A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

by Yiyun Li

  “Gone,” the youngest of the brothers shouts back. “Windy days are good for haircuts.”

  “Why?”

  “No need to clean up. The wind does it,” the third brother says, making a gesture of being blown away by the wind.

  I laugh. I like the boys of the Song family, each one of them knowing how to tell a joke and make people laugh. None of them is in school, the youngest one expelled from the high school for gang fights earlier in the year; nor is any of them working, since jobs are so scarce and the city is full of young idlers like the Song boys, to-be-placed youths, as they are called. The Song boys spend their days wandering in the city, picking fights with other boys and coming home with stories of their victory.

  Mrs. Song sticks her head out their door and yells, “You money eaters! Who told you to shave your heads? I don’t have money to buy you hats.”

  “Use the money we save on shampoo!” the oldest boy retorts.

  I laugh and run back into the room.

  “Out again to speak with the Song boys?” Mrs. Pang says, shoving coals into the burning belly of the stove.

  “No,” I lie, though I know Mrs. Pang will not be angry with me. Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

  “They’ll have a lot to worry about soon,” Mrs. Pang sighs, placing a water kettle on the stove.

  “Why?”

  “They need to think about finding wives in a few years, right? If they do not have jobs and places to live, how can they get married?”

  “Can they inherit their parents’ jobs?”

  “They sure can, but they only have two parents. What would the other two do?” Mrs. Pang says. “They learned nothing in school.”

  “I bet the oldest two will not inherit Mr. and Mrs. Song’s jobs.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” I answer with a smile of secrecy. The oldest son of the Song family told me that their father worked in a factory making lightbulbs and their mother worked in a factory making light switches. “My mother clicks and my father is turned on. Perfect pair, huh?” he said, and was happy to see me laugh hard. Mr. Song is a quiet man, following every order of his loud wife, a loyal bulb always responding well to the light switch.

  “Don’t boast because you know too little,” Mrs. Pang says. “Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he’ll become tomorrow.”

  NOT LONG BEFORE dinner, Mr. Pang comes back from work, chatting with Mr. Du in the yard about the weather before entering the room. Mr. Du rents the two small rooms on the eastern side of the quadrangle, and he pays the rent on time. He is a dutiful son, living with his old mother, who has been left paralyzed by a stroke. He does not have a wife, as nobody is willing to take care of his mother. Besides the Songs and the Dus, five other families live in the inner quadrangle, around a bigger yard that is connected to the front quadrangle with a moon-shaped door. The inner quadrangle used to be the Pangs’ living quarters while the front quadrangle was for the servants. But of course that was before the liberation. Mr. and Mrs. Pang live now in the small quarters that once belonged to their chauffeur and his family, with a living room, a bedroom, and another bedroom that used to be shared by the Pangs’ two daughters before they married, occupied by me when I visit. A small room next to the kitchen serves as Mr. Pang’s study, the door always locked and the windows shut tight behind a heavy curtain.

  “How was your day?” Mr. Pang comes in, putting his briefcase in the usual corner and hanging his coat and hat neatly behind the door.

  “Good,” I answer. “How was yours?”

  “Working hard, as usual,” Mr. Pang says and turns to Mrs. Pang. “How was your day?” It is the only thing he can think of saying to us at the end of the day. In the morning it is always, How was your sleep?

  Mrs. Pang does not reply. Mr. Pang never earns a penny, hardworking as he is, six days a week and sometimes overtime on Sundays. Nobody knows what he does at work. He was kicked out of his working unit at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, on the charge of being the son of a big landlord, an enemy of the proletarian class. After the Revolution, when he went back to his working unit in the Postal Department, he was told that his files had been lost and there was no record of his being employed there, even though every one of his colleagues had attended the meeting and voted for denouncing him as a dog son of the evil landlord class. Still he goes to work every day, taking the first of each month off to deliver copies of yet another letter to several sections in the Postal Department as well as the city government, appealing for an investigation of his history.

  “A tiring day,” Mr. Pang says, and sits down at the head of the table.

  Mrs. Pang places a bowl of rice heavily in front of him. “Nobody pays you to work. What can you do? Just wasting your own life. Better if you could stay home and help me with the housework.”

  Mrs. Pang is the rice earner of the family. She was a nanny for years but I was the last kid she nannied. The year she spent with me made her age fast, as my mother always says when she blames me as the most difficult child in the world. After me, Mrs. Pang performs only small chores: buying groceries for some families in the alley, doing laundry for other families, and taking care of Mr. Du’s paralyzed mother.

  Mr. Pang does not reply and counts the grains of rice with his chopsticks.

  “Please eat, Mr. Worker,” Mrs. Pang says and exchanges a smile with me.

  Mr. Pang eats silently. Dinner is the only time when Mr. Pang stays with us. Afterward, he goes directly to his study. One year he installed a folding bed in the study, and started to sleep there.

  “What is he doing there in his study?” I ask when I am helping Mrs. Pang do the dishes.

  “Heaven knows!”

  “You know, he is the only one I know who has a study,” I say. “I thought only rich people had studies and they never used them.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he does nothing in his study.”

  “But he is not rich.”

  “Well, he was at one time.”

  “Why does he still keep a study when he is no longer rich?”

  “Because we still have these rooms left with us so he can play a rich man. Things could be worse—everything confiscated, not one penny left.”

  “Why? You are good people.”

  “Good people may not have good luck,” Mrs. Pang says. “Remember the saying? Bad luck always chooses a good man. ”

  YET BAD LUCKhas chosen Mr. Pang for another reason— he is a useless man.

  “I wouldn’t say his parents were parasites, but he sure is one,” Mrs. Pang says. She likes to chat with me when she is hand-washing the laundry in the afternoon, a big washbasin in the middle of the living room, the winter sun pale on the floor.

  “Yes, I think so, too.” I dip my finger into the water to check the temperature. If Mrs. Pang does not forget to pour some hot water into the basin, I will be glad to catch the floating socks like slim fishes and wash them all, Mr. Pang’s big gray socks last.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. He is a parasite and he lives off you.”

  Mrs. Pang laughs. “You sure know a lot. What else do you know?”

  “He is very educated.” I’ve learned that from the boys of the Song family. They said Mr. Pang was proof that school was useless.

  “Ha, educated. You know how he got into the college? The entrance exam was very difficult, so he asked his younger brother to take it for him. His brother was very smart. That was how he got into college. If he took the test himself? Ugh, he would have to spend all his life taking the entrance exams.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. That’s the story,” Mrs. Pang says, handing a slice of soap to me.
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  “And then what?”

  “Then? Then he went to the college and never took a single course for his engineering degree. He hired someone to take the courses and the tests for him for the diploma.”

  “But who would do that for him? Why get a diploma for someone else if he had taken all the tests?”

  “There were always poor students willing to do that. They could not afford the tuition, but they did not have to pay a penny to receive a good education. The diploma? That was just a piece of paper. And that was all my husband got.”

  “Oh,” I say, and throw Mr. Pang’s sock back into the water, feeling cheated. “What was he doing in college?”

  “Going to the theater. Practicing calligraphy and painting. Gardening. Teaching his parrots to recite poems. Thinking of himself as an artist. What else could he do? Just wasting his time and money.”

  This is the most incredible story I have ever heard, I think, unable to connect Mr. Pang, the gray-headed, hunch-backed man, with the young man squandering his money in the city. “How come you married him?” I ask.

  “You know who I was then?” Mrs. Pang says. “My father was a landlord, too. We used to have servants, handmaids, nannies, chauffeurs, private teachers in our house. I was a parasite too.”

  From what I learned from books and movies, the daughters of landlords were always spoiled, ugly, and vicious. “You don’t look like one,” I say.

  “I’m not anymore.” Mrs. Pang smiles.

  “But Mr. Pang still is.”

  “Yes, he still is.”

  “How come you married him?” I ask again.

  “We got married because our parents wanted us to. That’s my share of luck. No one will have more good luck or bad luck than heaven permits. And no one will have all good luck or all bad luck, like I once had a nanny and handmaids to do everything for me and now I am doing things for other people.”

  “But Mr. Pang always has good luck. He never works.”

  “That’s his bad luck. He has nothing to do. He is useless.”

  THE NEXT SUMMER when I arrive at Mr. and Mrs. Pang’s house, Mr. Pang has retired. Retired may be the wrong word because he has not been paid for years, nor is there any indication of a pension. According to the Song boys, who know every single story in the city, one Monday Mr. Pang found his desk assigned to another man and his stuff piled in the hallway, the handle of his favorite teacup missing. He insisted that he would not leave until they returned the handle of his teacup. “It’s an old piece of China, older than your grandfather,” he kept saying until people felt insulted by his comparison. They told him to shut up and go to the trash can along with his teacup.

  That did it. Mr. Pang became a piece of trash. By the time I arrive that summer, he has locked himself up in his study along with the rooster Mrs. Pang has bought for my favorite dish. “Mr. Retired Worker!” Mrs. Pang knocks on the door when I arrive. “The kid is here.”

  Mr. Pang lifts a corner of the curtains up and looks at me with suspicion. I press my face on the window and peep in. There are shelves of ancient books in the room. His bed is unmade like a messed-up rooster nest. The rooster itself is sauntering and pecking around on his desk. White and gray rooster droppings are drying on the floor, perfectly round like large coins.

  “Yuck,” I say, pointing at the floor. Mr. Pang waves and tucks the curtain’s corner into its place.

  The fact that Mr. Pang is losing his mind makes me so unhappy that I do not go out to play with the alley girls. Even though I despise Mr. Pang as a parasite, I want him to be a healthy parasite. My knitted eyebrows make Mrs. Pang laugh at dinner. Mr. Pang is not coming to dinner with us anymore. He eats with the rooster in his room.

  “What happened?” Mrs. Pang asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, shoveling the food into my mouth without swallowing.

  “Mad at him?”

  “Umm.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like him being this way.”

  “He lost his mind long ago. Don’t worry about him.”

  I put down my chopsticks and walk around the table to Mrs. Pang. “I am mad at him for you.” I hug Mrs. Pang and start to cry.

  Mrs. Pang wipes my tears off with her hand, her palm scratching like sandpaper. “You are a very kind girl, even better than my own daughters,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “They said they wished that they had never been born to us,” Mrs. Pang says, still smiling. “You’ll make them ashamed.”

  I go back to my seat and continue my dinner, not feeling better.

  “Bad things happen,” Mrs. Pang says.

  “Not to you.”

  “Believe me, this is nothing. I have seen worse things.”

  “Why didn’t you marry the younger brother?” I ask.

  “Whose brother?”

  “His brother, the one you said was very smart and took the entrance exam for him.”

  Mrs. Pang laughs as if she has heard the most absurd story in the world. I do not laugh with her. “He has been long gone. He died before he finished college,” Mrs. Pang says.

  “That’s very sad.”

  “No, it’s not that bad. Sometimes I feel glad for him to have died that early.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was a son of the landlord, too. He was such a bright and sensitive boy.” Mrs. Pang looks across the table at the wall behind me for a moment and sighs. “He would have been killed by the Revolution.”

  “Why? Was he a bad guy?”

  “You don’t have to be a bad guy to get killed,” Mrs. Pang says. “In ’66 the Red Guards whipped to death eighty people from three families in the county next to my old home, and the youngest one was a three-year-old boy. I used to know some of them. Their grandfathers were landlords.”

  “Were they not bad guys?”

  “They were people just like me,” Mrs. Pang says. “That’s why you would rather see someone you love die young than suffer from living.”

  I think for a moment. “My mom and dad never tell me these things.”

  “Maybe they will when you grow up.”

  “No, they won’t. It is their occupational malady.” In our world in the Institute, a secret is a secret and it is always better to speak less than more.

  AFTER DINNER EVERYONE in the quadrangle sits in the yard to enjoy the cooling air. Mr. Pang and Mr. Du’s paralyzed mother are the only two people missing.

  The jasmine bushes in the yard are blooming like crazy that summer, the fragrance so strong that one could become dizzy if sitting too close to the bushes. A horde of wasps has built a heavy hive under the roof, buzzing around the grapevines and tasting the grapes before they are large enough for an early harvest. The sticky juice from the pierced grapes is as corrosive as the most poisonous liquid. If you sit under the grape trellis long enough, you would think that you could see the grapes rotting one cluster after another, in a blink their smooth rinds replaced by ugly scars.

  Mr. Du is the last one to sit down, after moving his orchids out of his room and carefully lining them under his window. Mr. Du is a big fan of orchids. What he raises are the most expensive species, the Gentleman’s Orchid. That summer a small pot of blooming Gentleman’s Orchid costs hundreds of yuan on the black market, more than the earnings of a worker for a year.

  “Old Du, be careful of your orchids,” Mr. Song says, waving his bamboo fan at a mosquito passing by. “Did you hear what happened last week in the Eastern Fourteen Alley? Someone broke into this old man’s house and robbed him of all his orchids, and stabbed the old man, too.”

  Mr. Du nods without answering, his face squeezed into a smile that makes him look like a wrinkled baby. He is a janitor in a nearby warehouse. Apart from the bed in which his old mother moans and curses all day, all the other furniture in their rooms is made of the cardboard boxes he has taken home from the warehouse. Sheets of old calendars are pasted on the outside. One time I went with Mrs. Pang to their room and saw my favorite actress, Chen Ch
ong, dangling from a cardboard cabinet. Underneath her smile were the printed words FIRST CLASS UREA, IMPORTED FROM JAPAN.

  “What’s the big fuss about the orchids?” Mrs. Song purses her lips. “I don’t see anything special about them.”

  “What do you know, Ma?” the third son says. “It’s said that they are Japanese orchids. Imported, understand? Just like Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic—Japanese products.”

  “Imported? No, no,” the oldest son says. “The orchids are raised here, so they are at most Japanese parts, Chinese assembled. ”

  Everybody laughs. Japanese brands have become the symbol of modern life in Beijing. At lower prices, people can buy appliances of Japanese parts assembled in China, and still be able to boast about their second-class luxuries.

  “Still, it is not worth losing one’s life for the orchids,” Mrs. Song says.

  “A bird is willing to die for a morsel of food. A man is willing to die for a penny of wealth,” Mrs. Pang sighs. “They do not see the flowers. They see money.”

  “Not everyone.” The second son points to Mr. Du. “Old Du here is an exception. Others raise the orchids for money. He is raising them as his wife and kids.”

  “Absolutely,” the first son says to Mr. Du. “You know, you have every right to fight for your orchids. We won’t blame you if you are killed by a robber. A man has to fight with someone who steals his wife and kids, right, Old Du?”

  All of the Songs laugh. Mr. Du smiles again and does not say a word. His old mother is shouting indistinct words from inside her room. He nods again and moves the orchids back to his room, as tenderly as if they were his wife and children.

  THAT NIGHT I can’t sleep. Mosquitoes dash outside the netting around my head like small bombers. I lie on one side of the bed until the bamboo mat becomes sticky from my sweat, and roll to the other side, feeling the patterns left on my thighs by the woven bamboo. I am waiting for the burglar to break into our quadrangle, running away with the orchids as dear to Mr. Du as his own wife and children, leaving Mr. Du in a pool of blood. For the first time, I start to miss our apartment, secure within the high wall of the Institute.