twitch in pain. Soon Mrs. Fong’s angry words blend with Mr. Fong’s snoring.

  With Mr. Fong fast asleep, Mr. Su stands up and walks into Beibei’s room. One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs. Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs. Fong’s blabbering and walks to Beibei’s bedroom. There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white, with a bluish hue. Mrs. Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei’s hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, gray and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents’ garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy.

  Immortality

  HIS STORY, AS THE STORY OF EVERY ONE OF us, started long before we were born. For dynasties, our town provided the imperial families their most reliable servants. Eunuchs they are called, though out of reverence we call them Great Papas. None of us is a direct descendant of a Great Papa, but traveling upstream in the river of our blood, we find uncles, brothers, and cousins who gave up their maleness so that our names would not vanish in history. Generations of boys, at the age of seven or eight, were chosen and castrated—cleaned as it was called—and sent into the palace as apprentices, learning to perform domestic tasks for the emperor and his family. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they started to earn their allowances, silver coins that they saved and sent home to their parents. The coins were kept in a trunk, along with a small silk sack in which the severed male root was preserved with herbs. When the brothers of Great Papas reached the marriage age, their parents unlocked the trunk and brought out the silver coins. The money allowed the brothers to marry their wives; the wives gave birth to their sons; the sons grew up to carry on the family name, either by giving birth to more sons or by going into the palace as cleaned boys. Years went by. When Great Papas could no longer serve the imperial masters on their wobbly knees, they were released from the palace and taken in by their nephews. Nothing left for them to worry about, they sat all day in the sun and stroked the cats they had brought home from the palace, fat and slow as they themselves were, and watched the male dogs chasing
the females in the alleys. In time death came for them. Their funerals were the most spectacular events in our town: sixty-four Buddhist monks, in gold and red robes, chanted prayers for forty-nine days to lead their souls into the heaven; sixty-four Tao masters, in blue and gray robes, danced for forty-nine days to drive away any evils that dared to attach to their bodies. The divine moment came at the end of the forty-nine days, when the silk sacks containing their withered male roots were placed in the coffins. Now that the missing part had rejoined the body, the soul could leave without regret, to a place better than our town.

  This was the story of every one of our Great Papas. For dynasties they were the most trustworthy members of the imperial family. They tended to the princesses’ and the concubines’ most personal tasks without tainting the noble blood with the low and dirty desires of men; they served the emperor and the princes with delicacy, yet, unlike those young handmaids who dreamed of seducing the emperor and his sons with their cheap beauties, Great Papas posed no threat to the imperial wives. There were wild rumors, though, about them serving as playthings for the princes before they reached the legal age to take concubines, and unfortunate tales of Great Papas being drowned, burned, bludgeoned, beheaded for the smallest mistakes, but such stories, as we all know, were made up to attack the good name of our town. What we believe is what we have seen— the exquisitely carved tombstones in our cemetery, the elegantly embroidered portraits in our family books. Great Papas filled our hearts with pride and gratitude. If not for them, who were we, the small people born into this no-name town?

  The glory of our town has faded in the past century. But may I tell you one boy’s story before I reach the falling of Great Papas in history? As a tradition, the boys sent to the palace were not to be the only sons, who held the even more sacred duty of siring more boys. But the greatest among our Great Papas was an only son of his family. His father, also an only son, died young before he had the chance to plant more seeds in his wife’s belly. With no uncle or brother to send them money from the palace, the boy and his widowed mother lived in poverty. At ten years old, after a fight with the neighbors’ boys who had bragged about their brothers accepting gold bricks from the emperor’s hands, the boy went into the cowshed and cleaned himself, with a rope and a sickle. According to the legend, the boy walked across the town, his male root dripping blood in his hand, and shouted to the people watching on with pity in their eyes, “Wait till I become the best servant of His Majesty!” Unable to endure the shame and the despair of living under a sonless and grandsonless roof, his mother threw herself into a well. Twenty years later, the son became the master eunuch in the palace, taking under his charge twenty-eight hundred eunuchs and thirty-two hundred handmaids. With no brothers to send his money to, he saved every coin and retired as the richest man in the region. He hired men to dig out his poor mother’s coffin and gave her a second funeral, the most extravagant one ever to take place in our town. It was in the ninth month of 1904, and to this day our old people haven’t stopped talking about every detail of the funeral: the huge coffin carved out of a sandalwood tree, stacks of gold bricks, trunks of silk clothes, and cases of jade bowls for her to use in the next life. Even more impressive were the four young girls the son had purchased from the poor peasants on the mountain, all of them twelve years old. They were put into satin dresses they would have never dreamed of wearing and were each fed a cup of mercury. The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin. With burning incense planted in their curled fingers, the four girls accompanied the mother to the other world as her loyal handmaids.