Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“You missed my point,” Shaoai said. “I am only using her as an example. Or maybe she is the wrong example. But those people shot dead in Tiananmen Square? Have you found yourself thinking, for even a moment, about them or their families? Have you asked Moran or Boyang about what they have seen or heard? No, and no, because those dead people have nothing to do with you; hence, they are nothing to you. Rest assured, you are not the only one who maintains that stance. More and more people will choose that attitude now that a revolution has been crushed, but that does not exempt you. In fact, I have to say, you must have been born a heartless person, or else you must have been thoroughly brainwashed by your grandaunts. Either way, I find your lack of interest in anything but your own little faith to be more than horrifying. Of course you can shrug your dainty shoulders and say, what does your opinion have to do with me?”

Ruyu did not speak when Shaoai finished her monologue. Her silence seemed to infuriate Shaoai even more. “Well?” she said. “Have you made up your mind not to condescend to answer me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Ruyu said.

“It’s not what I want you to say. It’s what you want to say for yourself. Come on, defend yourself. Defend your grandaunts. Let’s at least have some fair play.”

“My grandaunts don’t need me to defend them.”

“And you yourself?”

“I’m fine with your thinking of me as anything, or nothing,” Ruyu said, and was relieved to hear Yening’s shuffling steps nearing the bedroom. Before Shaoai could find more words, Yening entered the room. “Why the silence all of a sudden?” she said to the dark room, laughing lightly. “I thought you two were having a good time.”

The next day, Shaoai helped Yening move back into her dorm, and when she did not return for dinner, Aunt wondered aloud if she had missed Shaoai saying that she was going to move back into the dorm that day, too. “You’d think I wouldn’t miss something so important,” Aunt said to Uncle, who comforted her, and said he himself had missed it too, if that indeed was Shaoai’s plan.

When Aunt asked Ruyu, she said she didn’t know of any such plan, either. Perhaps in Shaoai’s eyes, Ruyu was like one of those birds that occupied another bird’s nest; but the thought did not bring Ruyu any remorse, nor did it diminish her relief that soon Shaoai would move out of the house, and she would have a bedroom to herself.

Just as the dinner was ending, Shaoai returned and with a stern face announced that she had decided to commute for the new semester. Uncle and Aunt exchanged a nervous look. “Did any school official talk to you?” Aunt asked.

“No.”

“Does that mean everything will be all right?”

“Nothing is ever all right, if you ask me,” Shaoai said.

“But the school — will they … will you …” Aunt tried in vain to find the right words.

“You’re worried that I’ll be expelled? And I won’t graduate and won’t have a job and will remain a burden to you forever?” Shaoai said. “Let me say this: there are worse things in the world than not graduating with a useless degree in international trade and relations.”

Aunt and Uncle watched as Shaoai stormed back to her bedroom. Had there been a door, Ruyu thought, Shaoai would have banged it shut as befitting her drama, and, as though the same thought had occurred to Shaoai, she came out of the bedroom and said that it was stuffy in the house and she was going for a walk. Aunt glanced at the clock on the wall and was about to say something, but Uncle shook his head discreetly at her. A moment later, the door was slammed shut; the bell on top, unconstrained, swung back and forth furiously.

No one said anything, but when Aunt looked up and caught Ruyu’s eyes, she sighed and said she wished that they could offer her a more peaceful stay, and that Shaoai were a better companion. “Had your grandaunts known what kind of failures we are as parents, they might not have sent you to us,” Aunt said, looking dejected.

“Every family has a book of challenging fate written out for them,” Uncle said, solicitously looking up at Ruyu, pleading for her to agree with the cliché, so she did, saying that Aunt should not think too much, and that everything would turn out all right in the end. Eager to believe someone — preferably someone other than her husband — Aunt seemed to have found comfort in Ruyu’s words, and repeated the saying herself as though to further console the other two in the room. When Grandpa made the noises demanding his supper, Aunt sprang into action. With a tender sadness, Uncle watched Aunt fill a bowl of gruel, adding soft, fermented tofu on top. At least they had each other, Ruyu thought, just as her grandaunts had each other.

When Aunt was out of the room, Uncle said to the half-empty platters on the table, “It’s kind of you to be understanding.”

For a moment Ruyu wondered if Uncle, who so rarely initiated a conversation, was in fact talking to her. She looked at him, but he only smiled at the unfinished dishes, the same way he smiled when the neighbors teased someone in the yard, or when Aunt complained about the weather. Ruyu did not know if he expected an answer from her.

“Shaoai has been headstrong from the very beginning,” Uncle continued. “A difficult baby, you would say. We talked about having another child after her — Aunt wanted another one — but I was so frightened that I could not imagine having to go through everything a second time.”

“But you might have had a different child,” Ruyu said. “I’ve heard people say that siblings from the same parents can have opposite temperaments.”

Uncle sighed. “Many told us that, too, but I didn’t believe them. To be honest, I now regret my stubbornness. If we had had a second child, he or she might have made it easier for us now, don’t you think? At least Shaoai would have learned how to be nice to someone younger than she. We’re sorry that she doesn’t really consider you part of the family.”

Ruyu shook her head as though to say that these things did not matter. Had Uncle and Aunt had another child — a boy, for instance — her grandaunts might have thought the household unfit for Ruyu. She would then have been sent to another place to live, with a different set of people … but it was useless to pursue such thoughts. She stood up and said she would put the leftovers away if Uncle had finished his meal.

The last days of summer were always sunny. The August heat, already abating, was still intense enough to create an illusion of never-endedness — of a moment, a day, a season. Cicadas, stubborn creatures, having spent long years underground, would not forsake their posts in the trees; yet their days were numbered: dusk muted their singing and brought, along with the first breeze of the evening, the autumnal song of the crickets.

One leaf drops and you know autumn is here ; on the morning of the last day of August, Ruyu heard Boyang’s grandmother exchange the cliché with a neighbor in the courtyard. The season’s end seemed to have brought out the sentimental side of people, as though everyone was preparing for a small part of himself to die with the summer lives. Watermelon Wen, upon hearing the old woman’s words, chanted in a drawn-out falsetto an opera passage about an old general’s grief over a tree that had aged during his fifty-year war career; Wen’s twin boys imitated their father from behind the screen door and then fell to giggling, cutting the performance short and diluting the sadness.

Wait until you fall in love with the autumn in Beijing, neighbors kept telling Ruyu, or else they would say, wait until you fall in love with Beijing this autumn. The notion that someone would fall in love with a place or a time was new to Ruyu; she might have tolerated it better were it not for the certainty of everyone about how she should feel. A season was a season for her — no more, no less, because that was the way time was for her grandaunts, each day a replica of the previous day; a place, any place, was merely a spot for resting during one’s migration from beginning to end. Only in a drama would an old man lay his hand on the coarse bark of a tree and mourn in advance his own death; in real life, a man’s grief for himself was as wordless as the dim light in Grandpa’s eyes, the passing days pooling into a stale puddle around his dying body.