by Yiyun Li
“You must be tired,” Boshen said as he pushed the tray of food to Sasha, who had taken a table by the window. She looked tiny in the oversized sweatshirt. Her face was slightly swollen, and the way she checked out the customers in the store, her eyes staying on each face a moment too long, moved him. She was twenty-one, a child still.
“I got a fish sandwich for you,” Boshen said when Sasha did not answer him.
“I haven’t seen one happy face since arriving,” Sasha said. “What’s the other one?”
“Chicken.”
Sasha threw the fish sandwich across the table and grabbed the chicken sandwich from Boshen’s tray. “I hate fish,” she said.
“It’s good for you now,” Boshen said.
“Now will be over soon,” Sasha said. She looked forward to the moment when she was ready to move on. “Moving on” was a phrase she just learned, an American concept that suited her well. It was such a wonderful phrase that Sasha could almost see herself stapling her Chinese life, one staple after another around the pages until they became one solid block that nobody would be able to open and read. She would have a fresh page then, for her American life. She was four months late already.
Boshen said nothing and unwrapped the fish sandwich. It was a change—sitting at a table and having an ordered meal—after months of eating in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant where he worked as a helper to the Sichuan chef. Boshen had come to America via a false marriage to a friend five months earlier, when he had been put under house arrest for his correspondence with a Western reporter regarding a potential AIDS epidemic in a central province. He had had to publish a written confession of his wrongdoing to earn his freedom. A lesbian friend, a newly naturalized American citizen herself, had offered to marry him out of China. Before that, he had lived an openly gay life in Beijing, madly in love with Yang, an eighteen-year-old boy. Boshen had tried different ways to contact Yang since he had arrived in America, but the boy never responded. The checks Boshen sent him were not cashed, either.
They ate without speaking. Sasha swallowed her food fast, and waited for Boshen to finish his. Outside the window, more and more people appeared, all moving toward downtown, red reindeer’s antlers on the heads of children who sat astride their fathers’ shoulders. Boshen saw the question in Sasha’s eyes and told her that there was a parade that evening, and all the trees on Michigan Avenue would light up for the coming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. “Do you want to stay for it?” he asked halfheartedly, hoping that she would choose instead to rest after the long bus ride.
“Why not?” Sasha said, and put on her coat.
Boshen folded the sandwich wrapper like a freshly ironed napkin. “I wonder if we could talk for a few minutes here,” he said.
Sasha sighed. She never liked Boshen, whom she had met only once and who had struck her as the type of man as fussy as an old hen. She had not hesitated, however, to call him and ask for help when she had found out his number through an acquaintance. She had spoken in a dry, matter-of-fact way about her pregnancy, which had gone too long for an abortion in the state of Nebraska. Yang had fathered the baby; she had told Boshen this first in their phone call. She had had no intention of sparing Boshen the truth; in a way, she felt Boshen was responsible for her misfortune, too.
“Have you, uh, made up your mind about the operation?” Boshen asked.
“What do you think I’m here for?” Sasha said. Over the past week Boshen had called her twice, bringing up the possibility of keeping the baby. Both times she had hung up right away. Whatever interest he had in the baby was stupid and selfish, Sasha had decided.
The easiest solution may not be the best one in life, Boshen thought of telling Sasha, but then, what right did he have to talk about options, when the decisions he had made for his life were all compromises? At thirty-eight, Boshen felt he had achieved less than he had failed. He was a mediocre doctor before he was asked politely to leave the hospital for establishing the first counseling hotline for homosexuals in the small Chinese city where he lived. He moved to Beijing and took on a part-time job at a private clinic while working as an activist for gay rights. After a few visits from the secret police, however, he realized that, in the post-Tiananmen era, talk of any kind of human rights was dangerous. He decided to go into a less extreme and more practical area, advocating for AIDS awareness, but even that he had to give up after pressure from the secret police and his family. He was in love with a boy twenty years younger, and he thought he could make a difference in the boy’s life. In the end, he was the one to marry a woman and leave. Boshen had thought of adopting the baby—half of her blood came from Yang, after all—but Sasha’s eyes, sharp and unrelenting, chilled him. He smiled weakly and said, “I just wanted to make sure.”
Sasha wrapped her head in a shawl and stood up. Boshen did not move, and when she asked him if he was leaving, he said, “I’ve heard from my friends that Yang is prostituting again.”
Not a surprise, Sasha thought, but the man at the table, too old for a role as a heartbroken lover and too serious for it, was pitiful. In a kinder voice she said, “Then we’ll have to live with that, no?”
BOSHEN WAS NOT the first man to have fallen in love with Yang, but he believed, for a long time, that he was the only one to have seen and touched the boy’s soul. Since the age of seven, Yang had been trained as a Nan Dan—a male actor who plays female roles on stage in the Peking Opera—and had lived his life in the opera school. At seventeen, when he was discovered going out with a male lover, he was expelled. Boshen had written several articles about the incident, but he had not met Yang until he had become a money boy. Yang could’ve easily enticed a willing man to keep him for a good price, but rumors were that the boy was interested only in selling after his first lover abandoned him.
The day Boshen heard about Yang’s falling into prostitution, he went to the park where men paid for such services. It was near dusk when he arrived, and men of all ages slipped into the park like silent fish. Soon night fell; beneath the lampposts, transactions started in whispers, familiar scenarios for Boshen, but standing in the shade of a tree— a customer instead of researcher—made him tremble. It was not difficult to recognize Yang in the moon-white-colored silk shirt and pants he was reputed to wear every day to the park. Boshen looked at the boy, too beautiful for the grimy underground, a white lotus blossom untouched by the surrounding mud.
After watching the boy for several days, Boshen finally offered to pay Yang’s asking price. The night Yang came home with Boshen, he became drunk on his own words. For a long time he talked about his work, his dream of bringing an end to injustice and building a more tolerant world; Yang huddled on the couch and listened. Boshen thought of shutting up, but the more he talked, the more he despaired at the beautiful and impassive face of Yang—in the boy’s eyes he must be the same as all the other men, so full of themselves. Finally Boshen said, “Someday I’ll make you go back to the stage.”
“An empty promise of a man keeps a woman’s heart full, ” Yang recited in a low voice.
“But this,” Boshen said, pointing to the pile of paperwork on his desk. “This is the work that will make it illegal for them to take you away from the stage because of who you are.”
Yang’s face softened. Boshen watched the unmistakable hope in the boy’s eyes. Yang was too young to hide his pain, despite years of wearing female masks and portraying others’ tragedies onstage. Boshen wanted to save him from his suffering. After a few weeks of pursuing, Boshen convinced Yang to try a new life. Boshen redecorated the apartment with expensive hand-painted curtains that featured the costumes of the Peking Opera and huge paper lanterns bearing the Peking Opera masks. He sold a few pieces of furniture to make space, and borrowed a rug from a friend for Yang to practice on. Yang fit into the quiet life like the most virtuous woman he had played on stage. He got up early every morning, stretching his body into unbelievable positions, and dancing the most intricate choreography. He trained his voi
ce, too, in the shower so that the neighbors would not hear him. Always Boshen stood outside and listened, Yang’s voice splitting the waterfall, the bath curtain, the door, and the rest of the dull world like a silver knife. At those moments Boshen was overwhelmed by gratitude—he was not the only one to have been touched by the boy’s beauty, but he was the one to guard and nurture it. That alone lifted him above his mundane, disappointing life.
When Boshen was at work, Yang practiced painting and calligraphy. Sometimes they went out to parties, but most evenings they stayed home. Yang never performed for Boshen, and he dared not ask him to. Yang was an angel falling out of the heavens, and every day Boshen dreaded that he would not be able to return the boy to where he belonged.
Such a fear, as it turned out, was not unfounded. Two months into the relationship, Yang started to show signs of restlessness. During the day he went out more than before, and he totally abandoned painting and calligraphy. Boshen wondered if the boy was suffocated by the stillness of their life.
One day shortly before Boshen was expelled from Beijing and put under house arrest in his hometown, Yang asked him casually how his work was going. Fine, Boshen said, feeling uneasy. Yang had never asked him anything about his work; it was part of the ugly world that Boshen had wanted to shelter Yang from.
“What are you working on?” Yang asked.
“Why, the usual stuff,” Boshen said.
“I heard you were working on AIDS,” Yang said. “What has that to do with you?”
Stunned, Boshen tried to find an explanation. Finally he said, “You don’t understand, Yang.”
“I’m not a child,” Yang said. “Why are you concerned with that dirty disease? The more you work on it, the more people will connect it with gay people. What good does it do for me?”
“I’m trying to help more people,” Boshen said.
“But you’ve promised to help me get back to the stage,” Yang said. “If you insist on working on something irrelevant, you’ll never fulfill your promise.”
Boshen could not answer Yang. Afterward, Yang started to go out more often, and a few days later, he did not come home for the first time in their relationship. Boshen thought of all the predators waiting to set their fangs and claws on Yang, and he did not sleep that night.
“There’s nothing for you to worry about,” Yang said with a strange smile when Boshen confronted him. “You’re not as endangered as you imagine.”
“At least you should’ve let me know where you were,” Boshen said.
“I was with a girl,” Yang said, and mentioned the name Sasha, which sounded slightly familiar to Boshen. They had met her at a party, Yang reminded Boshen, but he did not remember who she was; he did not understand why Yang was going out with her, either.
“Why? What a silly question,” Yang said. “You do things when you feel like it, no?”
THE FIRST TIME Sasha met Yang, at a party, she felt that she was looking into a mirror that reflected not her own face, but that of someone she could never become. She watched the ballet of his long fingers across the table while he listened absentmindedly to the conversation of others around the table. She looked at the innocent half-moons on his fingernails; her own fingers were plump and blunt. His cream-colored face, his delicate nose and mouth reminded her of an exquisite china doll. Later, when they sat closer, she saw the melancholy in his eyes and decided that he was more like a statue of Kuanyin, the male Buddha in a female body, the goddess who listened and responded to the prayers of suffering women and children. Sitting next to him, Sasha felt like a mass-produced rubber doll.
The uneasy feeling lasted only for a moment. Sasha had heard of his stories, and was glad to see him finally in person. She leaned toward him and asked, as if picking up from a conversation they had dropped somewhere, “What do you think of girls, then?”
He looked up at her, and she saw a strange light in his eyes. They reminded her of a wounded sparrow she had once kept during a cold Mongolian winter. Sparrows were an obstinate species that would never eat and drink once they were caged, her mother told her. Sasha did not believe it. She locked up the bird for days, and it kept bumping into the cage until its head started to go bald. Still she refused to release it, mesmerized by its eyes, wild but helplessly tender, too. She nudged the little bowl of soaked millet closer to the sparrow, but the bird was blind to her hospitality. Cheap birds, a neighbor told her; only cheap birds would be so stubborn. Have a canary, the neighbor said, and she would be singing for you every morning by now.
The boy lowered his eyes at Sasha’s scrutiny, and she felt the urge to chase the beautiful eyes, a huntress of that strange light. “You must have known some girls, no?” she said. “When you went to the opera school, were there girls in the school?”
“Yes,” the boy said, his voice reminding her of a satin dress.
“So?”
“We didn’t talk. They played handmaids and nannies, background roles.”
“So you were the princess, huh?” Sasha laughed and saw the boy blush, with anger perhaps, but it made her more curious and insistent in cornering him. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Which name?”
“How many names do you have?”
“Two. One given by my parents. One given by the opera school.”
“What are they?”
He dipped one finger into a glass of orange juice and wrote on the dark marble tabletop. She followed the wet trace of his finger. It was Yang, a common boy’s name with the character for the sun, the masculine principle of nature, the opposite of Yin.
“A so-so name. What’s your opera name?”
“Sumeng,” he said. A serene and pure dreamer, it meant.
“Worse. Sounds like a weepy name from a romance novel,” Sasha said. “You need a better name. I’ll have to think of one for you.”
In the end she did not use either name, and did not find a better one for him. She called him “my little Nan Dan,” and that was what he was to her, a boy destined to play a woman’s part. She paged him often, and invited him to movies and walks in the park. She made decisions for them both, and he let her. She tried to pry him open with questions—she was so curious about him—and slowly he started to talk, about the man he had loved and men who loved him. He never said anything about the opera school or his stage life, and she learned not to push him. He was so vain, Sasha thought when he spent a long time fixing his hair or when he put on an expression of aloofness at the slightest attention of a stranger; she teased him, and then felt tender and guilty when he did not defend himself. She made fun of the other people in Yang’s life, too: his lover, Boshen, whom she believed to be a useless dreamer, and the men who boldly asked him for his number. She believed she was the first person in his life who did not worship him in any way, and he must be following her around because of that. It pleased her.
Was she dating the boy? Sasha’s classmates asked when they saw her with Yang more than once. Of course not, she said. In a month, Sasha was to go to America for graduate school, and it was pointless to start a relationship now. Besides, how smart was it to date a boy who loved no one but himself?
EVEN THE WIND could not cut through the warm bodies lined up on both sides of Michigan Avenue. Sasha pushed through the crowd. They looked so young and carefree, these Americans, happy as a group of pupils on a field trip. She envied these people, who would stand in a long line in front of a popcorn shop waiting for a bag of fresh popcorn, lovers leaning into each other, children hanging on to their parents. They were born to be themselves, naive and contented with their naivety.
“I would trade my place with any one of them,” Sasha said to Boshen, but when he raised his voice and asked her to repeat her words, she shook her head. If only there were a law in America binding her to where her baby belonged so that the baby would have a reason to live!
Sasha herself had once been used by the law to trap her mother in the grassland. One of the thousands of high school students sent down f
rom Beijing to Inner Mongolia for labor reeducation, her mother, in order to join the Party, married a Mongolian herdsman, one of the model inter-racial marriages that were broadcast across the grassland. Five years later, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, all of the students were allowed to return to Beijing. Sasha’s mother, however, was forced to stay, even after she divorced her Mongolian husband. Their two daughters, born in the grassland, did not have legal residency in Beijing, and the mother had to stay where the children belonged.
Sasha pushed forward, looking at every store window. Silky scarves curved around the mannequins’ necks with soft obedience. Diamonds glistened on dark velvet. At a street corner, children gathered and watched the animated story displayed in the windows of Marshall Field’s. If only her baby were a visa that would admit her into this prosperity, Sasha thought, saddened by the memories of Nebraska and Inner Mongolia, the night skies of both places black with lonely, lifeless stars.
“There’s an open spot there,” Boshen said. “Do you want to stand there?”
Sasha nodded, and Boshen followed her. Apart from the brief encounter at the party in Beijing and a few phone calls, he did not know her. He had thought about her often after she had called him about the pregnancy. What kind of girl, he had wondered, would’ve made Yang a father? He had imagined a mature and understanding girl. Beautiful, too. He had made up a perfect woman for Yang and for his own peace of mind, but Sasha had disappointed him. When they settled along the curb, he said, “So, what’s your plan after the operation?”
Sasha stood on tiptoe like a child, and looked in the direction where the parade would start. Boshen regretted right away speaking with such animosity. Seeing nothing, she turned to him and said, “What’s your plan in America? Where’s your new wife, anyway?”
Boshen frowned. He had told Yang that the marriage would be used as a cover, and his departure was meant only to be a temporary one. He had promised Yang other things, too, money he would send, help he would seek in the overseas Chinese community for Yang’s return to the stage. Not a day since he had arrived did he forget his promises, but Sasha’s words stung him. His marriage must have been an unforgivable betrayal, in Sasha’s and Yang’s eyes alike. “I can’t defend myself,” Boshen said finally.