Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Han walks across the street to the Starbucks. He feels tired and sad, but then it is his mother’s mistake, not his, that makes them unhappy, and he decides to forgive her. A few steps away from the coffee shop, there is a loud squealing noise of tires on the cement road. Han turns and looks. Men and women are running toward a car, where a crowd has already gathered. A traffic accident, people are yelling, a kid run over. More people swarm toward the accident, some dialing the emergency number on their cellphones, others calling their friends and family, reporting a traffic accident they are witnessing, gesturing as they speak, full of excitement. A man dressed in old clothes runs toward the crowd. “My child,” he screams.

Han freezes, and then starts walking again, away from the accident. He does not want to see the man, who must have been smoking in a shaded corner a block or two away, cry now like a bereaved parent. He does not want to know if it’s the young girl with the singsong voice, or her brother with the sly smile in his eyes, that was run over. Traffic accidents happen every day in this city. People pay others to take their driving tests for them or buy their driver’s licenses directly from the black market; cars do not yield to pedestrians, pedestrians do not fear the moving vehicles. If he does not look, it could be any child, a son, a daughter, someone irrelevant and forgettable.

But somehow, Han knows it’s the boy. It has to be the boy, ready to deceive anyone who is willing to be deceived. The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han’s memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else’s disbelief.

Han sits in Starbucks by the window and waits for his mother. When she finally walks out of the church, the street is cleared and cleaned, not a trace of the accident left. Han walks out to meet his mother, his hands shaking. Across the street she smiles at him, hope and love in her eyes, and Han knows she has already forgotten the unpleasant incident from two hours earlier. She will always forgive him because he is her son. She will not give up her effort to save his soul because he is her son. But he does not want to be forgiven, or saved. He waits until his mother safely arrives at his side of the street, and says without looking at her, “Mama, there is something I want you to know. I’ll never get married. I only like men.”

Han’s mother does not speak. He smiles and says, “A shock, right? What would Baba say if he knew this? Disgusting, isn’t it?”

After a long moment, Han’s mother says, “I’ve guessed. That’s why I didn’t try matchmaking for you this time.”

“So you see, I’m doomed,” Han says. “I’m one of those— what did we say of those counterrevolutionaries back then? — stinky and hard and untransformable as a rock in an outhouse pit.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” Han’s mother says.

“Admit it, Mama. I’m doomed. Whoever your god is, he wouldn’t be fond of people like me.”

“You’re wrong,” Han’s mother says. She stands on tiptoe and touches his head, the way she used to touch his head when he was younger, to reassure him that he was still a good boy even after he did something wrong. “God loves you for who you are, not what others expect you to be,” she says. “God sees everything, and understands everything.”

Of course, Han wants to make a joke. Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son. But he stays quiet when he looks up at his mother, her eyes so eager and hopeful that he has to avert his own.

UNCLE BING CAME TO VISIT RUOLAN AND HER mother when her father went away on business trips. Ruolan’s father worked as a salesman for a tea factory, so every year in late spring, he traveled with samples of new tea to Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, big cities Ruolan dreamed of visiting when she grew up. Earlier on, he had come home before summer, but each year he traveled longer, and by the time Ruolan was ten years old, he did not show up until late December, when he was home just in time for the end-of-the-year housecleaning and the holidays. He sent postcards but not often. He brought Ruolan gifts from the cities, too: a doll with blond, curly hair and blue, deep-set eyes, fragrant rubber erasers in the shapes of little bunnies, dresses with laces and shining decorations that were too fancy for the town. Her mother put the dresses away in a trunk and never let Ruolan touch them. After a while, she learned not to ask. She wore passed-down clothes of her mother’s to school, gray blouses and blue pants, faded and too big. Gray-Skinned Mouse, the boys in school nicknamed Ruolan, but even that had stopped bothering her.

Uncle Bing lived in the mountains nearby, and was the only teacher in the small village school there. He was not married. He was not even a relative, but as long as Ruolan remembered, he had been Uncle Bing. Every spring, before her father’s trip, he left an envelope for Ruolan; inside were a piece of paper with Uncle Bing’s address and enough money for the round-trip bus fare. “Go find Uncle Bing in case of an emergency,” Ruolan’s father told her. She had never taken the trip once; there was no need really, as Uncle Bing came to visit Ruolan and her mother every weekend when her father went away. The paper bills Ruolan had put away, between pages of an old textbook that she hid under her straw mattress.

On Saturday evenings, Uncle Bing arrived, with a small basket of bayberries, or apricots, or freshly picked edible ferns, gifts from the students and their parents. They cost Uncle Bing nothing, but Ruolan’s mother always thanked him as if he had gone to great trouble to get them. “It’s so very kind of you, Uncle Bing. How could we ever repay you for your generosity?” she said.

Ruolan frowned. Her mother had the ability to fill her words, even the best-meaning ones, with disdain and sarcasm. Uncle Bing, however, was not annoyed. He went into the yard to chop the firewood, and when he became warm, he took off his shirt and hung it over the clothesline. From the kitchen, where Ruolan was cooking, she looked at the small and big holes in his undershirt. When she had been small, she used to stick her fingers into the holes and call it a fishnet. She no longer did it now; thirteen years old she was, and already she had started missing her childhood, when she had been less restrained around Uncle Bing, and happier.

Uncle Bing went on to fix the grapevine trellis that had been partly taken down by an early storm. Ruolan watched him work, and cut the vegetables halfheartedly until her mother called from the bedroom, “Does the knife weigh a thousand tons?”

Ruolan did not answer and chopped the celery with an angry speed.

At supper, Ruolan’s mother poured the strong yam wine for Uncle Bing. They talked about the weather, too much rain or too little, and how the peasants’ lives would be affected, even though neither of them needed to worry about the harvest season. Ruolan listened to their pointless chatting and spun the chopsticks between her fingers. Her mother did not tell her to stop the bad-mannered game in a snapping voice when Uncle Bing was around.

Sometimes, when they ran out of small talk, Uncle Bing poured a cup of yam wine for Ruolan’s mother, and they let the rims of the cups touch slightly. She took a few sips, which made her cough and blush, and she would tell Ruolan to see to it that Uncle Bing had a good drink, and then excuse herself and retreat to the bedroom.

“How’s Mama’s health?” Uncle Bing asked Ruolan after her mother left.