Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

It took Moran a moment to understand what the older girl was insinuating, and by then Shaoai had unlocked her bicycle, leaving Moran in an abyss. Slowly she turned toward her house, fumbling for the key.

There was no reason not to believe Shaoai. Moran wondered if others — her parents, for instance, or Boyang’s grandmother — had wanted to warn her, too. Since childhood, Moran had seen, in the approving eyes of their elders, a future for her and Boyang. She had refrained from naming it because he had not named it. Loyalty to that future was all she had, yet loyalty to a future, unlike to the past, is a feeling both blind and arrogant. What begins with a label bears an expiration date; by defining something only after its disappearance — a sibling, a friend, a childhood sweetheart — Moran would one day understand that the loss, limited for him because he must have long ago dismissed it with a name, was for her a continuing void.

Moran slipped into bed with her school uniform still on, and under the cover of the blanket she shed quiet tears. A small shift in the past few days, which had been so minute that she had been uncertain whether it was only in her imagination, came back to her with new significance. It used to be that Ruyu would hop on whichever bicycle was closer to her, though one morning last week she had walked around Moran and sat behind Boyang, and ever since had chosen his bicycle.

The next day Moran proposed to Boyang that the three of them use his room rather than Ruyu’s for their night study. To give Sister Shaoai some space, Moran said. After a difficult night she had decided that her friendship with the other two should not change, but she did not want her bravery — or foolishness — to be seen by Shaoai.

Boyang readily agreed. He must have found it hard to be around Shaoai these days, too; Moran wondered if Shaoai had embarrassed Boyang by commenting on the relationship between him and Ruyu. Moran did not detect any change in him toward herself, and Ruyu was distant but no more than before. Perhaps Shaoai had been in such a bad mood that she wanted to hurt others; what she had told Moran might not be true. This thought made Moran hopeful again, and it cast a pitying shadow over her sympathy toward Shaoai. Like anyone with a youthful mind, Moran, too occupied with her own prospect of happiness, had little capacity for real sympathy — the kind that is not perfunctorily expressed out of one’s duty toward another person’s misfortune. But how many people are strong enough to give — or to receive, even — real sympathy? In distress and in catastrophe, one often looks for the strengthening forces not in people closest to one, but in the perfect indifference in strangers’ faces, who put one’s woes back to where they belong — irrelevant to the extent of being comical.

“Every generation has to learn this lesson,” Moran’s mother said at dinner when the topic turned to Shaoai. “Public protest will never do in this country. Unfortunately, some pay more dearly than others. Now that you’re not a child anymore, use your brain better.”

Moran mumbled an answer. The neighbors did not discuss Shaoai’s situation. All had gone through the political “recheck” over the past few weeks, none but Shaoai with a harsh outcome. They all treated her with the same respect and patience, but behind closed doors, they must have exchanged critical words about Shaoai, as Moran’s parents had.

A moth fluttered into the lamp above the dinner table, and Moran’s father waved his chopsticks as though the gesture alone would make the distraction go away. Moran watched the moth, its wings dusty and gray, its flight purposeless. These moths, no larger than ladybugs, seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the house. They came from the straw-colored worms that lived in the bags of rice her parents had scrambled to buy out of fear of the ever-worsening inflation; it was Moran’s job to winnow out the wiggly worms before cooking the rice. Unlike the mosquitoes and flies her mother hunted down with a single-minded determination, the moths, doing no harm, were left to live and die on their own.

Moran sighed, and her mother, as though she had been waiting for the opportunity, launched into a speech about why a young person like Moran felt she had the right to sigh. Moran listened with an obedient expression. These days, the moths, along with supplies her parents had stored in their battle against inflation — bars of alkaline soap, drab yellow and wrapped in straw paper, boxes of matches that had become damp and became harder to strike by the day, toilet paper, laundry detergent, inexpensive tea in the form of crude bricks, all growing stale, collecting dust — these made Moran’s heart despondent: every time she turned around, she seemed to bump into another pile of things, stirring another moth from its repose into a frenzy of blind flight. The world had become smaller, dimmer, but was it for her alone?

Such despair Moran had to hide from her parents. Hadn’t her mother survived an impoverished childhood among six siblings, supported by the meager earnings of their father as a pedicab driver? Hadn’t her father weathered years of humiliation as the son of a petit bourgeois?

The same gray moths fluttered in other houses, too, yet Boyang and Ruyu never seemed to be bothered. Why would they be, if life was generous and granted them all the good qualities that Moran herself lacked? But such a bitter thought made her feel guilty: certainly Ruyu had experienced bigger loss; certainly she deserved more kindness, better love.

After the last class of the day, Ruyu went to the music room to practice the accordion. Sometimes, when she played on the porch, Moran came over to watch. She did not want to go into the low-ceilinged cottage, which was gloomy, and indeed she had no right to be in there; besides Ruyu, there were a few other student musicians Teacher Shu supervised — four violinists, two boys who played four-hands on the piano, and a middle school girl who played the xylophone and belonged to a fifty-member, all-girl xylophone ensemble in Japan, where she was the only Chinese student. How the girl could join a Japanese ensemble Moran did not know, and some days, sitting on the porch and listening to the instruments, each preoccupied with its own music, she wondered about the things she had missed or would miss in life. She had no talent for creating anything beautiful — the only music she could make was to whistle a simple tune, wobbling with uncertainty, and even that drew disapproving looks from her mother because it was unladylike to whistle; her drawings and her handwriting were childish, and she had few skills in any art; even her body and face were nondescript.

Moran turned to study Ruyu — it was one of the best autumn days in Beijing, the sky blue in a crystal way, and Teacher Shu had driven all his charges, other than the two pianists, onto the porch to practice. In the shade of the eave, Ruyu moved her fingers up and down the keyboard in a distracted way, yet when Moran closed her eyes, she could not tell the difference between a halfhearted performance and a dedicated one, as she could not tell the difference between Ruyu’s confidence and her impertinence.

“This must be boring for you,” Ruyu said when she finished a piece. “You shouldn’t feel obliged to wait for me.”

“No, it’s not boring at all,” Moran said. “What is it that you just played?”

Ruyu turned over the sheet of music as though she had not heard the question. “I can walk home,” she said after pausing to read the next sheet. “Or else I’ll catch a ride with Boyang.”

Three days a week, Boyang played basketball, and on the other two days, he played soccer or just hung out with a few boys by the bicycle shed, exchanging tall tales. Sometimes Moran joined them, as they were all friendly with her, though their favorite topics — Michael Jackson, breakdancing, Transformers — did not interest her. Once in a while, she played Ping-Pong, but she was not a great player, and would step aside when the games became competitive. Three girls with whom she had been close in middle school stayed after class, too, talking more than doing anything; Moran’s friendship with them had not continued as easily as she’d expected: there seemed to be a dangerous undercurrent, a triangle of complications in which Moran often got lost, and their words, seemingly pregnant with meaning, sometimes sounded too assiduous or simply silly.