Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Remember the disassembled hand grenade in second grade?” he imagined starting an email to Moran — with an appeal to nostalgia she could not possibly ignore. Would she feel the obligation to write him back if he did not mention Shaoai or Ruyu but made the note about him and her? Once upon a time — if he tried to convince himself, could he convince her, too? — there had been a tale, or a tale in the making, about them: did she forget that? No, she couldn’t possibly.

Violently he erased the maudlin note from his mind. To have treated someone badly and to have refused to acknowledge that mistreatment — Boyang wondered if in his friendship with Moran he saw the nascent self he would eventually turn into: selfish but not enough to be immune to the pains caused by his selfishness; adamant in refusing to suffer yet not blind enough to others’ suffering.

Boyang had known, even when they were young, that Moran’s feeling toward him had been more than a friend’s or a sibling’s. That he had never encouraged her was his excuse to forgive himself; all the same, when the poisoning had happened, when madness and loss had overtaken their lives, he had not suppressed his urge to hurt Moran — to punish her for her love, for being alive, healthy, and for being a good person.

What kind of man would it make him if he insisted on bringing the past into fresh focus? Boyang had not been in touch with Moran’s parents over the years but had heard from old neighbors that they were well traveled, so Moran must have had a solid life elsewhere with enough good things — a husband, a career, two or three children (as she had loved children, and had always been patient with the younger kids in the neighborhood) — to prefer not to share his retrospection.

On Sunday, Boyang decided to arrive a few minutes late for his date with Sizhuo. He had taken a taxi, not wanting to risk having to drive the girl home — or to his place. The latter was unlikely, he decided: the right thing was to see her off to her place. Coco had left plenty of traces in his car as she had done in his apartment, an animal marking its territory. It would be a hassle to have to clean up for a first date.

Boyang asked the driver to drop him off on the opposite bank of the Front Sea. He took a walk near the water, then crossed the arched stone bridge, where a tour guide was speaking a memorized script, explaining in heavily accented English to a group of foreigners the origin of the bridge’s name — Silver Ingot — with such seriousness, as though it mattered to those pale-skinned foreigners that the bridge had been built in the Yuan Dynasty, when the Mongolians ruled Beijing, and not (as usually and mistakenly thought) in the Ming Dynasty.

To whom did the dynasties matter now? Boyang thought of pointing out to the tour guide the misjudged faith in her audience. For Coco and her friends, what happened twenty years ago was as ancient as the events of two hundred or two thousand years ago.

In middle school, Moran and Boyang had become intensely interested in their city. They had combed through the used-book market near Confucius Temple and had pooled their allowances to buy all the books they could afford on the subjects of Beijing’s history, architecture, and generations of anecdotes. Some of the books were fifty or sixty years old, some over a hundred, their thin yellow pages brittle to the touch; many bore personal stamps or signatures of their former owners inside the covers. Moran and Boyang had been eager to know their city in a way that their peers would find strange, or even perverted , as the youthful slang had it then, yet they had been proud of themselves, as though they alone had discovered the city, and they alone lived in it. After school, they would hide in Boyang’s bedroom and tell everyone they were doing homework, while they were reading through the old books, relishing the illustrations of different decorations on old, latticed windows, memorizing histories and tales associated with streets and plazas and temples. To whom had those books belonged before they had come to them, Boyang wondered now. He was surprised such a question had not occurred to them at the time; they had taken the books as their own with the same ease — perhaps known only to youthful minds that are not tainted by self-doubts or corrupted by the distrust of the world — as they had taken the histories and beauties of the city as their own.

The summer Ruyu arrived seemed the perfect time for them to show off their expertise: they brought her to see the execution crossroads, where a hundred years earlier people had gathered to watch a public beheading, applauding when the feat had been completed; they showed her a run-down temple where two pine trees, nine hundred years old, had grown into a pair of inseparable twins; they pointed out the earthen sculptures at the eaves of old houses, different patterns indicating the different statuses of the owners. And above all, they spent long afternoons under the willow trees here on the waterfront of the Front Sea or Back Sea, talking — about what, Boyang had no recollection now. What could have made them think that Ruyu would one day love what they had passionately loved? What had been on her mind that summer when she had come to them? Pompous, incurious, he and Moran must have made the mistake that almost every young person makes at one time or another: they had never for a moment seen Ruyu as anything other than what they wanted her to be, an orphan whom they would adopt with their friendship. They had both been enchanted by her, captivated even, and they had been in a rush to offer all they had — the long history of the city, the short history of their own existence — because they could not see any other way to be of consequence to her.

First love is at times dangerous, opening in our hearts an abyss of uncertainty and despair; or else it is uncomplimentary — how many of us can look back at our first loves without laughing at our foolishness, or else cringing at our insensibilities? But most first loves peter out without dragging a life down with them. A death, though twenty-one years too late, had nevertheless become part of his first love; it was like having died from losing one’s virginity — Boyang thought with sarcasm — unfortunate to the extreme of being comical.

A young couple walked past him, a Chinese woman hanging on to a white man’s arm with both hands, he keeping his hands stubbornly jammed in his coat pockets. The woman said something to the man, looking up at him with the eagerness of a child seeking approval, and the man only nodded absentmindedly. In the light of the street lamp, she looked not much older than Coco, and she looked very much like Coco, with her hair dyed blond, her face and neck powdered too pale, and her facial expressions exaggeratedly dollish. Boyang had a friend who ran an unofficial agency that pimped foreigners to businesses needing a white face or a cluster of white faces to impersonate potential collaborators and funders from abroad. At least he should give Coco credit for not being so stupid as to bet her future on some useless white man mining for gold in this city — though, to think about it, what difference did it make, since Coco had put her stakes on someone both she and he knew was not to be trusted?

Even though Boyang himself had foreseen the development of this place long before it had taken off, he felt resentful looking at the lakes and surrounding areas, which had become a sort of cultural magnet, where chic white-collar workers, expats of all nationalities, tourists, and imitators of every kind converged — youths with boldly dyed Mohawks or dreadlocks, fashionable women toting designer bags and openly assessing the authenticity of one another’s possessions, an avant-garde artist dressed in a gray monk’s robe and wearing a long beard, looking sagely ancient, except that he made sure to always be seen with two or three beautiful young women fluttering around like butterflies. What draws you here, Boyang wanted to grab someone’s shoulder and ask; what makes you leave your country, your city, your neighborhood, and come here to be part of this display of self-importance? Once upon a time, this had just been another neighborhood where people lived out their minor tragedies and comedies. Now it was called the sexiest spot in Beijing, as Boyang had read in tourist brochures. He wondered what Moran would have thought, had she come back and seen their childhood place transformed into the center stage of a masquerade party. But she must have been to other places like this, participated in the same nonsense shows elsewhere. He imagined her sitting in a plaza in Rome, or at a sidewalk café in Paris: she would have read enough about those places, and would idly tell an anecdote or two to the person next to her, laughing more than smiling because she was not the kind of woman who constrained her joy just to look elegant. To passersby, she would be the face of the carefree, and in someone’s memory of that city she would live on. Why not come back then, Boyang wished he could ask her now. Why not sit by the Front Sea and tell a visitor about the princess whose arm the emperor had cut off when the rebels entered Beijing because he could not stand the thought of her falling into the hands of savage creatures? He had meant to kill the fifteen-year-old princess, but she had raised an arm in defense and had begged for her life; at the sight of her gushing wound he had cried and said it was her misfortune to be born into the imperial family. Boyang remembered Moran telling the story to Ruyu that summer. They had been standing next to the tree where the emperor had hanged himself when he could not bring himself to kill his favorite daughter. The end of the Ming Dynasty , he remembered the exact words Moran had used, her solemnness too sincere even for him to laugh at her now. Ruyu had acted nonchalant; all the same she had reached over the perimeter fence, trying to pick a leaf off the ancient tree, but it was too far for her to reach.