Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

The girl had a way of talking in circles, her tone flat and unhurried, as if she was telling an old folktale that no longer held any suspense, and Ming-Ming always calmed down. In those moments Kai felt that the girl was innocent and mysterious at once, a child and an old woman sharing the space within her skinny body, neither aware of the other's existence.

Han came out of the bathroom, buttoning the last button on his Mao jacket. “Let Mama go to work, yes,” he said, and tickled Ming-Ming under his chin. “But your baba will make more than enough money even if Mama doesn't work. Aren't you a lucky boy?”

Ming-Ming turned away and hugged the nanny's neck, having already banished his parents from his world before he was abandoned for the day. The child's attachment and indifference, both absolute, were a mystery to Kai. She did not recall ever being close to her mother, an unhappy woman who had been easily disappointed by everything in her life: her husband's lack of social status, the three children close to their father but stingy with their affection for her, promotions given to her colleagues, the tedious life, year after year, in a provincial city. Han's mother, a shrewd woman who had been credited with both her husband's political career and her own—she had been a nurse in the civil war, and had tended several high-ranking officials—was attentive to Han's needs, a better mother than Kai's own perhaps, but Kai had never thought of apprenticing herself to her mother-in-law. Until Ming-Ming's birth Kai always had someone to rely on for advice, teachers for instruction at the theater school, an older actress as a mentor in the theater troupe, her father. In her new motherhood, she felt not much different from a young child in a fishermen's village—her father had once told her and her siblings about the practice in his hometown near the East Sea, where a boy, upon turning three, would be thrown into the sea without warning; the child was expected to use his instinct to stay afloat, and those who could not save themselves were banished from the fishing boats, to live out their humility onshore, mending fishing nets and harvesting air-dried fish and seaweeds from clotheslines among women. Life is a war, and one rests only when death comes to fetch him, Kai remembered her father saying. She looked at Ming-Ming's small limbs; in another life he would soon be expected to fight in his first battle.

Kai repeated to the nanny a few details about feeding and napping. The girl looked patient, and Kai wondered if the girl was eager for them to go to work so that she could mother Ming-Ming more capably than Kai could herself. When the girl had been hired, her parents had told Kai that, as the eldest daughter of the family, she had helped to bring up six siblings, the youngest not much older than Ming-Ming. She had become a mother before she had grown into adulthood, Kai thought now, and Ming-Ming's plump arms, circling the nanny's neck with trust and familiarity, reminded Kai how easy it could be to replace a mother with another loving person in a small child's life.

Han insisted on walking Kai to the studio. The well-orchestrated denunciation event of the day before and, more so, the successful transplant—by now Han felt little need to keep it a secret from Kai that a top official had received Gu Shan's kidneys, and that Han himself was to be praised for that—had made Han more talkative.

“Is that why her trial was expedited?” asked Kai.

Han smiled and said they need not be concerned about irrelevant details; they had more important things to look forward to now, he said, and when she asked him what he meant, more pointedly than she had intended, he brought up the possibility of a second baby.

But Ming-Ming was no more than an infant himself, Kai said. Han studied her face and told her not to be nervous. By the time his little sister was born Ming-Ming would be old enough to be a big brother, he said. Even before Ming-Ming Han had hoped for a daughter, though he knew a boy as the firstborn would please his parents more.

They might get another boy, Kai reminded Han.

“Then we'll have another baby. I won't stop until I get a daughter as beautiful as her mother.”

Kai was silent for a moment and then said that she was not a sow. Han laughed. He could easily find a joke in everything she said, and she thought he would have failed as an actor, unable to recognize or deliver the subtlety in his lines.

It was time to think about a second baby, and soon a third, Han said, more seriously now. Ming-Ming was for his parents, Han explained, as the first grandchild was born for the sake of satisfying and entertaining the grandparents. For her mother too, he hastily added when he found Kai gazing at him, though she was not upset-rather, she was thinking that he had stumbled into the truth: Kai's mother doted on Ming-Ming in a timid way, as if she had less right to claim him as a grandchild than Han's parents did.

The second baby would be for Ming-Ming, as he needed a companion more than they needed another baby to deprive their sleep, Han said. Only the third child could they have as their own. “I'm not a selfish person but I want us to have something for ourselves,” Han said.

Kai walked on without replying. She had always convinced herself that the decision to marry was not much different from serving a meal to a tableful of guests, with different people to consider: her parents’ elation at being taken more seriously by those who had previously treated them with little respect, the futures of her two younger siblings—a brother whom Han had arranged to send to Teachers College in the provincial capital, and a sister who had been delighted to be courted as the relative of an important figure in the government. The heroines Kai had once played onstage had all given up their lives for higher callings, but it was not for a grand dream that she had decided to marry Han, but for a life with comfort and convenience.

When they arrived at the studio, Han assured Kai that there was no pressure. He handed her the mug of herb tea he had carried for her. “Sometimes a man can talk like an idiot when he is dreaming.”

Kai smiled and said she was only tired. She had no right to stop a husband from dreaming up a future to share with his wife. She wondered if the foundation of every marriage was made up of deceptions, and whether to keep the marriage from collapsing the deceived party had to maintain a blind confidence or a willingness to look away from the unwelcome truth. In his last year of life Kai's father had admitted, in one of his few private conversations with Kai, that marrying Kai's mother had been the most unfortunate decision he had ever made, and that he had stayed in the marriage only for the sake of the three children; this confession was not to be shared with her mother, as both father and daughter understood without having to make any promises to each other.

“I know I may not be the perfect husband for you,” Han said. “But I also know that you may not find someone who wants to do as much for you as I do, or someone who can do as much as I do for you.”

“Why are we talking like a new couple who needs to prove our love to each other?” Kai said, trying to make her voice light. “Isn't Ming-Ming enough for what we are to each other?”

Han gazed at Kai with a strange smile. “How many children do you think would make you settle down?”

She had never been unsettled, Kai said.

She had not been the only girl, Han said. Kai had never asked him about other suitable matches, and he had questioned little about her own past, though she knew he had the connections to investigate if he had wanted to. There was little mystery about what the other girls wanted, Han said, and there was little doubt that he could easily give them what they were after. “But you were different. I knew it the moment I saw you. You were more ambitious than all the other girls, and I thought maybe even I couldn't get for you what you wanted.”