Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“But who’ll give us the certificate?”

“I’ll worry about that. You think about the application,” Sansan said. She saw the hesitation in Tu’s eyes, but there was also a spark of hope, and she caught it before it dimmed. “Don’t you want to go to America, too? We don’t have to go back home after graduation, and work at some boring jobs because we don’t have city residency. Nobody will care about whether you are from a small town when you get to America.”

“But to marry Min?”

“Why not?” Sansan said. “We have each other, but she doesn’t have anyone. The city boys — they all become turtles in their shells once she’s in trouble.”

Tu agreed to try. It was one of the reasons Sansan loved him — he trusted her despite his own doubt; he followed her decision. Persuading Min seemed easy, even though she too questioned the plan. Sansan alone nudged Tu and Min toward the collective American dream for all three of them; she went back to her hometown, and through bribing and pleading got a false certificate about the American grand-uncle of Tu. The plan could have gone wrong but it went right at every step. Tu was accepted by a school in Pennsylvania; Min, with the marriage certificate, got her own paperwork done to leave the country as Tu’s dependent. The arrangement, a secret known only to the three of them, was too complicated to explain to outsiders, but none of the three had a doubt then. One more year and the plan would be complete, when Min would find a way to sponsor herself, and Tu, with a marriage and a divorce under his belt, would come home and marry Sansan.

It did not occur to Sansan that she should have had sex with Tu before he took off. In fact, he asked for it, but she refused. She remembered reading, in her college course, Women in Love, and one detail had stuck with her ever since. One of the sisters, before her lover went to war, refused to have sex with him, afraid that it would make him crave women at a time when only death was available. But Tu was not going to a war but a married life with another woman. How could a man resist falling in love with a beautiful woman whose body ate, slept, peed, and menstruated in the same apartment, a thin door away from him?

Sansan started to imagine the lovemaking between Tu and Min when, after the short letter informing her of their intention to stay in the marriage, neither would write to her again. She stripped them, put them in bed, and studied their sex as if it would give her an answer. Min’s silky long hair brushed against the celery stalk of Tu’s body, teasing him, calling out to him; Tu pushed his large cauliflower head against Min’s heavy breasts, a hungry, ugly piglet looking for his nourishment. The more she imagined, the more absurd they became. It was unfair of her, Sansan knew, to make Tu into a comic image, but Min’s beauty, like a diamond, was impenetrable. Sansan had never worried about the slightest possibility of their falling in love — Min was too glamorous a girl for Tu, the boy with a big head, a thin body, and a humble smile. She had put her faith in the love between Tu and herself, and she had believed in the sacrifice they had to go through to save a friend. But inexplicable as life was, Min and Tu fell in love, and had mismatched sex in Sansan’s mind. Sometimes she replaced Min with herself, and masturbated. Tu and she looked more harmonious — they had been playmates when Sansan had been a toddler sitting by her mother’s stove, where Tu had been a small boy from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son; the sex, heartbreakingly beautiful, made her cry afterward.

Sansan took up the habit of eating sunflower seeds when she could no longer stand her imagination. Every night, she sits for hours cracking sunflower seeds; she reaches for the bag the first thing when she wakes up, before she gets out of bed. She calms down when the shells pop in her brain, and is able to imagine Tu and Min in their clothes. The fact that they both broke their promises to her, hurtful as it is and it will always be, no longer matters. What remains meaningful is Tu and Min’s marriage vows to each other. She was the one to make them husband and wife, and even if they would be too ashamed to admit it to each other, she would always hover above their marriage bed, a guardian angel that blesses and curses them with her forgiveness.

What, then, has led them to end their marriage, ten years too late? Once they broke their promises to her; twice they did. With a divorce, what will become of her, when neither of them will be obliged to think about her nobleness?

WHEN THE BAG of sunflower seeds runs out, Sansan decides to go find her mother and ask about Tu’s divorce. The marketplace, the only one in town, is next to the railway station. The trains running between Beijing and the southern cities stop several times a day at the station for ten-minute breaks, and many vendors rely on these trains for their businesses.

The one-fifteen train has just pulled into the station when Sansan arrives. A few passengers show up stretching their legs and arms, and soon more flood into the marketplace. Sansan stands a few steps away and watches her mother hitting the side of the pot with a steel ladle and chanting, “Come and try — come and buy — the eight-treasure eggs — the best you’ll ever taste.”

A woman stops and lifts the lid, and her kid points to the biggest egg in the pot. More people slow down at the good smell of tea leaves, spices, and soy sauce. Some take out their wallets to pay; others, seeing more egg sellers, walk on without knowing they’ve missed the best hard-boiled eggs in the world. When Sansan was young, she was infuriated by the people who did not choose her mother’s eggs — the other vendors were all stingy, never adding as many spices and tea leaves to their pots as her mother did. But when Sansan became older, she grew angry, instead, at her mother’s stubbornness. All those people who buy her eggs — strangers that come and go and will not remember this place or her mother’s face even if they remember the taste of the eggs— they will never know that her mother spends more money on the best spices and tea leaves.

When the train leaves, Sansan finds a brick and puts it next to her mother’s stool. She sits down and watches her mother add eggs and more spices to the pot. “Isn’t it a waste of money to put in so much of the expensive spices?” Sansan says.

“Don’t tell me how to boil eggs. I have done this for forty years, and have brought you up boiling eggs my way.”

“But even if people can taste the difference, they will never come back to look for your eggs.”

“Why not give them their one chance to eat the best eggs in the world, then?” her mother says, raising her voice. A few vendors look at them, winking at one another. The marketplace is full of eyes and ears. By dinnertime, the whole town will have known that Sansan has shown up and attacked her poor mother, and children of the town will be warned, at the dinner tables, not to follow Sansan’s example, a daughter not fulfilling her filial duty, who spends money on renting when her mother has kept a room ready for her.

“Mama, why don’t you think of retirement?” Sansan says in a lower voice.

“Who will feed me then, a poor old widow?”

“I will.”

“You don’t even know how to take care of yourself,” her mother says. “What you need is a man like Tu.”

Sansan looks at her own shadow on the ground, and the fragments of eggshells by her leather sandals. The eggshells were her only toys before she befriended Tu from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son. Tu’s parents have retired, living in a two-bedroom flat that Tu bought for them. The next stall now sells cigarettes and lighters and palm-sized pictures of blond women whose clothes, when put close to the flame, disappear. After a moment, Sansan asks, “What happened to Tu?”