Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Think of when you first went to college. Your dad and I thought we were the most accomplished parents in the world,” her mother says, ready to reminisce and cry.

“Mama, we’ve been there many times. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Why? You think I toil all these years just to raise a daughter to shut me up?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” Sansan says.

“Don’t go yet. Stay with me longer,” her mother says, almost pleading.

Sansan tries to soften her voice. “Mama, I’m in the middle of a class.”

“Come home tonight, then. I have something important to tell you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now? I can spare five minutes.”

“Five minutes are not enough. It’s about Tu.” Sansan’s mother steps closer and whispers, “Tu is divorced.”

Sansan stares at her mother for a long moment. Her mother nods at her. “Yes, he’s unoccupied now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sansan says.

“His parents want you to go back to him.”

“Mama, I don’t understand.”

“That’s why you have to come home and talk to me. Now go teach,” Sansan’s mother says, and pushes the wheelbarrow forward before Sansan replies.

SANSAN DISCOVERED CASABLANCA the year Tu wrote a short and apologetic letter from America, explaining his decision not to marry her. Before the letter’s arrival, she showed The Sound of Music to her students, humming with every song, ready to abandon the students for America at any minute. After the letter, she has never sung again. Casablanca says all she wants to teach the students about life.

Sansan goes back to the classroom and resumes her place on the windowsill, letting her legs dangle the way she remembers her American teachers did in college. At the end of the Paris scene, when Rick gets soaked on the platform in the pouring rain, and then boards the train, a boy says, “How funny. His coat is dry as a camel’s fur now.”

Sansan is surprised that she has missed the detail all along. She thinks of praising the boy for his keen observation, but changes her mind. “One of life’s mysteries is its inexplicability,” she raises her voice and says.

The students roar with laughter. Certainly the line will be passed on, along with the nickname, to the next class, but Sansan does not care. The students, recent graduates from junior high, will be teaching elementary students after the two years of studying in the Educators’ School. Most of them are from villages, and the school is their single chance to escape heavy farm labor. English is taught only to comply with a regulation set by the Education Department; they will never understand what she means, these kids living out their petty desires.

After two classes, Sansan decides to take off, complaining to her colleagues of a headache. Nobody believes her excuse, she knows, but nobody would contradict her, either. They indulge her the way people do a person with a mild and harmless craziness, whose eccentricity adds color to their otherwise dull lives. Among the few people in town who have college degrees, Sansan is the best-educated one. She was one of the two children from the town who have ever made it to the most prestigious college in Beijing, and the only one to have returned. The other one, Tu, the childhood companion and classmate and boyfriend and fiancé at one time or another in her life, is in America, married to a woman more beautiful than Sansan.

And divorced now, ten years too late. Back in her rented room, Sansan sits on her bed and cracks sunflower seeds. The shells rain down onto the sheet and the floor, and she lets them pile up. She craves the popping sounds in her skull, and the special flavor in her mouth. It is the sunflower seeds, sweet and salty and slightly bitter from the nameless spices Gong’s Dried Goods Shop uses to process its sunflower seeds, and the English novels she bought in college— a full shelf of them, each one worthy of someone’s lifetime to study — that make her life bearable. But the sunflower seeds taste different today; Tu’s divorce, like a fish bone stabbed in her throat, distracts her.

Tu would never imagine her sitting among the shells of sunflower seeds and pondering his failed marriage, but she still imagines him on a daily basis. Not a surprise, as she promised Tu at their engagement ceremony. “I’ll be thinking of you until the day when all the seas in the world dry up,” she said. Tu must have said something similar, and Min, the only witness of the ceremony and then Tu’s legal wife on paper, hugged both of them. It was odd, in retrospect, that Min did not take a vow. After all, the engagement between Sansan and Tu, just as the marriage between Min and Tu, was the contract for all three of them.

Min was the most beautiful girl Sansan had met in college, and is, ten years later, the most beautiful person in her memory. In college they lived in the same dorm with four other girls, but for a long time in their first year, they were not close. Min was a city girl, attractive, outgoing, one of the girls who would have anything they set their eyes on, and of course they only set their eyes on the best. Sansan, a girl from a small town, with a heavy accent and a plain face, was far from the best for Min, as a confidante or a friend.

Toward the end of their freshman year, the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square disrupted their study. Min became an active protester in the Square. Miss Tiananmen, the boys voted her; she dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and gestured victory to the Western reporters’ cameras. After the crashing down, she had to go through a difficult time, being checked and rechecked; she ended up belonging to the category that did not need imprisonment but did not have a right to any legal job after graduation, either. When Min came back to school, still beautiful but sad and defeated, Sansan was the first and the only person in the dorm who dared to express sympathy and friendliness toward Min. Sansan was among the few who had not attended any protests. She and Tu had been the only students showing up for classes when their classmates had gone on a strike; later, when the teachers had stopped coming to classes, they had become intimate, falling in love as their parents and the whole town back home had expected them to.

Sansan never thought of her friendly gesture to Min as anything noble or brave; it was out of a simple wish to be nice to someone who deserved a better treatment from life. Sansan was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, then, when Min decided to return the goodwill and become her best friend. Sansan felt a little uneasy, too, as if she had taken advantage of Min’s bad fortune; they would have never become friends under normal circumstances, but then, what was wrong with living with the exceptional, if that’s what was given by life?

At the end of their sophomore year, the Higher Education Department announced a new policy that allowed only those students who had American relatives to be granted passports for studying abroad, something that made no sense at all, but such was their life at the time, living with all the ridiculous rules that changed their lives like a willy-nilly child. Min’s only hope for her future — going to America after graduation — became a burst bubble, and Sansan, when she could not stand the heartbreakingly beautiful face of Min, started to think and act with resolution.

“Are you out of your mind?” Tu said when she announced to him her plan — that he would apply to an American graduate school and help Min out through a false marriage. “I don’t have any American relatives.”

“Your grandfather’s brother — didn’t he go to Taiwan after the Liberation War? Why couldn’t he have gone to America later? Listen, nobody will go to America to check your family history. As long as we get a certificate saying that he’s in America. .”