Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Before they parted, Josef asked Moran if she had any plans for her first Thanksgiving in America. She said no, and he asked her if she would like to join his family for the holiday. He had not mentioned that it would be the first one for him and his children without Alena, but Moran had guessed it. Had she accepted the invitation because other people’s wounds had always been more of a calling, a reason for her to be? After the divorce, Moran acquired the habit of looking at everything in their relationship with scrutiny. After all, their two years of dating and three years of marriage — a story preserved completely as though in amber, which had no connection to her life in China — was the only one for which she could find a beginning and an end; yet even this simple tale made little sense when she studied it closely. What if she had found an excuse to decline Josef’s invitation, as she had always done with similar invitations in those days, and ever since?

But back in that coffee shop, it had felt only natural to say yes to Josef, because it had been good of him to think of inviting her, a newcomer in a foreign land. When she gave him her phone number, she told him her real name.

“Which name would you prefer to go by?” Josef asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, though she knew it did.

“Well then, we’ll call you Moran,” Josef said, and she noticed that he had included his family in the sentence. “Does your name have a meaning? I heard every Chinese name has a meaning to go with it.”

There could be many different Chinese characters for a name like hers, she explained. The characters her parents had chosen for her meant quietness. “Silence?” she tried again, sounding out the word, but then said the meaning was more like reticence. “It means for someone to choose not to express an opinion, to refrain from speaking.”

What an odd name to give to a child, she waited for Josef to say, but he only nodded, as though there were nothing strange about it. She wished, then, that she had insisted on Lara, who would have been a different person: attractive, impertinent, mysterious.

When Moran had left China, she had known that she would never return, though this she had not told her parents; nor had she revealed it to Boyang, when she had asked him to arrange for her to see Shaoai a few days before her flight. They had been strangers to each other then: Moran had chosen to go to a university in Guangzhou, the farthest she could get from Beijing; Boyang and Ruyu had enrolled at the same university in Beijing, though in their second year, Ruyu had abruptly given up her study and married a man to go to America.

Uncle and Aunt must have been told about Moran’s visit that day, as they had both left before her arrival, leaving Shaoai in the care of Boyang, who helped her move around with his strong arms and coaxing words. The chemical, having destroyed much of Shaoai’s brain, had left her near blind and with the intelligence of a three-year-old. Unable to see well, Shaoai had come to where Moran was sitting on the edge of a chair and put her face close, as though she could only see a mouth, a nose, or a patch of skin at a time. Shaoai’s mumbling was incoherent, and her mood swings — from laughing to crying to whimpering — seemed neither to embarrass nor to distress Boyang. His face, having a harshness Moran did not remember seeing before, was no longer boyish, and she felt intimidated by what she sensed behind his tender authority toward Shaoai and his flawless courteousness toward Moran herself: this was someone who had found all the solutions he needed for his life, and she, among others, would be sacrificed if she hindered him in any way.

The visit had not lasted long. Shaoai’s dangerous plumpness, and the unexpectedness of her bumping from one corner of the room to another, made Moran jumpy, and she could see that Boyang had no intention of helping her; rather, he seemed to take a kind of vicious pleasure in Moran’s discomfort. Years ago he had given her the ostensible reason for the end of their friendship: she had loved him more than as a childhood companion, and in doing so she had been the one most responsible for an unresolvable crime.

Had Moran been a different person she would have confronted his injustice in that apartment: it is easier to hold a person accountable for a tragedy than to hold fate, which defeats everyone impartially, accountable. But pride held her back. She did not want to be seen as begging for forgiveness.

When he saw her to the door, he slipped her his business card. “Don’t ever forget us,” he said slowly, and before she said anything, he closed the door behind her.

He had known her well enough to put such a curse on her, and all she could come up with in her own defense was not to think about what she could not forget. If forgetting is the art of eliminating a person, a place, from one’s history, Moran knew she would never become a master at it. Rather, she was like a diligent craftsman, and never gave up a moment of vigilance in practicing the lesser art of not looking back, not thinking about the past.

But it would have been different for someone named Lara, who would choose what to forget from her past, and what to carry on for a better life. Long after the divorce, Moran maintained the habit of giving her name as Lara to the Starbucks baristas. She had once met another Lara at Logan airport, both of them waiting for their coffees, both stepping forward when summoned. The other Lara said her parents had gone through a period of thinking that everything Russian was holy, and had named her Larissa — Lara — after the heroine of a Russian novel. Later, her parents left their hippie-hood behind and gave her younger sisters more normal names: Jennifer, Molly, Aimee.

It was odd, Moran thought as she buckled herself in and waited for the plane to take off, how one could become a collector of irrelevant memories. Easily she could recall the other Lara from the airport: her full head of red hair, her tired eyes when she talked about her parents, who were “wintering”—Lara’s word — in Florida. She was not particularly close to them, Lara had said; none of the four siblings was. “A psychologist friend keeps telling me: the refrigerator is empty; stop going to it,” Lara had said, gulping down her coffee with a hungry vehemence.

Sister Lan and Brother Zechen ,

Your two letters, written respectively on August 5 and August 17, have reached us safely, and we have read them with care. We thank you for receiving Ruyu into your family, and all arrangements are more than satisfactory to us. We have sent two hundred yuan for October and November via postal order. Do not feel obliged to telegraph unless the money does not arrive .

Ruyu has written us, and we believe she is happily settled. As you said, she is an easy child to care for, but we would appreciate it if, from time to time, you remind her of her goal. Regarding her future, nothing matters more to us, and thus to her, than that she goes to America; we would be grateful if you ensure that she spends enough time studying and practicing the accordion. We are not particularly interested in the so-called well-roundedness of a person’s character, as the schools these days seem to advocate, but we must stress that good grades and special talents in music are essential in her case .

We thus conclude our letter with our best regards. Seeing our words is like seeing us in person .

Sister Wenlu and Sister Wenshu

2nd of September, ’89

Ruyu ,

Your letter, written on August 24, has arrived safely, and we have read it with care. We are pleased that you have settled down, and that Aunt and Uncle and Shaoai are nice and caring, and that you have made friends .