Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Sasha listened to the song repeat and said, “I don’t understand why these people think they have the right to trash Genghis Khan.”

“Their ears are dead to real music,” Yang said.

“When I was little, my father taught me a song about Genghis Khan. It’s the only Mongolian song I remember now,” Sasha said, and opened her mouth to sing the song. The melody was in her mind, but no words came to her tongue. She had forgotten almost all of the Mongolian words she had learned, after her parents’ divorce; she had not seen her father for fifteen years. “Well, I don’t remember it anymore.”

“ The broken pillars, the slanted roof, they once saw the banqueting days; the dying trees, the withering peonies, they once danced in the heavenly music. The young girls dreamed of their lovers who were enlisted to fight the Huns. They did not know the loved ones had become white bones glistening in the moonlight, ” Yang chanted in a low voice to the ceiling. “Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.”

“What’s the point of remembering the song anyway? I don’t even remember what my father looked like.” Sasha thought about her father, one of the offspring of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan was turned into a clown in the pop song. Mongolia was once the biggest empire in the world, and now it was a piece of meat, sandwiched by China and Russia.

“We live in a wrong time,” Yang said.

Sasha turned to look at Yang. He lay on his hands and stared at the ceiling, his face taking on the resigned look of an old man. It hurt her, and scared her too, to glimpse a world beneath his empty beauty. “We were born into a wrong place, is what our problem is,” she said, trying to cheer him and herself up. “Why don’t you come to America with me, Yang?”

Yang smiled. “Who am I to follow you?”

“A husband, a lover, a brother, I don’t care. Why don’t you get out of Beijing and have a new life in America?” The words, once said, hung in the room like heavy fog, and Sasha wondered if Yang, too, had difficulty breathing. Outside the window, a vendor was sharpening a chopper with a whetstone, the strange sound making their mouths water unpleasantly. Then the vendor started to sing in a drawn-out voice about his tasty pig heads.

“Sasha,” Yang said finally. “Is Sasha a Mongolian name?”

“Not really. It’s Russian, a name of my mom’s favorite heroine in a Soviet war novel.”

“That’s why it doesn’t sound Chinese. I would rather it is a Mongolian name,” Yang said. “Sasha, the princess of Mongolia.”

Sasha walked barefoot to Yang’s bed and knelt beside him. He did not move, and let Sasha hold his face with both hands. “Come to America with me,” she said. “We’ll be the prince and the princess of Nebraska.”

“I was not trained to play a prince,” Yang said.

“The script is changed,” Sasha said. “From today on.”

Yang turned to look at Sasha. She tried to kiss him, but he pushed her away gently. “ A beautiful body is only a bag of bones, ” he sang in a low voice.

Sasha had never seen Yang perform, and could not imagine him onstage; he had played princesses and prostitutes, but he did not have to live with the painted mask and the silk costume. “The Peking Opera is dead,” she said. “Why don’t you give it up?”

“Who are you to say that about the Peking Opera?” Yang said, his face turning suddenly stern.

Sasha saw the iciness in Yang’s eyes and let the topic drop. Afterward, neither mentioned anything about the stay in the hotel. A week later, when Boshen was escorted away from Beijing, Sasha was relieved and scared. There was, all of a sudden, time for them to fill. To her relief and disappointment, Yang seemed to have forgotten the moment when they were close, so close that they were almost in love.

THE PARADE STARTED with music and laughter, colorful floats moving past, on which happy people waved to the happy audience. Boshen looked at Sasha’s face, lit up by curiosity, and sighed. Despite her willfulness and unfriendliness, the thought of the baby — Yang’s baby — made him eager to forgive her. “Do you still not want to tell Yang about the baby?” he said.

“You’ve asked this the hundredth time,” Sasha said. “Why should I?”

“He might want to come to the U.S. if he learned about the baby,” Boshen said.

“There’ll be no baby after tomorrow,” Sasha said. She had tried Yang’s phone number when she had learned of the pregnancy; she had tried his pager, too. At first it was measured by hours and days, and then it became weeks since she had left the message on his pager. He might be living in another apartment with a new telephone number. The pager might no longer belong to him. She knew he had every reason for not getting her message, but she could not forgive his silence. In the meantime, her body changed. She felt the growth inside her and she was disgusted by it. Sometimes she hated it from morning till night, hoping that it would finally go away, somehow, surrendering to the strength of her resentment. Other times she kept her mind away for as long as she could, thinking that it would disappear as if it had never existed. Still, in the end, it required her action. In the end, she thought, it was just a chunk of flesh and blood.

“But why was there a baby in the first place?” Boshen said. Why and how it happened were the questions that had been haunting him since he had heard from Sasha. He wanted to ask her if she, too, had been dazzled by the boy’s body, smooth, lithe, perfectly shaped. He wanted to know if she had loved him as he had, but in that case, how could she have the heart to discard what had been left with her?

Sasha turned to Boshen. For the first time, she studied the man with curiosity. Not handsome or ugly, he had a candid face that Sasha thought she could not fall in love with but nonetheless could trust. A man like Boshen should have an ordinary life, boring and comfortable, yet his craze for Yang made him a more interesting man than he deserved to be. But that must be what was Yang’s value — he made people fall in love with him, and the love led them astray, willingly, from their otherwise tedious paths. Yang had been the one to bring up the idea of spending a night together again, and Sasha the one to ask a friend for the use of her rented room, a few days before Sasha’s flight. It was one of the soggiest summer evenings. After their lovemaking, sweet and short and uneventful, they stayed on the floor, on top of the blanket Sasha had brought for the purpose, an arm’s length between them, each too warm to touch the other. Outside, the landlady’s family and two other neighbor families were sitting in the courtyard and watching a TV program, their voices mixed with the claps of their hands killing the mosquitoes. Sasha turned to look at Yang, who was lying with his back to her. The little pack of condoms she had bought was tucked underneath the blanket, unopened. She had suggested it and he had refused. A rubber was for people who touched without loving each other, Yang had said; his words had made her hopeful again. “Do you want to come to America with me now?” she asked, tracing his back with one finger.

“What am I going to do in America? Be kept as a canary by you?” Yang said and moved farther away from her finger.

“You can spend some time learning English, and get a useful degree in America.”

“Useful? Don’t you already know that I am useless? Besides, nothing humiliates a man more than living as a parasite on his woman,” Yang said, and reached for a silk robe he had packed with him. Before Sasha had the time to stop him, he walked out the door. Sasha jumped to her feet and watched from behind the curtain; Yang walked with a calculated laziness, not looking at the people who turned their eyes away from the television to stare at him. When he reached the brick sink in the middle of the courtyard, he sat on the edge and raised his bare legs to the tap. The water had run for a long moment before the landlady recovered from her shock and said, “Hey, the water costs me money.”