Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Learning how to be a charming and accommodating young woman in the real world,” Shaoai said. “What else would she be doing?”

If only Shaoai would shut up, Ruyu thought, but these days it was Shaoai who led the dinnertime conversation, as though her topics were harmless, everyday subjects. No doubt she was aware of — perhaps even enjoying — the pains she was inflicting on her parents, who were unable to stop her from tormenting them. Already Ruyu could see Shaoai slowly losing her place everywhere but in her parents’ hearts — not a prospect for a job, less sympathy from the neighbors, fearful looks from Moran and Boyang. But why should one feel sorry for Shaoai’s parents? It was their doing, bringing a person like that into the world, and they were not to be spared from living under her despotism long after she ceased mattering to the world.

“Are you all right, Ruyu?” Aunt asked.

From the look on Aunt’s face, Ruyu knew that she must have missed a question, asked by Aunt to avoid carrying on a difficult conversation with Shaoai. Ruyu apologized, and said she was wondering if she had forgotten to bring an important test prep kit home.

Aunt looked worried; Ruyu wondered if secretly Aunt welcomed the opportunity for a manageable misfortune. “Do check your school bag,” she said. “If it’s not there, Boyang or Moran must have theirs with them. Is it something you have to finish tonight?”

Ruyu said she would check and excused herself from the dinner table. In the bedroom, on the narrow desk, was the folder of the test kit, and mechanically she picked up the top page and started to read the first question; halfway through she got lost, but she kept looking engaged, lest Aunt look in. On the chair was her book satchel, a new one that Aunt had insisted on buying, as she said no high school student should use a child’s satchel like the one Ruyu had brought from home. In the corner of the room was an old chest of drawers, the bottom two drawers belonging to Ruyu. A glance at the top drawers, where Shaoai kept her underclothes, made Ruyu recoil violently, tearing the paper.

Her grandaunts’ willow trunk was under the bed, and Ruyu had covered it with an old shawl to keep the trunk free of dust. Her accordion was at school, locked in a place that looked as if generations of monks’ ghosts visited at night. These were all the things she owned in life — not much, but enough for her not to be a disposable being. When her parents had left her on the doorstep of her grandaunts, had they thought of the possibility that she might have died of hunger or cold before the two sisters discovered the bundle? In her grandaunts’ eyes, God had made them find her before bad things had happened, but Ruyu understood now that their god had no more wisdom than whatever words they put in his mouth. If Ruyu packed everything and left at this moment, she would leave no trace in these people’s lives, yet she would have no place to go but to jump into the river with the trunk. If she killed herself, her grandaunts could ask and ask, but neither their god nor any mortal would have the simplest explanation.

Yet people do not die until they are made to. An infant for whom no love can be found in her parents’ hearts, if left in the wilderness, will cry until her voice grows hoarse; it is not in our nature to expire quietly.

The next day, Ruyu took the bus to the west side. It was the first time she had ridden a bus since the day she arrived. Just a little over two months, but already so much had changed. The men and women around her could not harm her because she had learned the secret of willing herself out of their sights and thoughts. Invisible, she felt indestructible.

Halfway to the destination, two children, a boy and a girl, not older than ten, came up and stood next to her. Neither reached for the back of a seat but swayed back and forth, keeping their balance. They were talking about rocks, using the terms sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic with such ease, as though they had no other reason to be in the world at that moment than to understand how millions of years had made one piece of rock different from another. A few stops later, they got off the bus. Through the window Ruyu watched them cross the street, threading between honking cars that did not slow down for them. That must be how Moran and Boyang had once looked. So much confidence in their ability to keep the dangerous world at bay; so little doubt about their futile efforts.

The university campus was indeed as beautiful as Boyang had boasted: a tree-lined lake, where the supple branches of weeping willows, their leaves barely turning yellow, reached for the water’s surface to touch their own reflections; a boat carved out of stones, forever moored next to an island; a pagoda, a temple, an ancient bell sitting on a hilltop; a bronze statue of Cervantes as a skinny man holding a broken sword; a few graves of famous people, both Chinese and Western, who had died long ago — neither Moran nor Ruyu had heard of any of them, though what a place to be buried in, their ancient solitude pleasantly interrupted by the hustle and bustle of the college students on foot or on bicycles. Toward the end of the day, many students were heading toward the dining halls, spoons clanking in the metal pails they carried in their hands or in the carriers wired to their bicycles.

Moran felt shy sitting at one end of the long table in the dining hall, with Boyang and Ruyu across from her. Some college boys whistled at them, finding them laughable in their high school uniform perhaps, yet this did not seem to bother Boyang or Ruyu. Once in a while someone would come over and pat Boyang on the back, girls and boys alike — they were his parents’ students, he told Moran and Ruyu. His mother had left the keys to her lab with one of her graduate students, he said, who would meet them at the entrance of the old chemistry building.

“Is there a new chemistry building?” Moran asked, but Boyang, who was saying something to Ruyu, did not hear.

Ruyu turned to Moran, waiting for or daring her to repeat the question, but Moran looked away as though she was studying a young couple at the other end of the table, who were gazing at each other without touching their food. The hunger in their eyes made Moran feel like an intruder — and perhaps she was, there and elsewhere. She thought about the people who welcomed her as an audience: Boyang’s grandmother when she reminisced about the famines in ’41 and ’58; Watermelon Wen’s two boys, who mimicked the quirks of the neighbors with exactitude; strangers in the alleyway, who had this or that complaint to make; her parents, who never tired of repeating the lessons they had learned from living humbly. If only it were that easy to be around those she wanted to be closest to; but they, it seemed, only wished her to be absent: Ruyu did not like her around when she was practicing the accordion, and now, sitting across from her friends, Moran wondered if Boyang was only trying to be nice by including her.

The laboratory was on the top floor of a three-story building. The hallway was cramped with old equipment, rolled-up posters, three-legged chairs leaning on rickety tables, and other nameless things that seemed to have been sitting in the dust for years. The graduate student with the keys looked introspective, and he said a few words about locking up before disappearing down an unlit hallway.

Boyang unlocked the door and turned on the fluorescent lamps. “Not much to see, really,” he said. Still, he walked the girls through the aisles, opening a cabinet here and there to show where the chemicals and supplies were stored, flipping on the switch for the fume hood to show off the toxic signs with grinning skulls on a few brown bottles.

Later they sat in the office adjacent to the lab. Boyang boiled water on a hot plate to make tea. It was oddly formal, as none of them drank tea at home. Still, it seemed to make him happy to play the host. There were two chairs in the office, a tall spinning one for his mother and a small wooden one. Moran hesitated when Boyang asked them to sit and took the wooden chair. Ruyu sat down behind the desk and looked at the titles of the papers in front of her.