Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Someone told a joke in the courtyard and laughter erupted, accompanied by clapping hands that hunted bloodthirsty mosquitoes in midair. In the last light of the day, early-rising bats darted around, their high-pitched screeches, both faint and shrill, unlike any other noise made by a living creature. Ruyu had never seen bats before, and considered these strange animals, with their blind and frantic flights at dusk, one thing she loved about Beijing. Even inside Grandpa’s small cube, one could occasionally catch a glimpse of a bat or two changing directions the moment when they were about to bump into the window, so abruptly yet so confidently, never making a mistake.

Aunt replaced an old coil of incense with a new one and lit it, the red tip the only live light in the room. Neither she nor Ruyu moved to turn on the light, and the old man’s gaunt face became less harsh in the falling dusk.

“I’ve never really asked you,” Aunt said after a moment, her voice dry, as if she were not certain of her right to have broken the silence. “Your grandaunts, how are they doing?”

“Good.”

“Have you written them?”

When Ruyu had first arrived, Aunt had pointed out the envelopes and stamps in the drawer of Ruyu’s new desk, though apart from a telegram she had sent her grandaunts about her safe arrival, she had not sent a letter: it was not expected of her. She did not want to admit any absence of communication now, so she only nodded vaguely, wondering if Aunt or Shaoai would monitor the numbers of stamps and envelopes in her drawer. Did she get a letter of reply from them, Aunt asked, and added that they — Uncle and Aunt — had written but had not heard from Ruyu’s grandaunts.

Ruyu said that she had not received a letter from her grandaunts, either, and found it annoying that Aunt seemed more disappointed by the silence from the province on Ruyu’s behalf than on her own. “They always know what they are doing. I’m sure they trust that you’re settling down well,” Aunt said. “Or the letter could’ve been held up somewhere. You never know.”

“It’s all right,” Ruyu said.

“Is there a phone stand near where they live? Will the people at the phone stand take messages, or will they be able to get your grandaunts for you? I can ask Uncle to take you to the post office to make a long distance call to them.”

“I don’t think they like to be phoned,” Ruyu said. They would not like to be written to, either. At the entrance of their apartment building, letters and postcards and newspapers were twice a day jammed into a wooden box painted green. The building’s residents, other than Ruyu and her grandaunts, would stop and flip through the mail, reading headlines or stealing a glance at other people’s postcards, which, drab colored and stamped with the green emblem of the post office, cost less to send than letters, and were preferred when privacy was not a concern. Once, in first grade, Ruyu had felt an urge, with her newly gained reading skills, to peek into the box. The letter on top of the pile was for a family on the third floor, but apart from that, she saw little. The younger of her grandaunts, who was walking up the stairs in front of her, stopped and studied her. There was no reproach in the old woman’s eyes, nor was anything said, but right away Ruyu understood that what she had done out of pointless curiosity was beneath what her grandaunts had raised her to be. “It’s really all right,” she said now. “My grandaunts will write if they need to.”

Aunt sighed and said certainly Ruyu knew them better. There was a tone of defeat in her voice, though Ruyu had inherited her grandaunts’ belief that people, especially the feebleminded, liked to see themselves entangled in minor pains and useless bewilderments; she had not the words to appease Aunt’s worry.

The old man, all the while breathing shallowly in the semidarkness, lost his patience. A deep grumbling threatened to become a full protest. Aunt switched on the ten-watt fluorescent tube dangling from the ceiling on two metal chains; the light made the bare room, its occupant, and its two visitors look ghastly pale. With the back of her hand, Aunt tested the old man’s bathwater, no doubt colder than lukewarm — but what difference would it make if it was not the perfect temperature? “Now you go and find your friends,” Aunt said. “Let me clean Grandpa before he gets irritated with me.”

Ruyu looked into the old man’s eyes once more before taking her leave, seeking an understanding she imagined to be there. She believed that he, like Ruyu herself, pitied Aunt, whose conversations with Uncle were often one-sided, with him nodding or mumbling agreement but never offering much in return. When Aunt talked to her daughter, Shaoai replied in a most unpleasant manner — if she replied at all — though Aunt seemed more resigned than offended by Shaoai’s sullenness. Why speak at all, Ruyu thought, when the people you were speaking with were either unfeeling walls or all-encompassing voids?

“Sometimes you wonder,” Aunt said to Grandpa when she heard the house door close behind Ruyu, “how that girl would’ve fared if her parents had left her at an orphanage instead.”

The old man listened. Living now with words locked away inside him, he liked to listen to his daughter-in-law talk. She knew it because on the days when she was not in the mood for talking, he would become agitated. Once upon a time he had not concealed his contempt for her chattiness, even though he’d been the talkative one in his own marriage. Nobody’s going to sell you off as a mute, he had often said to her, and had more than once told the neighbors that his son had married a woman afflicted with the talking consumption . But his own quiet, uncomplaining wife had long since died, his three married daughters were the caretakers of their own in-laws, and his son, who had inherited his mother’s reticence, was a poor companion: all he would do was clean and feed his father in silence. Sometimes Aunt felt vindictively joyful that she had not let her father-in-law shut her up. “I know, I know,” she said to him now. “It’s pointless to think that way. But still, wouldn’t you want to see a child like her be just a bit more normal?”

The old man made some noises in his throat, disagreeing.

“Of course you like her that way. What other child would have the patience to sit here with you?” Aunt stripped the old man of his undershirt and started to wipe his upper body, taking caution not to rub too hard on the half-dead skin or hurt the protruding bones underneath. Despite years of being a target for his mockery, she was fond of him, feeling a kinship that she had not felt toward her mother-in-law: quiet people kept her both in awe and perplexed. “And of course her grandaunts like her that way, too. They don’t bother to worry what she’ll be like when she goes out in the world because they won’t be around to see it. Just like you spoiled Shaoai, and now it’s me who’s to suffer the consequence.”

The old man closed his eyes, but Aunt knew he was listening.

“Why, you don’t want to hear it? All the same, where do you think Shaoai got the idea that she was free not to follow the rules? You didn’t teach your own children that, did you? You raised your daughters to be obedient,” Aunt said. She wondered if she, too, would one day instill some mischievous thoughts in her grandchild, so that together they could be conspirators against the child’s parents, but at once she chased away that fate-taunting thought like an unwelcome gnat. “Don’t think I’m chastising you for no reason. Do you remember the last time Shaoai came in to sit with you, to talk to you? For all I know, you and I and even her father don’t exist for her. Being a good daughter and granddaughter? Fulfilling her filial duties? What rotten ideas for her.”