Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Boyang had not hidden his disinterest in having a child from his parents, and as far as he knew, they were fine with it: his sister had — as efficiently as befitted their parents’ standard — given birth to a pair of brilliant twins. His ambition, he knew, sufficed only to provide himself a comfortable life and allow him to be near his parents as they grew older. He did not feel stuck in the middle of the ladder; if anything, he felt lucky because of his track record of doing the right thing at the right time. He had taken his second year of college off to start a printing company when digital printing had just emerged in the country; after college, he had spent a couple of years working on a software program that input Chinese characters into computers, which he had sold to a big company when he became bored with programming; the stock market and the real estate market he had entered earlier than his peers, and now, with a real estate development project under his name and a couple of unrelated businesses he backed — an organic lavender farm on the outskirts of the city, with single-story vacation rentals nearby to attract trendy urbanites, and an oxygen bar in the central business district, where condensed air imported from Japan was offered at a high price to those who could afford its cleanness — Boyang felt complacent enough. He could see himself climbing a few more rungs, but he did not feel the urge to be in a different place from where he was now: purposefulness, in his view, was overrated. He had none of the potentially bad habits for a man of his status: he drank but not excessively; he was not into drugs; he kept a girl he could be rid of easily; he had little interest in anything with ideology behind it — he had declined to support a group of underground documentary filmmakers, and he had not bitten, either, when a so-called independent artist approached him for a photography project that involved placing naked men and women in orgiastic poses in various heavily contaminated industry sites.

A beep brought a text message from Coco. “Do not go out and find another woman,” it said, followed by a laughing emoticon, a scowling one, and a parade of kisses.

Poor Coco, already learning to turn everything into a joke at an age when living should be a more serious business for her. At Coco’s age, the girl Boyang had been dating, who would later become his wife and then someone else’s lover, had still been holding on to a belief in love and loyalty. At least Boyang should give his ex-wife credit for earning the right to laugh at her own past, as she had gone through the proper stages of dreaming, wakening, and being disappointed by a world that would never meet a young person’s expectations. What would Coco laugh at in ten or twenty years — her own inept jokes? Or worse, would she have to constantly focus on things that were laughable in others, so that she did not have a free moment to dwell upon her own foolishness? Boyang did not think Coco was heading toward a promising future, but there was little for him to do. He himself would not be in that future, and besides, he was not her savior.

His ex-wife had suffered remorse after the divorce. He was lucky to have not loved her sufficiently, luckier to have provided more than sufficiently: the apartment he had left her, unless the city’s real estate market completely crashed, would offer her enough if she was hit by hard times, and that alone had cleared him of any unease. Boyang did not mind being seen as a cad, but he would have liked to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on others. He would have liked to be, as the old saying goes, a bandit with principles.

And now, what a perfect message Coco had sent. All day he had been hesitating, going over the pros and cons of making a phone call to a stranger — a woman Coco’s age, a girl really. But now the message arrived, a plea masked as a warning that sounded to him more like an encouragement. Without further delay, he dialed the girl’s number.

After four rings, the girl picked up, sounding younger on the line than in person. He heard only her thin voice; there was no noise in the background. Where was she — in the small art shop not many people visited, or already off work, spending a quiet night in a rented room somewhere? Boyang gave her his name, and added that he was the one who had come into the shop the day before and bought, upon her recommendation, the double-dragon kite. “Or maybe you sold many kites yesterday,” he said. “In that case I’m one of the people who you convinced to buy a kite.”

“No, I remember you,” the girl said. “I only sold one kite yesterday.”

“Sold more today?”

“Not really,” the girl said, her voice low, as though apologetic. Or perhaps she was beginning to feel suspicious about the call? The day before, when she had gone into the storage room to find a matching case for the kite, Boyang had grabbed her phone from the counter and made a quick call to his phone, so he’d have her number. He wondered if she had noticed that. He did not know her name.

“Um, listen, I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in flying the kite this weekend,” Boyang said.

“But I don’t know how to fly a kite.”

A kite seller, Boyang wanted to say, should at least pretend to know how to fly one. He wanted to make a joke that she should deliver a more complete service package but decided it would sound too familiar, off-color even. The girl, as he remembered, had not responded well to any kind of glibness. He had noticed that she had the habit of looking into people’s eyes when she listened; her pupils, dark, rarely out of focus, made her look at once innocent and composed.

It didn’t matter that she did not fly kites, he told her. He himself was good at it; he only needed a helper. The girl hesitated and said she wasn’t sure. She had agreed to go to see an art exhibition with a friend on Saturday.

“What kind of exhibition?”

“Oh, nothing big,” she said, sounding embarrassed. By what, he wondered — by being caught lying, or by being chased, which she was not used to? “It’s only a small show about ancient architecture, and I thought it would be good to see it for work.”

The day before, between a business lunch and a meeting at a bar near the Front Sea, Boyang had wandered into a side alley where he knew there was a quaint old house, part museum and part retail space, associated with a folk arts and crafts organization. Possibly it would be a good place to look for some birthday presents for his mother, and, walking off the wine from the lunch, he could not find a better way to kill an hour. Boyang did not care much for ancient folk art, nor did his mother, but, as far as he could tell, she already had everything he’d normally offer. Vaguely he imagined finding her a useless replica of a pottery figure from the Han Dynasty, or a cast of miniature poets drinking at a famous party from the Jin Dynasty, carved exquisitely from walnut shells — something his mother would appreciate only because he had gone out of his way to get it for her. Love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.

The salesgirl had been the only one in the shop when Boyang entered, and when he said he was looking around, she asked him if he would like a tour of the exhibition of artisan kites. She had memorized the material and at times invited him to come closer to inspect one kite or another, to appreciate the fineness of a dragonfly’s transparent wings on a small, palm-sized silk kite, or to see the calligraphy on another — wild, dancing characters, which, if not for the girl, Boyang could not have deciphered. Secretly he slid a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, feeling bad for the girl, who had to pretend that he did not reek of alcohol. The girl’s hair was not dyed, and Boyang could not remember the last time he had seen such natural black in a girl’s hair. Coco’s was dyed reddish blond.