Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

When Boyang got back into his car, he saw that both his mother and Coco had called. He dialed his mother’s number and, after the call, sent a text to Coco saying he would be busy for the rest of the day. Coco and his mother were the two chief competitors for his attention these days. He had not deemed it worthwhile to introduce the two — one was too transient in his life, and the other, too permanent.

Going to his parents’ place after Aunt’s was a comfort. Remodeled as though for an advertisement in a consumer magazine, their home provided a perfect veil behind which the world of unpleasantness receded. Here more than elsewhere Boyang understood the significance of investing in trivialities: beautiful objects, like expensive drinks and entertaining acquaintances, demand that one think little and feel nothing beyond one’s immediate surroundings.

They had taken some friends out for dinner the night before, Boyang’s mother explained. They had too many leftovers, so she thought Boyang might as well come and get rid of the food for them. He laughed, saying he did not know he was their compost bin. His parents had become particular in their eating habits, obsessing over the health benefits, or lack thereof, of everything entering their bodies. He could see that they would order an excessive amount of food for their friends yet touch little themselves.

The topics at dinner were his sister’s American-born twins, the real estate prices in Beijing and in a coastal city where his parents were pondering purchasing a waterfront condo, and the inefficiency of their new housekeeper. Only when his mother had cleaned away the dishes did she ask, as though grasping a passing thought, if Boyang had heard of Shaoai’s death. By then, his father had gone into his study.

That he had kept in touch with Shaoai’s parents and had acted as caretaker when illnesses and deaths had beset their family — this Boyang had seen no reason to share with his parents. If they had suspected any connection, they had preferred not to know. The key to success, in his parents’ opinion, was the capacity to selectively live one’s life, to forget what one ought not to remember, to untangle oneself from lesser and irrelevant others, and to recognize the unnecessariness of human emotions. Fame and material gain are secondary though unsurprising, if one is able to choose the portion of one’s life to live with impersonal wisdom. For this belief they had, as an example, Boyang’s sister, who was a prominent physicist in America.

“So I heard,” Boyang said. Aunt would not have kept the death from the old neighbors, and it did not surprise him that one of them — or perhaps more than one — had called his parents. If there were any pleasure in delivering the news of death it would be that call, castigation barely masked by courteousness.

His mother returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea and passed one to him. He cringed at her nudging the conversation beyond the comfortable repertoire of their usual topics. He showed up whenever she summoned him; the best way to stay distanced, he believed, was to satisfy her every need.

“What do you think, then?” his mother said.

“Think of what?”

“The whole thing,” she said. “One must acknowledge the waste, no?”

“What waste?”

“Shaoai’s life, obviously,” his mother said, adjusting a single calla lily in a crystal vase on the dinner table. “But even if you take her out of the equation, others’ lives have been affected.”

What others, Boyang wanted to say to his mother, would be worth a moment of her thought? The chemical found in Shaoai’s blood had been taken from his mother’s laboratory; whether it had been an attempted murder, an unsuccessful suicide, or a freak accident had never been determined. His family did not talk about the case, but Boyang knew that his mother had never let go of her grudge.

“Do you mean your career went to waste?” Boyang asked. After the incident, the university had taken disciplinary action against his mother for her mismanagement of chemicals. It would have been an unpleasant incident, a small glitch in her otherwise stellar academic career, but she insisted on disputing the charge: every laboratory in the department was run according to outdated regulations, with chemicals available to all graduate students. It was a misfortune that a life had been damaged, she admitted; she was willing to be punished for allowing three teenage children to be in her lab unsupervised — a mismanagement of human beings rather than chemicals.

“If you want to look at my career, sure — that’s gone to waste for no reason.”

“But things have turned out all right for you,” Boyang said. “Better, you have to admit.” His mother had left the university and joined a pharmaceutical company, later purchased by an American company. With her flawless English, which she’d learned at a Catholic school, and several patents to her name, she earned an income three times what she would have made as a professor.

“But did I say I was speaking of myself?” she said. “Your assumption that I have only myself to think of is only a hypothesis, not a proven fact.”

“I don’t see anyone else worthy of your thought.”

“Not even you?”

“What do you mean?” The weakest comeback, Boyang thought: people only ask a question like that because they already know the answer.

“You don’t feel your life has been affected by Shaoai’s poisoning?”

What answer did she want to hear? “You get used to something like that,” he said. On second thought, he added, “No, I wouldn’t say her case has affected me in any substantial way.”

“Who wanted her to die?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me right. Who wanted to kill her back then? She didn’t seem like someone who would commit suicide, though certainly one of your little girlfriends, I can’t remember which one, hinted at that.”

In rehearsing scenarios of Shaoai’s death Boyang had never included his mother — but when does any parent hold a position in a child’s fantasy? Still, that his mother had paid attention, and that he had underestimated her awareness of the case, annoyed him. “I’m sure you understand that if, in all honesty, you tell me that you were the one who poisoned her, I wouldn’t say or do anything,” she said. “This conversation is purely for my curiosity.”

They were abiding by the same code, of maintaining the coexistence between two strangers, an intimacy — if their arrangement could be called that — cultivated with disciplined indifference. He rather liked his mother this way, and knew that in a sense he had never been her child; nor would she, in growing old, allow herself to become his charge. “I didn’t poison her,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

“You’d be much happier to have an answer. I’d be happier, too, if I could tell you for sure who poisoned her.”

“Well then, there are only two other possibilities. So, do you think it was Moran or Ruyu?”

He had asked himself the question over the years. He looked at his mother with a smile, careful that his face not betray him. “What do you think?”

“I didn’t know either of them.”

“There was no reason for you to know them,” Boyang said. “Or, for that matter, anyone.”

His mother, as he knew, was not the kind to dwell upon sarcasm. “I never really met Ruyu,” she said. “Moran of course I saw around, but I don’t remember her well. I don’t recall her being brilliant, am I right?”

“I doubt there is anyone brilliant enough for you.”

“Your sister is,” Boyang’s mother said. “But don’t distract me. You used to know them both well, so you must have an idea.”

“I don’t,” Boyang said.