Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“I don’t mind waiting,” Moran said. “In fact, I like to watch you play.”

Ruyu looked at Moran with a cold scrutiny. “Do you mean you like to watch people play music? Or do you mean you like to watch me?”

Moran blushed. What right, Ruyu seemed to be saying, did Moran have to sit next to Ruyu, claiming to be her friend? “I don’t know. Maybe I just like to listen to real music being played on an instrument.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t play music?” Moran said, wavering under Ruyu’s steadfast gaze. “No one I know plays music.”

“Do you want to?”

Moran looked at the girl on the xylophone, who was practicing with such abandon that even when her eyes were open — and they were huge, almost inhuman eyes, mysteriously deep — she seemed to be seeing nothing. Years later, the girl would transform herself into the drummer for the first female rock band in China, and Moran would see her photo in a magazine: clad in a layer of shiny black leather, she had the same abandon, or exaggerated despair, in her eyes.

Ruyu glanced at the girl. Moran wondered if in Ruyu’s eyes the girl was simply a pretentious actor, or worse, a nuisance. Yet the girl could travel with her instrument on an airplane to Japan, showing her passport to the officials in both countries. Apart from Boyang’s sister, Moran had not known another person who had left the country; none of the people in the quadrangle was even qualified to apply for a passport.

With wordless contempt Ruyu turned to look at Moran, as though to ask her if she wanted to be the girl at the xylophone. “I do wish I could play music,” Moran said. “But not everyone can afford to.”

“Why not? I’m an orphan, and even I can do it.”

It was the first time Ruyu had used the word orphan . Moran did not have words to comfort Ruyu, but the claim, with its haughtiness, had been thrown more as a dagger at the world, and Moran, unable to reply, offered herself as the target.

Ruyu returned to her practice and launched into a maddeningly paced polka. Moran understood that she was not a welcome companion on the porch. Pride would have required her to apologize and to absent herself, but whether she left or not seemed to matter little. Of course Ruyu could do many things that no other person could do: it was not because she was an orphan — had Moran been an orphan, she would have been one of those shivering and begging by the roadside; it was not because Ruyu was beautiful — she was, but there were other girls more beautiful, better built than she, yet at times they, too, were susceptible to the uncertainties that Ruyu was immune to; no, Ruyu could do anything she wanted, to others, to the world, because she knew she was someone destined to be special. She felt no burden to prove it to herself or to anyone, nor had she any tolerance for those who were not chosen as she was. What was Moran like in Ruyu’s eyes? Years later, it would strike Moran as either the most fortunate or the most unfortunate happening in her life that the first time she looked at herself through someone else’s eyes, she had chosen Ruyu’s: who was she to Ruyu but someone so ordinary that neither her joy nor her pain would amount to anything but the dross of everydayness?

A few days later, Boyang told Moran that Ruyu had asked to see the university where his parents taught. “Saturday afternoon,” he said. “Shall we go together?”

The university, on the west side of the city, was not far from the Summer Palace, and its campus had been, in its previous incarnation, a residence for the closest cousins and allies of the emperors of the last dynasty. It was said to be one of the most beautiful places in Beijing, yet in all the years Moran had known Boyang, she had never once visited the campus. It was part of the world he did not want to share with her; nor would she have found herself at ease near it. His parents, she knew, had little regard for her and her parents and people like them.

Ruyu’s request did not come as a surprise. Still, it agonized Moran that what was forbidden for her was something ordinary for Ruyu, who had only to ask to be handed the entry pass. Was Boyang aware of the difference? She looked at him, and he seemed excited by the plan. “Of course we’ll put her on a bus and we’ll meet her at the university. But do you think she’ll handle the bus ride all right? She’d have to change to another route midway. Alternatively, you could ride the bus with her. But then we won’t have the two bicycles, and it’s an awfully big campus to walk around.” Boyang stopped. “What? Did you already plan something else for Saturday?”

“No, not at all,” Moran said. She sounded too eager, she thought, but she did not want to disappoint him.

“Would your parents be okay if we have dinner there? Not with my parents. Ruyu asked if we could see my mother’s lab, and I thought we could have dinner in a dining hall and then go there after hours, so we won’t have to deal with talking to people.”

“Will your mother be there?”

“Oh silly, don’t you worry. She wouldn’t stay for us. She wouldn’t change her plans for the prime minister.”

Despite Moran’s misgivings, as the day came nearer, she, too, started looking forward to the outing. There was little doubt that Boyang would attend his parents’ university — he was a top student and would not even need to claim family privilege to get in. He had always believed that Moran would attend the university, too, though she wasn’t so sure herself. She would have to improve her academic standing and score perfectly on the entrance exam, but when she voiced such doubts to Boyang, he only teased her for being overcautious. Of course things would work out, he told her; she was better than she allowed herself to think. Imagine the freedom they would have when they went to the university, he had said, and she had seen no option but to trust his enthusiasm, and had, up till now, enjoyed his vision.

“So,” Shaoai said on Friday evening at dinner. “Did I hear right about some visit to a university tomorrow?”

Ruyu did not raise her eyes to acknowledge the question. These days, dinnertime was a torment for her, worse than bedtime, because by then she had an open battleground separating her from Shaoai. Only once after that night had Shaoai tried to touch Ruyu again, but she had, with the most even voice she could manage, told the older girl to leave her alone. No more words had been said afterward, no more advances made, and every night Ruyu wrapped her blanket tightly around herself and stayed alert by only sleeping shallowly.

Ruyu had sworn, and had so far kept her word, that she would never lay eyes on Shaoai’s face again. The presence of Aunt and Uncle, though, made things harder. At dinner, with the older girl sitting across the table, Ruyu had to either look into her bowl of rice or, when Aunt talked to her, look up at Aunt, yet willfully blur her peripheral vision.

“What university?” Aunt said, bristling. University was one of the words they did not want to bring into the household lately.

“Ruyu here,” Shaoai said, “is going to check out where she’s going to spend her bright future studying.”

What was worst was that there was no way for Ruyu to shelter herself from the noises the other person made: the clinking of chopsticks, the scraping of chair legs on the floor, the grunts in place of answers to Aunt’s questions, and the various comments hurled at Ruyu to provoke a reaction.

Aunt looked at Ruyu, was about to ask something, but then changed her mind.

“And I just heard that our dear old Yening got an internship at Sino Oil and Gas,” Shaoai said.

When no one responded right away, Aunt sighed and asked what kind of job Yening would be doing.