Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Uncle Bing watched her with a sad, tender look. “You’re too young to know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I’m old enough to tell what’s good for you,” Ruolan said, and felt something soften inside her. She was not a stone woman, after all. She walked to where Uncle Bing sat on the stool, bent down, and put her hands palms down on his knees. “Uncle Bing,” she said in a whisper, looking into his eyes the way she imagined a seductive woman would do. “Have you heard of the saying that what a mother owes, a daughter pays back?”

Uncle Bing’s lips quavered. “No, I’ve never heard it.”

“Now you know,” Ruolan said, and touched Uncle Bing’s face, his sideburns stubby under her palm. Uncle Bing breathed hard, and then brushed her hand off gently. “Your mother doesn’t owe me,” he said, putting his head between his hands, not looking at her.

Ruolan knelt down and looked up at Uncle Bing. “You need an antidote for her poison,” she said eagerly. “Baba has his other woman. You need one yourself, too.”

“You’re a big girl now, and Uncle Bing is getting old,” he said. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you catch the next bus home so Mama doesn’t worry about you?”

Ruolan burst into tears. “Why don’t you understand me?” she said.

“I do,” Uncle Bing said. “But let’s keep life as it is.”

“What’s good about this life, Uncle Bing?”

“You and Mama are my only family now. I can’t afford losing either one of you.”

Ruolan wiped the tears with the back of her hands. She stared at Uncle Bing; he looked weak, despondent, beaten, and she pitied him. If she was willing, she could keep the nameless love, not of a daughter or of a lover, but both. She could as well stay in the arrangement, tolerating her mother for his sake, but then, why should she choose misery because of love? Why should she choose misery for any reason? She touched the money in her pocket. “I’m leaving, Uncle Bing,” Ruolan said, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Perhaps when she was gone, he would realize what a mistake he had made; perhaps only then she would beat her mother, and he would understand that he had chosen the wrong woman.

“Tell Mama I’ll come Saturday,” Uncle Bing said, still not daring to look up at Ruolan.

THE HOUSE OF MR. AND MRS. PANG IS THE PLACE where I can take a break from being someone’s daughter. The days spent there, one summer week and one winter week, are the only time when I am not living under my schoolteacher mother. Being someone’s child is a difficult job, a position one has no right to quit. Heaven forgive every child who dreams of being an orphan while her parents are working with backs bent to make the child’s life a happy one. No life seems happier than an orphan’s life for a non-orphan like me. So many times have I dreamed of standing on a street corner, wearing shabby clothes two sizes too small, my ankles and wrists frozen to a bluish white. In my dream I am singing songs about all the sadness in the world, my small voice quavering in the wind. After the most heartbreaking song, I bow to the crowd and they let streams of coins drop into my street singer’s basket, men sighing and women wiping tears away with their fingertips.

“Good singing. Sing another song, Little Blossom.” It is always the sons of Mr. and Mrs. Song who clap and awaken me from my daydreaming. I am standing in the center of Mrs. Pang’s yard, wearing my brand-new bunny coat, snow white fur soft and smooth, the two long ears too tender to stay up, resting on my forehead like extra bangs. I push the ears aside and blush from excitement. Little Blossom is not my name but the name of a famous heroine in a movie, played by my favorite actress, Chen Chong. At sixteen, she is already the most famous actress in the country; every day she smiles at me from the calendar by my bedside.

“Come on,” the oldest of the four boys says. “Do you want to be a little blossom ?”

I nod hard and the two ears flap in front of my eyes. In other dreams, always following the dreams of being an orphan selling her singing voice, I would eventually grow up into an actress like Chen Chong, my beautiful face on other people’s walls, wearing makeup. Only actresses are allowed to wear makeup without being denounced as morally degenerate. Lipstick and rouge are part of my orphan dreams.

“Oh yeah, you want to be a little blossom for us?” the second of the four brothers says with a teasing smile. The four boys roar in laughter. At seven years old I am too young to understand the meaning of the little blossom in their vocabulary. I laugh with them but Mrs. Pang stops me. She rushes out from the kitchen and waves a spatula at the boys. “Watch your mouths,” she says. The boys laugh again and go back to their room. Mrs. Pang drags me out of the yard and puts me down on the female stone lion in front of the quadrangle. The heads of the pair of lions were chopped off by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution as part of the old trash. I sit astride the lioness, fingering the sharp edges left by the axes.

“Now, don’t get mixed up with the Song boys,” Mrs. Pang said. “Wait here. We are going to the market soon.”

Mrs. Pang does not like the Song family. Mr. and Mrs. Song started as tenants, renting the room at the western side of the quadrangle, but they stopped paying when Mr. Pang was kicked out of his working unit as an enemy of the People. Mr. and Mrs. Song stayed, claiming themselves to be the legal owners of the room. During the years of their occupancy, they demolished Mr. Pang’s flower bed and built a kitchen on the spot. They installed clotheslines between Mr. Pang’s pomegranate tree and grape trellis, their flagging underwear the permanent decoration of the yard. They produced four sons, and the six of them are still living in one room, the youngest son already sixteen and the oldest twenty-three.

THE MORNING SUN is halfway up in the sky. Three old men are sitting under the north wall of the alley, their eyes closed and their toothless mouths half open, enjoying this unusually warm winter day in Beijing. On the other side of the alley, four girls are jumping rope, chanting a song I have never heard before: “ One two three four five. Let’s go hunt the tiger. The tiger does not eat man. The tiger only eats Truman. ” It will be years later when I realize that the Truman they are singing about was the American president during the Korean War, so in the winter of 1979, the song makes little sense to me. I sit there and chant the song silently to myself. After a while the four girls stop singing and start to draw squares on the ground. I jump down from the lion. “Can I join you?” I ask.

“Say the pledge,” a girl says and the four of them quickly surround me hand in hand, waiting solemnly.

“What pledge?” I ask.

“You don’t know the pledge?” a girl says, making a face. “Where are you from? The Java Island?”

“No, I am from the Institute.”

“What institute?” the girl says.

“Let’s not waste time,” another girl cuts in. “Say with me: I promise to Chairman Mao — she who does not obey the rule is Liu Shaoqi. ”

“Who is Liu Shaoqi?”

“A counterrevolutionary,” the girl says, impatient with my ignorance.

I take the oath, feeling strange that they have so many rules unknown to me. It will also be years later when I know more about Liu Shaoqi: a loyal follower and close colleague of Chairman Mao, he was tortured to death by a group of teenagers when he showed doubt about Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The alley girls make me feel like a foreigner. The place where I live is called the Institute, in a suburb of Beijing next to an ancient graveyard. The Institute is secured by high walls and patrolled by armed soldiers, bayoneted rifles on their shoulders and leather pistol holsters chained to their belts. Rumors are that the holsters are filled with old newspaper and the rifles are always empty, but the bayonets are real, sharp and shining. The heart of the Institute is a gray building secured by more soldiers. That is where my father as well as many fathers work, a research center for the Department of Nuclear Industry. Children like me growing up inside the Institute have different rules for life and games. We are not allowed to go out of the security gate of the Institute, not allowed to approach the gray building. The game we enjoy playing is to guess whose father is on “calculating duty”—our fathers go to another institute to use the machine, which we know nothing of until “computer” becomes a household word years later. Calculating duty is always performed at night, and every afternoon a father or two ride a luxury car into the dusk to a place nonexistent on any map. We watch the car drive by noiselessly, and then play the game. Every one of us pretends to be the child of the man behind the curtain. Only after asking questions and carefully examining one another’s words do we find out who is telling the truth and who is making up stories.