Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Why, the usual stuff,” Boshen said.

“I heard you were working on AIDS,” Yang said. “What has that to do with you?”

Stunned, Boshen tried to find an explanation. Finally he said, “You don’t understand, Yang.”

“I’m not a child,” Yang said. “Why are you concerned with that dirty disease? The more you work on it, the more people will connect it with gay people. What good does it do for me?”

“I’m trying to help more people,” Boshen said.

“But you’ve promised to help me get back to the stage,” Yang said. “If you insist on working on something irrelevant, you’ll never fulfill your promise.”

Boshen could not answer Yang. Afterward, Yang started to go out more often, and a few days later, he did not come home for the first time in their relationship. Boshen thought of all the predators waiting to set their fangs and claws on Yang, and he did not sleep that night.

“There’s nothing for you to worry about,” Yang said with a strange smile when Boshen confronted him. “You’re not as endangered as you imagine.”

“At least you should’ve let me know where you were,” Boshen said.

“I was with a girl,” Yang said, and mentioned the name Sasha, which sounded slightly familiar to Boshen. They had met her at a party, Yang reminded Boshen, but he did not remember who she was; he did not understand why Yang was going out with her, either.

“Why? What a silly question,” Yang said. “You do things when you feel like it, no?”

THE FIRST TIME Sasha met Yang, at a party, she felt that she was looking into a mirror that reflected not her own face, but that of someone she could never become. She watched the ballet of his long fingers across the table while he listened absentmindedly to the conversation of others around the table. She looked at the innocent half-moons on his fingernails; her own fingers were plump and blunt. His cream-colored face, his delicate nose and mouth reminded her of an exquisite china doll. Later, when they sat closer, she saw the melancholy in his eyes and decided that he was more like a statue of Kuanyin, the male Buddha in a female body, the goddess who listened and responded to the prayers of suffering women and children. Sitting next to him, Sasha felt like a mass-produced rubber doll.

The uneasy feeling lasted only for a moment. Sasha had heard of his stories, and was glad to see him finally in person. She leaned toward him and asked, as if picking up from a conversation they had dropped somewhere, “What do you think of girls, then?”

He looked up at her, and she saw a strange light in his eyes. They reminded her of a wounded sparrow she had once kept during a cold Mongolian winter. Sparrows were an obstinate species that would never eat and drink once they were caged, her mother told her. Sasha did not believe it. She locked up the bird for days, and it kept bumping into the cage until its head started to go bald. Still she refused to release it, mesmerized by its eyes, wild but helplessly tender, too. She nudged the little bowl of soaked millet closer to the sparrow, but the bird was blind to her hospitality. Cheap birds, a neighbor told her; only cheap birds would be so stubborn. Have a canary, the neighbor said, and she would be singing for you every morning by now.

The boy lowered his eyes at Sasha’s scrutiny, and she felt the urge to chase the beautiful eyes, a huntress of that strange light. “You must have known some girls, no?” she said. “When you went to the opera school, were there girls in the school?”

“Yes,” the boy said, his voice reminding her of a satin dress.

“So?”

“We didn’t talk. They played handmaids and nannies, background roles.”

“So you were the princess, huh?” Sasha laughed and saw the boy blush, with anger perhaps, but it made her more curious and insistent in cornering him. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Which name?”

“How many names do you have?”

“Two. One given by my parents. One given by the opera school.”

“What are they?”

He dipped one finger into a glass of orange juice and wrote on the dark marble tabletop. She followed the wet trace of his finger. It was Yang, a common boy’s name with the character for the sun, the masculine principle of nature, the opposite of Yin.

“A so-so name. What’s your opera name?”

“Sumeng,” he said. A serene and pure dreamer, it meant.

“Worse. Sounds like a weepy name from a romance novel,” Sasha said. “You need a better name. I’ll have to think of one for you.”

In the end she did not use either name, and did not find a better one for him. She called him “my little Nan Dan, ” and that was what he was to her, a boy destined to play a woman’s part. She paged him often, and invited him to movies and walks in the park. She made decisions for them both, and he let her. She tried to pry him open with questions — she was so curious about him — and slowly he started to talk, about the man he had loved and men who loved him. He never said anything about the opera school or his stage life, and she learned not to push him. He was so vain, Sasha thought when he spent a long time fixing his hair or when he put on an expression of aloofness at the slightest attention of a stranger; she teased him, and then felt tender and guilty when he did not defend himself. She made fun of the other people in Yang’s life, too: his lover, Boshen, whom she believed to be a useless dreamer, and the men who boldly asked him for his number. She believed she was the first person in his life who did not worship him in any way, and he must be following her around because of that. It pleased her.

Was she dating the boy? Sasha’s classmates asked when they saw her with Yang more than once. Of course not, she said. In a month, Sasha was to go to America for graduate school, and it was pointless to start a relationship now. Besides, how smart was it to date a boy who loved no one but himself?

EVEN THE WIND could not cut through the warm bodies lined up on both sides of Michigan Avenue. Sasha pushed through the crowd. They looked so young and carefree, these Americans, happy as a group of pupils on a field trip. She envied these people, who would stand in a long line in front of a popcorn shop waiting for a bag of fresh popcorn, lovers leaning into each other, children hanging on to their parents. They were born to be themselves, naive and contented with their naivety.

“I would trade my place with any one of them,” Sasha said to Boshen, but when he raised his voice and asked her to repeat her words, she shook her head. If only there were a law in America binding her to where her baby belonged so that the baby would have a reason to live!

Sasha herself had once been used by the law to trap her mother in the grassland. One of the thousands of high school students sent down from Beijing to Inner Mongolia for labor reeducation, her mother, in order to join the Party, married a Mongolian herdsman, one of the model inter-racial marriages that were broadcast across the grassland. Five years later, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, all of the students were allowed to return to Beijing. Sasha’s mother, however, was forced to stay, even after she divorced her Mongolian husband. Their two daughters, born in the grassland, did not have legal residency in Beijing, and the mother had to stay where the children belonged.

Sasha pushed forward, looking at every store window. Silky scarves curved around the mannequins’ necks with soft obedience. Diamonds glistened on dark velvet. At a street corner, children gathered and watched the animated story displayed in the windows of Marshall Field’s. If only her baby were a visa that would admit her into this prosperity, Sasha thought, saddened by the memories of Nebraska and Inner Mongolia, the night skies of both places black with lonely, lifeless stars.