Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“His parents came by yesterday, and asked if you wanted to go back to him.”

“Why?”

“A man needs a woman. You need a husband, too.”

“Is that what I am, a substitute?”

“Don’t act willful. You’re not a young girl anymore.”

“Why did he get a divorce?”

“People change their minds. Sansan, if you ask me, I would say just go back to Tu without questioning.”

“Is that what Tu wants? Or is it his parents’ idea?”

“What’s the difference? He’ll marry you if you want to go back to him, that’s what his parents said.”

“That would make it an arranged marriage.”

“Nonsense. We’ve seen you two grow up together from the beginning,” Sansan’s mother says. “Even in arranged marriages, people fall in love.”

Sansan feels a sting in her heart. “Sure, people fall in love in arranged marriages, but that’s not the love I want.”

“What do you want, then, Miss Romantic?”

Sansan does not reply. A romance is more than a love story with a man. A promise is a promise, a vow remains a vow; such is the grandeur of Casablanca, such is the true romance that keeps every day of her life meaningful.

Neither of them speaks. Sansan watches her mother pick up the fresh eggs with the ladle, and crack the shells carefully with a spoon so that the spices will soak the eggs well. When her mother finishes, she scoops up an egg and puts it into Sansan’s hands without a word. The egg is hot but Sansan does not drop it. She looks at the cracks on the shell, darkened by the spices and soy sauce like a prophet’s fractured turtle shell. When she was younger, she had to beg her mother for a long time before she was given an egg to eat, but when Tu was around, her mother always gave them each an egg without hesitation. Sansan wonders if her mother still remembers such things, the nourishing of their relationship long before she and Tu became lovers.

A FEW MINUTES pass, and then, across the street, two jeeps stop with screeching noises. Sansan looks up and sees several cops jump out and surround Gong’s Dried Goods Shop. Soon the customers are driven out the door. “What’s going on?” the vendors ask one another. Sansan’s mother stands up and looks across the street for a minute, and hands the ladle to Sansan. “Take care of the stove for me,” her mother says, and walks across the street with a few other curious vendors.

Sansan watches her mother pushing to the front of the store, where the cops have set up red warning tapes. She wonders why, after forty years in the marketplace, her mother is still interested in other people’s business.

Ten minutes later, her mother returns and says to the vendors, “You’ll never imagine this — they’ve found opium in Gong’s goods.”

“What?”

“No wonder their business is always so good — they add opium when they make their nuts and seeds so people will always want to go back to them,” Sansan’s mother says. “What black-hearted people they are!”

“How did the police find out?” the vendor across the aisle asks.

“Someone working in the shop must have told on them.”

More vendors come back. Sansan listens to them talking about Gong’s opium business, her palms wet and sticky. She was planning to go to Gong’s to buy more sunflower seeds before the end of the day; even the thought of the sunflower seeds makes her eager to go home and hide herself in a pile of cracked shells, letting the taste on her tongue take her over and carry her away to a safe place, where she watches over Tu and Min serenely. Is that what she is living on, a poisoned food, a drugged dream?

Sansan’s mother turns to her. “But let’s not talk about other people’s trouble. What do you think of the proposal, Sansan?”

“To marry Tu? No, I don’t want to marry him.”

“You’ve been waiting for him all these years. Don’t be silly.”

“I’ve never waited for him.”

“But that’s a lie. Everyone knows you’re waiting for him.”

“Everyone?”

“Why else do you never get married? Everyone knows he did this horrible thing to you, but men make mistakes. Even his parents apologized yesterday. It’s time to think about forgiveness.”

“What’s to forgive?”

“He had you, and then left you for another woman. Listen, it would not be that bad a thing if you went back to him. As the old saying goes —what belongs to someone will belong to him eventually. ”

“Wait a minute, Mama. What do you mean he had me?”

Sansan’s mother blushes. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know. If you mean sex, no, he’s never had me.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It was understandable, and it was nobody’s fault.”

Sansan, for the first time, understands the town’s tolerance of her, a pitiful woman used and then abandoned by a lover, a woman unmarriable because she will never be able to demonstrate her virginity on the snow-white sheet spread on the wedding bed. “Mama, I have nothing to do with Tu. We never had sex.”

“Are you sure?” Sansan’s mother asks, hopeful disbelief in her eyes.

“I’m a spinster losing my mind. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you ask the town to vote on my virginity?”

Sansan’s mother stares at her for a long moment, and claps her hands. “That’s even better. I didn’t know you loved him so much. I’ll go talk to his parents tonight, and tell them you’ve kept your cleanness for him all these years.”

“I did nothing for him.”

“But why wouldn’t you get married, if he never had you?”

Sansan does not reply. She wonders how much of the gossip about her lost virginity burdened her father before his death. She wonders why her mother has never confronted her all these years; but then, how could her mother, a proud yet humble woman of tradition, ask her daughter such a thing when they have never talked about sex in her family?

“If you can’t answer the question, it’s time to make up your mind,” Sansan’s mother says.

“My mind has been made up all along. I won’t marry Tu.”

“Are you going crazy?”

“Mama, why do you want to be the best egg seller in the world?”

Sansan’s mother shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mama, why do you put more spices in?”

“If I’m telling people I sell the best eggs in the world, I have to keep my promise.”

“But nobody cares about it. You’re keeping a promise that matters only to you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m an illiterate. Besides, what has that to do with your marriage?”

“I have my own promise to keep.”

“Why are you so stubborn? Do you know we’ll both end up as crazy women if you don’t get married?” Sansan’s mother says, and starts to cry.

ANOTHER TRAIN PULLS into the station with a longwhistle. Sansan listens to her mother chanting in a trembling voice, and wipes a drop of tear off. Indeed she is going crazy, hurting her mother so, the only person who loves her despite who she is. But she has no other choice. People in this world can discard their promises like used napkins, but she does not want to be one of them.

A man enters the marketplace, in a dirty shirt and jeans and carrying a shapeless bag. He hugs the bag close to his body as if it were a woman. Sansan watches the man sit down at the open space between the two stalls across the aisle from her mother’s stove. He takes a flattened cardboard box and a knife out of the bag, the kind with a long and sharp blade that fruit vendors use to cut watermelons. Then he takes off his shirt, points the knife to his left arm, and with a push, carefully slices open his flesh, from the elbow to the shoulder. He seems so calm and measured in his movements that Sansan and a few other people who have noticed him all watch with quiet amazement. The man dips his index finger in the blood, checks his finger as if he is a calligrapher, and writes down the words on the cardboard box: Give me ten yuan and I will let you slice me once wherever you like; if you finish my life with one cut, you owe me nothing.