A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

by Yiyun Li

  “Of course not. You were the one sending him back to the street,” Sasha said.

  “It’s been a troubled time,” Boshen said, struggling over the words. “It’s been difficult for all of us. But we certainly should try to help him out.”

  Sasha turned to look at Boshen with an amused smile. “You speak like the worst kind of politician,” she said. “Show me the solution.”

  “I am thinking.” Boshen hesitated, and said, “I’ve been thinking—if we can tell him that he’ll be able to perform in America, maybe he would want to leave Beijing?”

  “And then?”

  “We will try here. There’s a Nan Dan master in New York. Maybe we can contact him and ask for his help. But the first thing we do is to get Yang out of the country.”

  “Does that ‘we’ include me?”

  “If you could marry Yang, he would be here in no time. I know him. If there’s one percent chance to go back to the stage, he’ll try.”

  “A very nice plan, Boshen,” Sasha said. “But why should I agree to the proposal? What’s in it for me?”

  Boshen looked away from Sasha and watched a couple kiss at the other side of the street. After a long moment, he turned to Sasha and tried to look into her eyes. “You must have loved him at least once, Sasha,” he said, his voice trembling.

  SASHA HAD NOT planned for love, or even an affair. The friendship was out of whimsy, a convenience for the empty days immediately before graduating from college. The movie they watched one night in July was not planned, either. It was ten o’clock when Sasha purchased the tickets, at the last minute. Yang looked at the clock in the ticket booth and wondered aloud if it was too late, and Sasha laughed, asking him if he was a child and if his lover had a curfew for him.

  The movie was Pretty Woman, with almost unreadable Chinese subtitles. When they came out to the midnight street, Sasha said, “Don’t you just love Julia Roberts?”

  “What’s to love about her?” Yang said.

  Sasha glanced at Yang. He was quiet throughout the movie—he did not understand English, but Sasha thought at least he could’ve enjoyed the beautiful actress. “She’s pretty, and funny, and so—American,” Sasha said. “America is a good place. Everything could happen there. A prostitute becomes a princess; a crow turns into a swan overnight.”

  “A prostitute never becomes a princess,” Yang said.

  “How do you know?” Sasha said. “If only you could come with me to America and take a look at it yourself.”

  After a long moment, Yang said, “Every place is a good place. Only time goes wrong.”

  Sasha said nothing. She did not want to spend the night philosophizing. When they walked past a small hotel, she asked Yang if he wanted to come in with her. Just for the fun of staying out for a night, she said; he needn’t have to report to his lover anyway, she added. Yang hesitated, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the foyer with her. A middle-aged woman at the reception opened the window and said, “What do you want?”

  “Comrade, do you have a single room for two persons?” Sasha said.

  The woman threw out a pad for registration and shut the window. Sasha filled in the form. The woman scanned the pad. “Your ID?” she asked.

  Sasha handed her ID to the woman. The woman looked at it for a long time, and pointed to Yang with her chin. “His ID?”

  “He’s my cousin from Inner Mongolia,” Sasha said in a cheerful voice. “He forgot to bring his ID with him.”

  “Then there’s no room tonight.” The woman threw out Sasha’s ID and closed the window.

  “Comrade.” Sasha tapped on the glass.

  The woman opened the window. “Go away,” she said. “Your cousin? Let me tell you—either you have a marriage license and I will give you a room, or you go out and do that shameless thing in the street and let the cops arrest you. Don’t you think I don’t know girls like you?”

  Sasha dragged Yang out the door, his lips quavering. “I don’t believe I can’t find a room for us,” Sasha said finally.

  Yang looked at Sasha with a baffled look. “Why do we have to do this?” he said.

  “Ha, you’re afraid now. Go ahead if you don’t want to come,” Sasha said, and started to walk. Yang followed Sasha to an even smaller hotel at the end of a narrow lane. An old man was sitting behind a desk, playing poker with himself. “Grandpapa,” Sasha said, handing her ID to the old man. “Do you have a single room for my brother and me?”

  The old man looked at Sasha and then Yang. “He’s not fifteen yet so he doesn’t have an ID,” Sasha said, and Yang smiled shyly at the old man, his white teeth flashing in the dark.

  The old man nodded and handed a registration pad to Sasha. Five minutes later they were granted a key. It was a small room on the second floor, with two single beds, a rusty basin stand with two basins, and a window that did not have a curtain. Roaches scurried to find a hiding place when Sasha turned on the light. They stood just inside the door, and all of a sudden she did not know what the excitement was of spending a night together in a filthy hotel. “Why don’t we just go home?” Yang said behind her.

  “Where’s the place you call home?” Sasha snapped. She turned off the light and lay down on a bed without undressing. “Go back to the man who keeps you if this is not a place for a princess like you,” she said.

  Yang stood for a long moment before he got into the other bed. Sasha waited for him to speak, and when he did not, she became angry with him, and with herself.

  The next morning, when the city stirred to life, they both lay awake in their own beds. The homing pigeons flew across the sky, the small brass whistles bound to their tails humming in a harmonious low tone. Not far away, Tao music played on a tape recorder, calling for the early risers to join the practice of tai chi. Old men, the fans of Peking Opera, sang their favorite parts of the opera, their voices cracking at high notes. Then the doors down the lane creaked open, releasing the shouting children headed to school, and adults to work, their bicycle bells clanking.

  Later, someone turned on a record player and music blasted across the alley. Sasha sat up and looked out the window. A young man was setting up a newspaper stand at the end of the alley, making theatrical movements along with a song in which a rock singer was yelling, “Oh, Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan, he’s a powerful old man. He’s rich, he’s strong, and I want to marry him.”

  Sasha listened to the song repeat and said, “I don’t understand why these people think they have the right to trash Genghis Khan.”

  “Their ears are dead to real music,” Yang said.

  “When I was little, my father taught me a song about Genghis Khan. It’s the only Mongolian song I remember now,” Sasha said, and opened her mouth to sing the song. The melody was in her mind, but no words came to her tongue. She had forgotten almost all of the Mongolian words she had learned, after her parents’ divorce; she had not seen her father for fifteen years. “Well, I don’t remember it anymore.”

  “The broken pillars, the slanted roof, they once saw the banqueting days; the dying trees, the withering peonies, they once danced in the heavenly music. The young girls dreamed of their lovers who were enlisted to fight the Huns. They did not know the loved ones had become white bones glistening in the moonlight, ” Yang chanted in a low voice to the ceiling. “Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.”

  “What’s the point of remembering the song anyway? I don’t even remember what my father looked like.” Sasha thought about her father, one of the offspring of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan was turned into a clown in the pop song. Mongolia was once the biggest empire in the world, and now it was a piece of meat, sandwiched by China and Russia.

  “We live in a wrong time,” Yang said.

  Sasha turned to look at Yang. He lay on his hands and stared at the ceiling, his face taking on the resigned look of an old man. It hurt her, and scared her too, to glimpse a world beneath his empty beauty. “We were born into a wrong place, i
s what our problem is,” she said, trying to cheer him and herself up. “Why don’t you come to America with me, Yang?”

  Yang smiled. “Who am I to follow you?”

  “A husband, a lover, a brother, I don’t care. Why don’t you get out of Beijing and have a new life in America?” The words, once said, hung in the room like heavy fog, and Sasha wondered if Yang, too, had difficulty breathing. Outside the window, a vendor was sharpening a chopper with a whetstone, the strange sound making their mouths water unpleasantly. Then the vendor started to sing in a drawn-out voice about his tasty pig heads.

  “Sasha,” Yang said finally. “Is Sasha a Mongolian name?”

  “Not really. It’s Russian, a name of my mom’s favorite heroine in a Soviet war novel.”

  “That’s why it doesn’t sound Chinese. I would rather it is a Mongolian name,” Yang said. “Sasha, the princess of Mongolia.”

  Sasha walked barefoot to Yang’s bed and knelt beside him. He did not move, and let Sasha hold his face with both hands. “Come to America with me,” she said. “We’ll be the prince and the princess of Nebraska.”

  “I was not trained to play a prince,” Yang said.

  “The script is changed,” Sasha said. “From today on.”

  Yang turned to look at Sasha. She tried to kiss him, but he pushed her away gently. “A beautiful body is only a bag of bones, ” he sang in a low voice.

  Sasha had never seen Yang perform, and could not imagine him onstage; he had played princesses and prostitutes, but he did not have to live with the painted mask and the silk costume. “The Peking Opera is dead,” she said. “Why don’t you give it up?”

  “Who are you to say that about the Peking Opera?” Yang said, his face turning suddenly stern.

  Sasha saw the iciness in Yang’s eyes and let the topic drop. Afterward, neither mentioned anything about the stay in the hotel. A week later, when Boshen was escorted away from Beijing, Sasha was relieved and scared. There was, all of a sudden, time for them to fill. To her relief and disappointment, Yang seemed to have forgotten the moment when they were close, so close that they were almost in love.

  THE PARADE STARTED with music and laughter, colorful floats moving past, on which happy people waved to the happy audience. Boshen looked at Sasha’s face, lit up by curiosity, and sighed. Despite her willfulness and unfriendliness, the thought of the baby—Yang’s baby—made him eager to forgive her. “Do you still not want to tell Yang about the baby?” he said.

  “You’ve asked this the hundredth time,” Sasha said. “Why should I?”

  “He might want to come to the U.S. if he learned about the baby,” Boshen said.

  “There’ll be no baby after tomorrow,” Sasha said. She had tried Yang’s phone number when she had learned of the pregnancy; she had tried his pager, too. At first it was measured by hours and days, and then it became weeks since she had left the message on his pager. He might be living in another apartment with a new telephone number. The pager might no longer belong to him. She knew he had every reason for not getting her message, but she could not forgive his silence. In the meantime, her body changed. She felt the growth inside her and she was disgusted by it. Sometimes she hated it from morning till night, hoping that it would finally go away, somehow, surrendering to the strength of her resentment. Other times she kept her mind away for as long as she could, thinking that it would disappear as if it had never existed. Still, in the end, it required her action. In the end, she thought, it was just a chunk of flesh and blood.

  “But why was there a baby in the first place?” Boshen said. Why and how it happened were the questions that had been haunting him since he had heard from Sasha. He wanted to ask her if she, too, had been dazzled by the boy’s body, smooth, lithe, perfectly shaped. He wanted to know if she had loved him as he had, but in that case, how could she have the heart to discard what had been left with her?

  Sasha turned to Boshen. For the first time, she studied the man with curiosity. Not handsome or ugly, he had a candid face that Sasha thought she could not fall in love with but nonetheless could trust. A man like Boshen should have an ordinary life, boring and comfortable, yet his craze for Yang made him a more interesting man than he deserved to be. But that must be what was Yang’s value—he made people fall in love with him, and the love led them astray, willingly, from their otherwise tedious paths. Yang had been the one to bring up the idea of spending a night together again, and Sasha the one to ask a friend for the use of her rented room, a few days before Sasha’s flight. It was one of the soggiest summer evenings. After their lovemaking, sweet and short and uneventful, they stayed on the floor, on top of the blanket Sasha had brought for the purpose, an arm’s length between them, each too warm to touch the other. Outside, the landlady’s family and two other neighbor families were sitting in the courtyard and watching a TV program, their voices mixed with the claps of their hands killing the mosquitoes. Sasha turned to look at Yang, who was lying with his back to her. The little pack of condoms she had bought was tucked underneath the blanket, unopened. She had suggested it and he had refused. A rubber was for people who touched without loving each other, Yang had said; his words had made her hopeful again. “Do you want to come to America with me now?” she asked, tracing his back with one finger.

  “What am I going to do in America? Be kept as a canary by you?” Yang said and moved farther away from her finger.

  “You can spend some time learning English, and get a useful degree in America.”

  “Useful? Don’t you already know that I am useless? Besides, nothing humiliates a man more than living as a parasite on his woman,” Yang said, and reached for a silk robe he had packed with him. Before Sasha had the time to stop him, he walked out the door. Sasha jumped to her feet and watched from behind the curtain; Yang walked with a calculated laziness, not looking at the people who turned their eyes away from the television to stare at him. When he reached the brick sink in the middle of the courtyard, he sat on the edge and raised his bare legs to the tap. The water had run for a long moment before the landlady recovered from her shock and said, “Hey, the water costs me money.”

  Yang smiled. “It’s so hot,” he said in a pleasant voice.

  “Indeed,” the landlady agreed.

  Yang turned off the tap and walked back to the room, with the same grace and idleness, knowing that the people in the courtyard were all watching him, his willowy body wrapped in the moon white robe. Sasha stood by the window, cold with disappointment. She became his audience, one of the most difficult to capture, perhaps, but he succeeded after all.

  A Disney float approached the corner where Sasha and Boshen stood. “Look,” Sasha said and pointed at a giant glove of Mickey Mouse moving ahead of the float. “There’re only four fingers.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Boshen said.

  “Yang needs us no more than that glove needs us for our admiration,” Sasha said.

  “But our love is the only thing to protect him, and to save him, too.”

  Sasha turned and looked into Boshen’s eyes. “It’s people like us who have destroyed him, isn’t it? Why was there Nan Dan in the Peking Opera in the first place? Men loved him because he was playing a woman; women loved him because he was a man playing, ” she said.

  “That’s totally wrong.”

  “Why else do you want so much to put him back on the stage? Don’t think I’m happy to see him fall. Believe me, I wanted to help him as much as you do. He didn’t have to be a man playing a woman—I thought I would make him understand. But what did I end up with? You’re not the one who has a baby inside; he’s not the one having an abortion,” Sasha said, and started to cry.

  Boshen held out his hand and touched Sasha’s shoulder hesitantly. If only she could love the boy one more time. Yang could choose to live with either of them; he could choose not to love them at all but their love would keep him safe and intact; they could—the three of them—bring up the baby together. Yang would remain the princess, exile
d, yes, but a true princess, beautiful in a foreign land. If only he knew how to make Sasha love Yang again, Boshen thought.

  Sasha did not move away when Boshen put an arm around her shoulder. They must look like the most ordinary couple to strangers, a nervous husband comforting his moody wife after an argument. They might as well be a couple, out of love, he caring only for the baby inside her, she having no feeling left for anything, her unborn child included.

  As if responding, the baby moved. A tap, and then another one, gentle and tentative, the first greeting that Sasha had wished she would never have to answer, but it seemed impossible, once it happened, not to hope for more. After a long moment, people in the street shouted, and children screamed out of excitement. Sasha looked up—the lights were lit up in the trees, thousands of stars forming a constellation. She thought about the small Mongolian town where her mother lived alone now, her long shadow trailing behind her as she walked home along the dimly lit alley. Her mother had been born into a wrong time, lived all her adult life in a wrong place, yet she had never regretted the births of her two daughters. Sasha held her breath and waited for more of the baby’s messages. America was a good country, she thought, a right place to be born into, even though the baby had come at a wrong time. Everything was possible in America, she thought, and imagined a baby possessing the beauty of her father but happier, and luckier. Sasha smiled, but then when the baby moved again, she burst into tears. Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

  Love in the Marketplace

  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.