Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“I didn’t say I hated them,” Sizhuo said.

“Then what’s upsetting you?”

“I don’t know what we are to each other. Perhaps this is never a problem for you, but it’s unnatural.”

“What’s unnatural about being friendly?”

“We’re not meant to be friends.”

“So we should either be lovers,” he said, and watched Sizhuo blush—“or strangers. Are those the only two options? Is there not space in between for us to be genuinely affectionate toward each other?”

Sizhuo looked agonized, cornered by a mind more lucid than hers, though what could his lucidity do but confirm the distance between them? The truth was, wherever they were at this moment — no, before this moment, before she laid out in the open the questions they both must have been asking themselves — whatever they had been then was better. Why, thought Boyang with a weary sadness, couldn’t people stay in a place they could not name, rather than wanting to know, always wanting to know, more of the truth? Everything comes to an end when explained, rightly or wrongly.

“Can I tell you a story?” Sizhuo asked.

Don’t, his heart cried out. Do not tell your story to me; I’m not one to whom you should entrust your secret. When you hand it to me, you will either expect me to hold it as something precious, or, in exchange, you will expect me to offer you a story of my own. Can’t you see that I’m going to fail you on both accounts? “Certainly,” Boyang said. He had known that sooner or later one of them would have to take a step to make things go one way or another. At least he should be glad that he was not the one who’d lost his poise first. “Do tell.”

“Yet you don’t want to hear it.”

“Of course I do,” Boyang said, turning his eyes away from Sizhuo’s stare. This was going to be the end of something that had not begun properly; would that make everything easier for him, and for her?

“I know you’re lying, but I don’t mind being lied to today,” Sizhuo said. “It’s time to stop this silliness of seeing you every week and pretending all is happy and normal.”

“I haven’t been pretending.”

Sizhuo ignored Boyang’s words, and when she spoke again there was a note of abandonment in her voice. Do not lose your composure over the past, Boyang wanted to advise the girl; what you think of as tragic will one day make you laugh.

The story, as he had guessed, featured a boy and a girl — Sizhuo herself — and would no doubt turn out to be a failed love story of the most heartbreaking kind. He braced himself for the moment when he was expected to offer something — comfort, wisdom, forgiveness.

The two had been playmates, Sizhuo said, having known each other all their lives. The boy, three months older, had taken on the role of big brother — the one to provide and to protect. When their parents could not offer enough food, there had been sparrows killed by a homemade slingshot, cicadas caught with glue attached to the top of a bamboo pole, frogs, hedgehogs, grasshoppers, all roasted in hot ash. The boy had not been interested in education and had failed school early on; nevertheless, he had been called a smart boy, too smart for his own good in the eyes of his elders. When her parents’ income could not satisfy her need for more books, he had invested his intelligence in stealing: copper wires dug out of the ground, wild ginseng and rare dried mushrooms swiped from the packing factory, small items that people had left around their yards. She had not asked to whom he brought these things — at age ten he was already connected to dubious people out in the world. She had not approved of these misdemeanors, yet neither had she declined the offerings. When she had left her hometown for college in Beijing, he had followed her, discarding a network of friends that could have made his life more convenient in the provincial town. In Beijing he had become an illegal transient, working odd jobs and living a life that did not cross paths with her college life. They met once a month far from campus to take a walk, and always, before parting ways, he would put an envelope of money into her hands and tell her to buy the namebrand clothes that the other girls in the city were wearing.

“What are you thinking?” Sizhuo stopped and asked.

“I was thinking that in everyone’s heart, there’s a graveyard for first love.”

“Of course to you there’s nothing special about the boy’s love.”

“I didn’t say that. He was in love with you, but the question is: were you — or are you — in love with him?”

Sizhuo looked at him strangely. “You can’t be in love with a dead person.”

Boyang felt a pang. How do you, he asked himself, compete with a young man in the grave for a woman’s heart?

The story that followed belonged to the metro section of the evening newspaper, one of those tales in which a young man, having no legal residency in Beijing, brought nothing to the city but chaos and danger. One night he had broken into a rental shared by three young women. He had thought they were out of town for the Lunar New Year, not realizing that one had returned early. Out of panic, he had stabbed and killed the woman, a journalist whose next assignment was to interview a rising star in local politics.

No doubt the young man’s execution would forever be the pinnacle of a tragedy that Sizhuo thought she could have prevented. Yet he — uneducated, without any connections or means — stood no chance in this city. Apart from some perfunctory sympathy for a life lost, Boyang felt little for the young man. Any premature death could be called a tragedy, but how many tragedies would one be willing to admit into one’s thoughts? There were worse losses: Shaoai, for instance, locked in her own body for twenty-one years. The life she could have made — a brilliant career, a successful family, influences on many lives, good use of her time on earth. Could he explain to Sizhuo that sometimes death was a mercy — that it was worse for the dead to go on living? In an ideal world, death should be the end of the story, but in this world, where they had to make do with muddles, death never ended anything neatly. “Your friend made a mistake,” Boyang said. “And yes, a pricey one. But if I were you, I wouldn’t burden myself with unnecessary guilt.”

“But you are not me.”

“You wouldn’t have changed many things in his life.”

“At least I could have let him believe he had a chance.”

“At what? Your love, or a better life in this city?”

“Either,” Sizhuo said hesitantly. “Or both.”

“But you were not in love with him, and you know that. You couldn’t have gotten him a better job, and you know that, too. What’s the point of regretting something you haven’t done wrong? The same misfortune could have befallen him all the same, and you would be sitting here feeling guilty for having lied to him about your love.”

Sizhuo looked a little dazed. “But in his mind, he must have thought part of his misfortune my responsibility.”

“Did he say that to you?”

“He always asked me why I hadn’t been like the other girls and found a sugar daddy in this city.”

Boyang cringed. That she had no trouble saying the words sugar daddy made him sad.

“He considered all men who were richer and older his enemies. He considered the young men whose parents had already bought them apartments in Beijing, and who already had the best jobs lined up for them, his enemies. But you must admit that he was not wrong. What did he have but his wish to make a better case for his love?”

Boyang felt an icy tingling on his back. Somewhere, the ghost of the young man must be glaring at him, resenting him, because he possessed what the young man would never be able to have.