Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

When he finally calmed down, Ruyu said that she would not call the police — with his PhD almost finished and a job offer from a former colleague of his advisor’s, he could not afford a criminal record, which would eliminate his dream of obtaining a green card in this country. In return, she said, she wanted a divorce and enough money for the next two years of tuition and living expenses. He did not have that kind of money, the man said, and Ruyu replied that she lived simply and did not need much; if he would not agree, she said, she would have to take care of matters by other means.

Scheming, he had called her in an email after their divorce, listing all the things she had done to ensnare him. The sincerity of his fury made Ruyu wonder about the difference between what one was and what one appeared to the world. She had not thought of herself as a calculating person, not because she was better than that, but because she did not find anything in life worth scheming for. She had asked little and would have been fine given less, but to want less, to want nothing, was, in the end, a kind of greediness her husband could not live with.

Ruyu had not thought of marrying again after that. She had gone on to finish her degree in accounting, as she had seen no need to change course. When she graduated, it became clear that she would either have to be ambitious and find a job with a big firm that supported a working visa, or find a legal way to stay in the country so she could work at a job that was less demanding.

Sometimes Ruyu wondered if her second marriage could have lasted longer, even forever, if circumstances had worked out for them. If anyone had the right to complain about her scheming, it could only be Paul, whom Ruyu had met before graduation and had decided to date wholeheartedly for her future stay in this country: the wedding had taken place before her one-year post-degree stay in the country expired.

Paul had grown up in North Dakota, and had on a whim transferred to a state university in California after two years at a local college; he’d wanted to see a bigger world than his hometown of two thousand people. After graduation, he had found a job at the height of the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley, but, neither brilliant nor ambitious enough, he had been unable to find another job after the bubble burst. By then, Ruyu had gotten her green card through the marriage and was working part-time as a bookkeeper for a few local businesses. Unlike her first husband, Paul had never considered her work essential to household finances; his dream was to make a decent amount of money when his company went IPO, and then to have three or four children to keep Ruyu busy at home. But when that dream had broken, he could not build another dream. And then there were his parents, always there, always hoping that one of their children — all four had gone away, all to big cities — would come back to be part of the family business, which sold kayaking equipment and managed tours for adventurous vacationers.

It was a painful decision for him, too, Paul said; he hoped that she understood in the long run it would be the best for them.

Homecoming of any sort struck Ruyu as a sad comedy. Her first year in America, her ex-husband had brought her to see the university’s homecoming parade, and one float, with a group of older men dressed up in matching suits and waving and grinning under the school banner, made her feel embarrassed for both the men on the float and those who had to watch them with cheers. Human beings are bad actors, but the worst are those who offer more than is required of them: heroes in the shoes of extras. But perhaps that is what people cannot stop doing — inventing consequences because our smallness is too heavy for us to bear. Afterward, in class, Ruyu would sometimes study her classmates and wonder who, among those boys who did not take off their baseball caps and did not stop chewing gum when the professor spoke from the podium, would grow up to be the men on the float.

Ruyu had flatly refused to join in Paul’s homecoming. His picture of their future was claustrophobic for her. There would be the creeks he had waded and fished when he was young, the ice cream stand where he had bought a cone for a high school girlfriend; Ruyu did not mind that he had a past, but she refused to be absorbed into his, or anyone else’s, history.

Compared to her first divorce, the second was more subdued, less dramatic. She had been fond of Paul, even if she had not loved him; she had learned to be among people — his friends and colleagues — and to dress in a way that made him proud, and to be witty, even flirty at times. If anything, the five years of marriage had taught her that she could fit into any role if she made an effort, though nothing satisfied her more than staying at a distance, watching people until she could see through them. Paul’s dream to become a millionaire, unrealized, had not saddened her. She had not minded seeing his folly confirmed; she felt pleased, even, as she would feel when she saw any mortal’s falling.

The water in the bathtub had turned lukewarm, and reluctantly Ruyu pulled herself out of it. The concerto had long since ended, but she had not noticed the quiet until then. In the vast world out there, those who had crossed paths with her were living in their safe cocoons; and those who had died — her grandaunts, for instance, or Uncle, or Shaoai — what had become of them?

Ruyu did not miss her grandaunts in the sense she had never missed her parents. The four of them had taken enough from her; what had been left was to be either cherished or else discarded with an insensitiveness that matched theirs. Uncle’s death had caused, however transient, a ripple of melancholy in Ruyu’s heart, followed by relief: Uncle had been one of those whose lives were saturated by unwarranted sadness, and what could be a kinder antidote to sadness than death itself?

Shaoai’s death, granted mercifully at long last, must be an antidote, too. Despite sounding ruthless, Ruyu had meant it when she told Edwin that Shaoai’s death had come too late, not only for the one waiting for death but for those around her. With each year’s passing Ruyu was a year older than Shaoai, whom she had known only as a young woman. A strange feeling stirred in Ruyu when the thought occurred that Shaoai had been young at the time; innocent even, but was it real innocence when it could be — and had been — used to taint another person? And then, the worst battle, Ruyu thought, is fought between the innocent: not knowing how to spare themselves, they don’t for a moment feel mercy for the other.

The celebration in Tiananmen Square on October 1 came and went; eventless, Moran could not help thinking with disappointment, as she had wondered if people would find ways to protest the event, which took place only four months after the bloodshed there. But bloodshed, even if it hadn’t been forgotten, cast little shadow on this day. There was no one climbing up the pole of the streetlight to shout out slogans, nor was there any organized sabotage — a homemade explosive tube thrown into the crowd not to hurt people but to cause havoc, a false alarm message to deceive people into an evacuation — as she and Boyang had wishfully imagined.

The only drama of the day happened earlier in the afternoon. When they gathered at the school, Headmistress Liu distributed two lipsticks to every homeroom, saying it was a district order that the girls look more festive. No one pointed out that wearing makeup was prohibited in school, as was clearly written in the students’ manual. When it was Ruyu’s turn, she passed the tube to the next girl in line without applying it.

“But why?” asked the class monitor. “It’s not poisonous.”

Moran bristled, ready to defend her friend. Ruyu was not one to make trouble and attract undue attention to herself, even though she had not put on a festive dress as instructed. She had on, for the day, a long-sleeved cotton smock, greenish gray, one of those she had brought with her from home; the only color about her, bright against her anemic skin, was the red gauze required for the dancing, which — unlike the other girls who wore the gauze as a scarf or a headband or even as a flower on their chest — she wound around her wrist.