Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others.” Reading it for the first time in English had been a bit of a shock. The words had lost their meaning; the line she’d underlined in her Chinese translation was, in English, an ordinary sentiment; or else something had caught her attention at seventeen but had lost its impact. Still, she had brought the book to show the words to Josef, though she wondered, after Winnie-the-Pooh, if it was pointless to do so. To start a life with a new language is like being returned to childhood — no one is really interested in your thoughts; all the world wants is for you to be contentedly occupied or else safely tucked away. Perhaps Josef was no different.

He seemed not to notice Moran’s change of mood. He asked her if she had plans for the Christmas break; she said no, and he said that if she liked, he would bring her to his friends’ house — a couple — as they always had the best gatherings on Christmas Eve, everyone singing Christmas carols at the end of the evening. Would his children come to the party, too? Moran asked, and Josef said that Thanksgiving was their family holiday. John and Mimi were planning to spend the week in Hawaii. Michael and Sharon were taking the children to see Sharon’s parents in Memphis. George and Rachel? Moran asked, and Josef said that they might or might not come. “I don’t want them to feel that they have to spend the holidays at home for my sake.”

Each member of the family, Moran thought, had a position in the world, and everything they did — working, raising children, partying, vacationing — added more assurance to that secured place. Even Josef, who hadn’t yet recovered from the most difficult year of his life, could rely on the consistency of his days — staff meetings at the library, choir practice, dinners with friends, and a meeting with Moran on Sunday afternoons. At Thanksgiving dinner, Moran had been impressed by the certainty of everyone in his family; no matter what the topics had been — college basketball, Bill Clinton’s second term, the different ways to cook a turkey, Rachel’s internship applications — the family members all seemed to have opinions, none of them shy to state his or her own. At times the back-and-forth had become a verbal game among the siblings or between a couple, and the ease with which they had carried on had given Moran an unreal sense that they lived in a TV show. But it must be her misimpression: what’s wrong with a family gathering around a table full of food and conversing in a lively way? In a parallel world, if things had happened differently, Moran herself could have belonged to such a scene: she would have remained friends with Boyang, and they would have bantered as easily — she dared not imagine them as a couple, but they would remain affectionate as siblings. In a parallel world Shaoai would have made a brilliant career for herself, as government permission was no longer required for working; Ruyu — what would have happened to her? — perhaps she would have moved out of their lives as abruptly as she had come in, but Boyang and Moran might not have felt the loss acutely: even someone like Ruyu could be replaced or forgotten, if one made the effort.

But there was only this one world, in which Moran had no position to claim as hers. This was not because she was a new immigrant; some of the other Chinese students she ran into on campus seemed as confident about America as they were about China. To have a position — any position — requires one to have opinions: Moran had none of them. What she did have were observations and questions — those that she asked Josef, to which he would provide answers, and those that she kept to herself, each unanswerable one pushing her further away from the world: sometimes she felt as though she was living from a long way off. Why couldn’t anyone detect the hollow echo of her voice when she spoke?

There was no reason not to accept Josef’s invitation to the Christmas gathering; perhaps she could play the role of a happy audience. When they left the café that day and reached Josef’s car — a Ford Taurus, as he had pointed out to her when he had learned her birthday, which made her a Taurus, too — Moran kicked the mudguards of both wheels on the right side. Chunks of frozen slush dropped to the ground with dull thuds, which strangely cheered her up. She had noticed other people doing that, and sometimes when she saw a car with too much accumulation behind the mudguards, she had an urge to give them a kick.

Josef looked at her oddly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it a bad thing to do?”

Of course it was not, he said, though he looked distracted. She wondered if the action was unladylike in his eyes, but he did not know her: he would never envision her riding a bicycle down an empty stretch of road in Beijing with both hands off the handlebars, or pedaling alongside Boyang, whistling a John Denver song in duet: Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong— years later, when a colleague of Moran’s whistled the song in the hallway, Moran would quietly weep into her hands, because a heart is always short one piece of its armor.

Josef drove quietly, and sensing his moodiness, Moran wrapped her scarf more tightly. He turned the heater up a notch, and then, without Moran’s prompting, he said that Alena used to do that, too. She could not stand even the smallest gathering of mud or slush, and it used to baffle him that she could feel so strongly about something trivial.

“Did you ask her why she did it?”

“Yes, but she didn’t know, either. She said she couldn’t help it.”

Moran had seen pictures of Alena at Josef’s house, looking down at one of her children, or, in a photo from their wedding, laughing away with a childhood friend. Had she kicked the mudguards for the simple satisfaction of getting rid of something unsightly, or had there been something within her that could only be expressed by a violent yet harmless action? Thinking about another woman’s past when the woman was no more had made Moran ashamed. That secret had belonged to Josef and, before that, to Alena.

A phone rang somewhere in the condo. Josef shifted on the sofa but did not wake up at once. Moran found the phone on the kitchen counter. She wondered if it was Rachel, and after a moment of hesitation, she took the call.

Rachel sounded flustered. “Oh, good, you’re still there with Dad,” she said.

“He’s taking a nap.”

“Will you be able to stay with him for a while? I promised I would come over, but the school just called. I think Willie is coming down with some sort of stomach bug.”

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Moran said. “Go ahead and take care of everything. I’ll be here.”

When she turned around, she saw that Josef had woken up. Was everything all right, he asked, and she repeated Rachel’s words. He nodded and said that Rachel had been stretched thin since his diagnosis.

If Moran tried again to talk about her plan to move back, it would be taking advantage of his guilt, though what if she talked to Rachel instead? Would her approval change his mind? But the thought of stepping from her hiding place behind Josef and speaking to Rachel made Moran uneasy. During her marriage to Josef, she had gotten along all right with his three sons, who had been living farther away; Rachel, who had stayed, had never liked Moran. Of course there were reasons for Rachel’s animosity: the protective instincts of a daughter toward her widowed father; her loyalty to Alena; Moran’s age — she was only three years older than Rachel; and Moran’s foreignness. Josef had only hinted at these things, though Moran had not needed him to spell them out; he had said that by and by Rachel would come around, and all they needed was a little patience.