Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“To do?”

“What if you lived in a basement with three other provincial boys, and you did not have any savings? You worked six and a half days a week, and yet you knew you would never be able to afford the cheapest apartment in this city. What if all you possessed was your being, and there was nothing you could do but be yourself? Would you still be courting a girl?”

No, he thought; this was not a welcoming world for young men without any means. A few weeks ago, a woman in her early twenties had said in a TV interview that she would prefer an unhappy marriage with a BMW to being in love with a young man who could afford only to carry her on his bicycle. Boyang mentioned the name of the young woman — already her bold practicality had made her a national celebrity — and asked what Sizhuo thought of the woman’s preference.

Sizhuo looked agonized. She crossed and uncrossed her fingers, the first time he had seen her lose her equanimity. “I wish she were completely wrong about everything. I don’t think she was, though,” she said. “This is not the kind of world I thought I’d grow up to live in, you know?”

She was not the first to have realized that, he wanted to point out. What made her different from other disillusioned souls? All young people start with untainted dreams, but how many would retain their capacities to dream? How many could refrain from transforming themselves into corruptors of other untainted dreams? We are all wardens and executors biding our time; what’s taken from us, what’s killed in us, we wait for our turn to avenge. Such wisdom, had Coco ever been interested, Boyang would not have hesitated to share: he would have sneered, laughed, enjoyed his position the way a cat gently plays with its prey. But what made Sizhuo different — what made him pensive now — was that he wanted a better answer for her; he wanted a better world to offer her. Was this how a father would feel toward a child? He made a face, the question conjuring the most farcical: paternal, he thought, a paternal sugar daddy.

Sizhuo did not take her eyes from his face. “You must find my ranting laughable,” she said, though her face showed no sign of unease due to self-consciousness. “Sometimes I think so, too, but the moment I think that way, I know I’m wrong.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “More at myself because, you know, I’m one of those people who have made the world a bad place for you, and in turn I’m asking you to like me, even to fall in love with me.”

“What do you do that for?”

“To ask you to like me?”

“To help make the world a bad place, if what you said was true.”

“What else can I do?”

Sizhuo looked baffled, as though he were asking her for an answer.

“Nobody can refrain from doing things,” he said. “You see, a child can get by with just being, but we aren’t children forever. We must live by doing things. And either we do harm, or, if we are extremely lucky, we do some good. The problem, as you know, is that the world is an unbalanced place, and it requires more bad than good to maintain that unbalance. If you want to do one good thing — say, if you give money to a beggar child — no big deal, right? But no, it’s not that simple. To be able to do that, you have to deceive yourself into believing that a bill dropped in her basket is going to help her, to give her one more morsel of food, to spare her one beating from her parents. While in reality, you and I both know that she might have been stolen or rented or sold to the begging ring; by giving her money, instead of doing anyone any good, what you’re really doing is contributing to criminals, helping them profit from doing damage, and encouraging more criminals to steal and sell babies into that trade. So what do I do? I either give her the money, or I don’t, all depending on my mood that day. But either way, I have no illusions about doing anything good for her, or for anyone. I’m sorry, is this too bleak for you?”

Sizhuo shook her head. “Why is the world unbalanced?” she said. “Why does it require more bad than good?”

He could give her his hypothesis about the connection between human hearts and entropy that he sometimes played in his head, but he would have to be drunk to go on with such nonsense. Already he regretted that their conversation was going off on a tangent. He was here to woo a woman. He was not here to be baffled and defeated by the world alongside her. “Why that is,” he said, “I truly don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

No, he did not, he thought, though he knew that was only wishful thinking. The real question was, can anyone afford to know? “Do you?” he asked.

“I do,” she said. “That makes me a fool in people’s eyes, I know, but I don’t mind being a fool.”

“What do you mind?”

“Not knowing, and making do with not knowing.”

After the celebration on October 1, life went back to the old routines, nearly normal again, though Moran no longer knew what kind of normalcy she was thinking of. There was little hope in the case of Shaoai, who no longer belonged to any school or work unit. Neither Moran nor Boyang had the courage to ask Shaoai about how she spent her days. In the evenings, she could be seen in the house or in the courtyard, moody and distant.

Uncle was no more reticent than before, bearing his trademark smile without fail, and Aunt was as chatty as ever. Yet their stoic efforts could not dispel the despondent fog hanging over their faces. They looked older now, and were sometimes distracted when they tried to follow the neighbors’ conversations. More than before they seemed intimidated by their daughter.

Hardships in lives, Moran was raised to believe, are like unpleasant weather, which one endures because bad weather will break as inevitably as bad luck will run its course. Hope is the sunshine after the storm, the spring thawing after the bitter winter; the goddess of fate, capricious as she is, has nevertheless an impressionable mind, as any young female does, who would smile at those who have perseverance.

Moran’s nature was to find hope for others before she could feel hopeful herself. To stay silent was the first step in resigning oneself to hopelessness, so armed with inherited and wishful thinking, she repeated the stale wisdom to Shaoai when they found themselves alone in the courtyard. It was a Saturday afternoon, a half day at school, and both Boyang and Ruyu disappeared around noon. Moran wondered if Ruyu had a rehearsal; as for Boyang, he must have gone to a basketball or soccer game with other boys.

“Things will become better, Sister Shaoai,” Moran said. “Don’t lose heart. Remember the tale in which the man lost one horse only to find that it brought another horse back to the stable?”

“Since when did you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the wise and the optimistic?” Shaoai said, looking at Moran askance.

Moran blushed. “I don’t want you to feel alone in your situation,” she said.

“You don’t want me to feel alone, huh? And I bet you want many things for others, too, right?”

Moran shook her head confusedly. Too young to know that her affection was the kind that made a child revolt against a mother, she was disheartened by Shaoai’s punishing words.

“It’s ambitious of you to want things for me,” Shaoai said. “But let me give you a solid piece of advice, the same I’ve given my parents: don’t waste your feelings on an unworthy person.”

Moran stammered and said she admired Shaoai as always.

“My dear Moran, in this case I wasn’t talking about myself. Sure, my parents should’ve known by now not to spend their energy worrying about me,” Shaoai said. “And you, don’t you think you’re a bit childish, following your two other friends as though you can’t see they’d prefer to be left by themselves?”