Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Yang smiled. “It’s so hot,” he said in a pleasant voice.

“Indeed,” the landlady agreed.

Yang turned off the tap and walked back to the room, with the same grace and idleness, knowing that the people in the courtyard were all watching him, his willowy body wrapped in the moon white robe. Sasha stood by the window, cold with disappointment. She became his audience, one of the most difficult to capture, perhaps, but he succeeded after all.

A Disney float approached the corner where Sasha and Boshen stood. “Look,” Sasha said and pointed at a giant glove of Mickey Mouse moving ahead of the float. “There’re only four fingers.”

“I didn’t know that,” Boshen said.

“Yang needs us no more than that glove needs us for our admiration,” Sasha said.

“But our love is the only thing to protect him, and to save him, too.”

Sasha turned and looked into Boshen’s eyes. “It’s people like us who have destroyed him, isn’t it? Why was there Nan Dan in the Peking Opera in the first place? Men loved him because he was playing a woman; women loved him because he was a man playing, ” she said.

“That’s totally wrong.”

“Why else do you want so much to put him back on the stage? Don’t think I’m happy to see him fall. Believe me, I wanted to help him as much as you do. He didn’t have to be a man playing a woman — I thought I would make him understand. But what did I end up with? You’re not the one who has a baby inside; he’s not the one having an abortion,” Sasha said, and started to cry.

Boshen held out his hand and touched Sasha’s shoulder hesitantly. If only she could love the boy one more time. Yang could choose to live with either of them; he could choose not to love them at all but their love would keep him safe and intact; they could — the three of them — bring up the baby together. Yang would remain the princess, exiled, yes, but a true princess, beautiful in a foreign land. If only he knew how to make Sasha love Yang again, Boshen thought.

Sasha did not move away when Boshen put an arm around her shoulder. They must look like the most ordinary couple to strangers, a nervous husband comforting his moody wife after an argument. They might as well be a couple, out of love, he caring only for the baby inside her, she having no feeling left for anything, her unborn child included.

As if responding, the baby moved. A tap, and then another one, gentle and tentative, the first greeting that Sasha had wished she would never have to answer, but it seemed impossible, once it happened, not to hope for more. After a long moment, people in the street shouted, and children screamed out of excitement. Sasha looked up — the lights were lit up in the trees, thousands of stars forming a constellation. She thought about the small Mongolian town where her mother lived alone now, her long shadow trailing behind her as she walked home along the dimly lit alley. Her mother had been born into a wrong time, lived all her adult life in a wrong place, yet she had never regretted the births of her two daughters. Sasha held her breath and waited for more of the baby’s messages. America was a good country, she thought, a right place to be born into, even though the baby had come at a wrong time. Everything was possible in America, she thought, and imagined a baby possessing the beauty of her father but happier, and luckier. Sasha smiled, but then when the baby moved again, she burst into tears. Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

SANSAN IS KNOWN TO HER STUDENTS AS MISS Casablanca. A beautiful nickname if one does not pay attention to the cruel, almost malicious smiles when the name is mentioned, and she chooses not to see. Sansan, at thirty-two, does not have a husband, a lover, or a close friend. Since graduation from college, she has been teaching English at the Educators’ School in the small town where she grew up, a temporary job that has turned permanent. For ten years she has played Casablanca, five or six times a semester, for each class of students. The pattern of their response has become familiar, and thus bearable for her. At the beginning, they watch in awe, it being the first real American movie they have watched, without Chinese dubbing or subtitles. Sansan sees them struggle to understand the dialogue, but the most they can do is catch a phrase or two now and then. Still, they seem to have no trouble understanding the movie, and always, some girls end the class with red teary eyes. But soon they lose their interest. They laugh when the women in the movie cry; they whistle when a man kisses a woman on the screen. In the end, Sansan watches the movie alone, with the added sound track from the chatting students.

That is what Sansan is doing with her morning class when someone taps on the door. Only when the knocking becomes urgent does she pause the tape.

“Your mother’s waiting for you outside. She wants to see you,” the janitor says when Sansan opens the door.

“What for?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy with my students?”

“It’s your mother waiting outside,” the janitor says, one foot planted firmly inside the door.

Sansan stares at the janitor. After a moment, she sighs. “OK, tell her I’m coming,” she says. The students all watch on amused. She tells them to keep watching the movie, and knows they will not.

Outside the school gate, Sansan finds her mother leaning onto the wooden wheelbarrow she pushes to the marketplace every day. Stacked in it are a coal stove, a big aluminum pot, packs of eggs, bottles of spices, and a small wooden stool. For forty years, Sansan’s mother has been selling hard-boiled eggs in the marketplace by the train station, mostly to travelers. Sitting on the stool for all her adult life has made her a tiny stooped woman. Sansan hasn’t seen her mother for a year, since her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hair is thinner and grayer, but so will Sansan’s own be in a few years, and she feels no sentiment for either of them.

“Mama, I heard you were looking for me,” Sansan says.

“How else would I know that you’re alive?”

“Why? I thought people talked about me to you all the time.”

“They can lie to me.”

“Of course.” Sansan grins.

“But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?”

“Theirs.”

“You’ve never known how to spell the word ‘shame.’ ”

“Do you come just to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself? I know it by heart now.”

“What god did I offend to deserve you as a daughter?” Her mother raises her voice. A few passersby slow down and look at them with amused smiles.

“Mama, do you have something to say? I’m busy.”

“It won’t be long before you will become an orphan, Sansan. One day I’ll be drowned by all the talk about you.”

“People’s words don’t kill a person.”

“What killed your dad, then?”

“I was not the only disappointment for dad,” Sansan says. Hard as she tries, she feels her throat squeezed tight by a sudden grief. Her father, before his death, worked as a meter reader, always knocking on people’s doors around dinnertime, checking their gas and water meters, feeling responsible for the ever-rising rates and people’s anger. One evening he disappeared after work. Later he was discovered by some kids in a pond outside the town, his body planted upside down. The pond was shallow, waist deep at most; he had plunged himself into the mud, with the force of a leap maybe, but nobody could tell for sure how he did it, or why. Sansan’s mother believed that it was Sansan’s failure at marriage that killed him.