Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

The old man refused to open his eyes. Aunt took off his pants and underpants, and cleaned him gently around his crotch while holding her breath. When she finished, she told the old man that she would now turn him around. He did not make a sound, and she saw wet lines left by tears traveling from the corners of his eyes to both temples. Her heart softened a little, but right away a bleakness snuck in. She shushed him; it did no one any good to be sentimental. “Don’t you dare think too much of it. We must have done something awful to Shaoai in our last lives, so she’s here to make us suffer. Who knows? You might have done that girl Ruyu a favor in your last life for her to care about you,” Aunt said. “She must have done some good deed in her last life, so she has her grandaunts to see about her future rather than being left in an orphanage.”

But what kind of future would it be, Aunt wondered, shaking her head while putting an arm under the legs of the old man, who seemed to get lighter each day. She wished she had someone to talk to besides her husband and neighbors about Ruyu’s grandaunts, but to them the two women were only her distant cousins. That she had once been arranged to become their sister-in-law she had not told anyone.

The two sisters had been born to the third concubine of a successful silk merchant. Their mother had died while giving birth to their younger brother, and the two girls, aged twelve and ten then, had more or less raised the boy, fighting, without their mother’s shelter, to maintain as much of their status as they could within the large family, where four other wives and fifteen siblings vied for attention and wealth. As teenagers, they had converted to Catholicism, and Aunt had suspected that the Church, because of its connection to the West and with the power beyond the local government, had factored beneficially in their battle for themselves within the family. When their brother reached age fifteen, the two sisters gained independence and moved back with their brother to the home village of their mother. How they had managed to do this no one knew for sure, but when they had moved back — two spinsters with money but no prospect of marrying, and a boy handsome and educated yet too sophisticated for country life — the villagers treated them with suspicion and awe. Soon, the boy was enrolled as a cadet in a military academy in the capital, but before he left, the two sisters arranged an engagement between the boy and a cousin twice removed.

Sometimes Aunt wondered why she, among her sisters and cousins, had been chosen. At nine, she had not been the prettiest, nor the most gifted at needlework. Relocating, with a small bag of clothes and a pillow, to the sisters’ house across the village had not been too difficult a change — she was to celebrate her good fortune, her parents had explained to her. From the departure of a few playmates who had been sent to other villages as child brides, she knew things could have been worse. Living with strangers one did not understand could be a harsh experience for some children, but she had been known as the most cheerful and thick-skinned of her peers. She had never felt unhappy with her new guardians. Strict as they had been with her, they had also been fair, and had taught her to read, which had made everything possible when she had later decided to go to nursing school.

“The foolish are assigned the good fortune of the fools, the weak, the good fortunes of the weaklings,” Aunt said now, thinking of her own mysterious lot. These must be nonsensical words to the old man, but it comforted her to quote other people’s wisdom when she herself was perplexed. Her engagement to the young man had lasted five years, during which time she had seen him only twice when he had been on leave from the academy: shortly after graduating, he, serving as a cannoneer, had to flee to Taiwan when his side lost the civil war.

Compared to his sisters’ loss, hers had been negligible, even though some older villagers had shaken their heads at her fate, widowed before wedded. When it became obvious that the separation across the Strait could be lifelong, the sisters told her that it was pointless for her to stay with them. Not wanting to cling to them, yet not being able to stop thinking of herself as part of their life, she had moved on but had never entirely forgotten them as they had expected her to. Once a year she wrote to them; after her marriage and later Shaoai’s birth, she’d enclosed a picture of her family each year. They wrote back to her too, courteous letters bearing their goodwill toward her and her family and dutifully recounting changes in their lives — their taking up residence in a provincial city and joining a neighborhood workshop to produce embroidered silk scarves so they could be part of the working class, their retirement, and, a year later, their discovering a baby left at their door. The years she had lived with the sisters, she serving them partly as a handmaid, they in turn educating her, had never been brought up in the letters, the man who had connected her to them left unmentioned. Once, during the sixth year of the Cultural Revolution, a provincial official, one of those traveling investigators with menacing power, came to the clinic and asked to talk to Aunt. Had she heard anything about the women’s brother, who had fled China, he wanted to know, indicating that it was a serious matter, with some Taiwanese or American spies involved. Aunt had denied any knowledge; her lie to the stranger had hurt her conscience less than her decision not to speak of the stranger’s visit with her in-laws and her husband: a minor secret too late to be revealed could expand its roots. For a while Aunt had difficulty sleeping: the two sisters and her childhood spent with them taking up too much space in her heart, until she started to take sleeping pills to drive out old memories.

How the two women managed to pull through the many revolutions unscathed Aunt did not know — though who could be certain that they were unscathed? In their letters they did not mention any hardship, and after a while, when they continued to write to her once a year, she was happy that they had not been thrown into a prison somewhere and left to die. Perhaps their god had truly ensured their safety in a hostile world. When she had lived with the sisters, they, no longer having a church to attend in the village, had been carrying out their own rituals of worship; twice a year they traveled to meet their old priest, though his god certainly had not looked after him well, as he had been executed right around ’49 as a counterrevolutionary by the new, Communist government. What the sisters had taught Aunt about their faith had been partially absorbed as a superstition by her, so she would never say no, in her heart, to the possibility of a deity from above. Imagine, she could have been converted by them, had her fiancé not fled China; imagine, on top of being the wife of a Nationalist officer, she could have been a counterrevolutionary by being a religious person!

There was little sense in such brooding. Still, buttoning the old man’s shirt and tucking him under the blanket, Aunt wished she could tell him that it was his good fortune that she was taking care of him now, that she would be the one to see him off when it was his time to exit this world. She could have been married off to a young Nationalist officer and left the country with him; her siblings and cousins would have been questioned during the Cultural Revolution, and they would have thought it their misfortune to have a sister who was an enemy of the country. I could’ve been another person, she thought of saying to the old man, but he had already been upset once this evening. She patted his cheek and told him to rest before she came back with the evening meal.