Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

After a pause, Moran poked Boyang, so he shook his head and said that it was late, and they all needed to go to bed soon. Shaoai snickered and mumbled something. The three friends walked back quietly, the festive mood of the night gone, exhaustion overwhelming them like a flood.

Moran’s mother had stayed up waiting for her, and when she entered the house, her mother brought her a bowl of millet porridge with chestnuts. “What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran asked, and her mother only pointed at the bowl and said to finish it before it got cold.

Moran was not hungry, but she knew she would never get any news out of her mother if she did not convince her mother that she was well fed. At the table, Moran’s mother watched attentively her daughter’s every morsel; when she saw that Moran had eaten enough, she revealed the news that Shaoai had been expelled from the university. The notice had been mailed to her parents a week earlier, but Shaoai must have intercepted it. Earlier that day she had gone back to the university dorm and returned with two traveling bags of belongings. Only then had she told her parents the news. “Shaoai’s mother fainted and bumped her head on a table corner,” Moran’s mother said. “Good thing it was not too serious. Teacher Li and I spent some time with her this evening.”

“How is Aunt now?”

“Better, I think. It was just a moment of overwhelming distress that went to her head,” Moran’s mother said. “You know she’s not the weak kind who can’t live with a little disaster. None of our generation is that weak.”

“What will they do?”

“Who?”

“Aunt and Uncle.”

“What can they do? Shaoai was expelled for political reasons — which work unit would dare to hire her? I told her mother at least she had not been shot dead on the Square. At least she had not been arrested and thrown into a prison somewhere. You ought always to look at the positive side.”

Moran laid the spoon next to the bowl. Her mother sighed. “Between you and me — and really, don’t say this to Aunt or the others — but don’t you think Shaoai is partially responsible? What’s wrong with recanting? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would have done that. It’s her parents’ bad luck to have such a stubborn daughter.”

“But isn’t that what makes Shaoai a better person than most people?” Moran asked. Shaoai would have scoffed at the lipstick assigned to them and called it demeaning; she would not have put on a silky dress, as Moran had that evening, to follow the official order to look pretty.

“Being good means little. Trust me, being good means nothing in this country. Being right, and being on the right side of any conflict, is the only way to stay safe. An egg never wins when it hurls itself against a rock. Now, don’t you go to school and say anything to your classmates. It’s better to keep your mouth zipped — you know that, don’t you?”

Moran nodded. She didn’t have the heart to argue, though she knew she disagreed with her mother. It pained her that Shaoai was in such trouble; it pained her also to imagine Aunt and Uncle suffering. “What is Sister Shaoai going to do now?”

“Do? Nothing for her to do. Stay around. Be an unemployed-and-stay-at-home youth. Thank goodness Aunt agreed to host Ruyu for that extra bit of money.”

“I thought Aunt was a relative of Ruyu’s grandaunts.”

“Relative, yes, but can you just send a girl to another family for free? No. Whoever Ruyu’s grandaunts are — see, I don’t know them, so really I don’t have the right to criticize them, but between you and me, I don’t like the sound of those ladies. All the same, they are to be commended for how much they pay for Ruyu’s stay.”

Moran wondered how much it was. If she asked, her mother would tell her, though what difference would that make? She was late in understanding many things about the world, which must have always been less opaque to Ruyu.

Moran’s mother shook her head and launched into her favorite monologue about the responsibilities of parents and children. Any news or event might offer an opportunity. “Now, parents feed and clothe a child and provide an education. To repay that upbringing, a child should always bear the parents’ well-being in mind when making any decision. If you don’t excel in school, you’re not only destroying your own life but your parents’, because how can you repay your parents if you don’t get a good job? You marry the wrong person, and you’re not only being irresponsible to yourself but bringing distress to your parents. Anything you do, think of your parents first. Other than the Monkey King, nobody comes out of a crack in the rock.”

Had Shaoai been there, she would have erupted into argument, but Moran only said of course, she knew these things by heart. Moran had long accepted that she was not a special person; in fact, she was commonplace in many ways: she was not one of the top students in school, and there was never going to be anything brilliant about her career. She was not as feisty or as sharp-minded as Shaoai; at her age, Shaoai had led her debate team to the city championships twice in a row. Had Moran been a boy, she would have been more convenient to her parents when they needed someone to mend the roof or haul in the three hundred kilos of bok choy — their only vegetable for the whole winter — at the beginning of November. What she was not she could make up only in ways available to her: she was a model child who treated her parents and all the grownups around with respect; she smiled at everyone, neighbors or strangers alike, not because she wanted to be praised for her cheerfulness but because she truly believed that any bit of sunniness she could offer the world would be a comfort; she was a loyal friend, a reliable babysitter, and a good person. What else could she be but a good person? Yet being good, in the end, means little in this world. Sitting by the table and listening to her mother, Moran felt defeated, though when her mother finished, she compelled herself to smile. How lucky she was to have the porridge after such a long day, she said, and her mother said of course, who else but one’s own mother would take care of her daughter with such love.

In another house, in the middle of the night, motherless Ruyu woke up, startled by unfamiliar sensations: a hand moving ever so clandestinely underneath her pajamas, her lips pried open by a wet and warm tongue; a foreign body on her own, the weight not heavy but enough to pin her down as one could be pinned down by a nightmare, and, as in the case of a nightmare, one would afterward forever question why one had not awakened in time, why one had not protested.

Ruyu opened her eyes and saw Shaoai’s eyes hovering near hers, too near, but how could she see in the darkness, how could anyone see? There must be a lamp somewhere — or was a house, a city, the world, always lit, complete darkness a luxury available only to the dead and the unseeing?

Please make her stop, Ruyu said in her heart, though to whom? No one came to stop the hands and the tongue, nor did she believe that anyone could stop the insanity behind those unclean organs that clung to her: the inconvenient knees and elbows, the slippery fingers, the greedy lips, the unrestrained desire, unrestrainable, consummating itself and in doing so making its object abandon existing as herself — neither a girl nor a woman Ruyu felt, but a being as blind as the force driving her predator. As poisonous.

In one’s hoping for help, one becomes small; smaller yet when no help comes. Only then does one understand that this moment is always there, waiting, preying, in disguise, or even in arrogant openness. How could she have misread life with such foolishness?

Yet that was not the worst. The worst is not a moment robbed from one’s life, but what’s left in place of the moment: an abyss where all the other moments could slip in easily. One does not wake up from a nightmare unhaunted.