Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

YET BAD LUCKhas chosen Mr. Pang for another reason— he is a useless man.

“I wouldn’t say his parents were parasites, but he sure is one,” Mrs. Pang says. She likes to chat with me when she is hand-washing the laundry in the afternoon, a big washbasin in the middle of the living room, the winter sun pale on the floor.

“Yes, I think so, too.” I dip my finger into the water to check the temperature. If Mrs. Pang does not forget to pour some hot water into the basin, I will be glad to catch the floating socks like slim fishes and wash them all, Mr. Pang’s big gray socks last.

“How do you know?”

“I just know. He is a parasite and he lives off you.”

Mrs. Pang laughs. “You sure know a lot. What else do you know?”

“He is very educated.” I’ve learned that from the boys of the Song family. They said Mr. Pang was proof that school was useless.

“Ha, educated. You know how he got into the college? The entrance exam was very difficult, so he asked his younger brother to take it for him. His brother was very smart. That was how he got into college. If he took the test himself? Ugh, he would have to spend all his life taking the entrance exams.”

“Really?”

“Yes. That’s the story,” Mrs. Pang says, handing a slice of soap to me.

“And then what?”

“Then? Then he went to the college and never took a single course for his engineering degree. He hired someone to take the courses and the tests for him for the diploma.”

“But who would do that for him? Why get a diploma for someone else if he had taken all the tests?”

“There were always poor students willing to do that. They could not afford the tuition, but they did not have to pay a penny to receive a good education. The diploma? That was just a piece of paper. And that was all my husband got.”

“Oh,” I say, and throw Mr. Pang’s sock back into the water, feeling cheated. “What was he doing in college?”

“Going to the theater. Practicing calligraphy and painting. Gardening. Teaching his parrots to recite poems. Thinking of himself as an artist. What else could he do? Just wasting his time and money.”

This is the most incredible story I have ever heard, I think, unable to connect Mr. Pang, the gray-headed, hunch-backed man, with the young man squandering his money in the city. “How come you married him?” I ask.

“You know who I was then?” Mrs. Pang says. “My father was a landlord, too. We used to have servants, handmaids, nannies, chauffeurs, private teachers in our house. I was a parasite too.”

From what I learned from books and movies, the daughters of landlords were always spoiled, ugly, and vicious. “You don’t look like one,” I say.

“I’m not anymore.” Mrs. Pang smiles.

“But Mr. Pang still is.”

“Yes, he still is.”

“How come you married him?” I ask again.

“We got married because our parents wanted us to. That’s my share of luck. No one will have more good luck or bad luck than heaven permits. And no one will have all good luck or all bad luck, like I once had a nanny and handmaids to do everything for me and now I am doing things for other people.”

“But Mr. Pang always has good luck. He never works.”

“That’s his bad luck. He has nothing to do. He is useless.”

THE NEXT SUMMER when I arrive at Mr. and Mrs. Pang’s house, Mr. Pang has retired. Retired may be the wrong word because he has not been paid for years, nor is there any indication of a pension. According to the Song boys, who know every single story in the city, one Monday Mr. Pang found his desk assigned to another man and his stuff piled in the hallway, the handle of his favorite teacup missing. He insisted that he would not leave until they returned the handle of his teacup. “It’s an old piece of China, older than your grandfather,” he kept saying until people felt insulted by his comparison. They told him to shut up and go to the trash can along with his teacup.

That did it. Mr. Pang became a piece of trash. By the time I arrive that summer, he has locked himself up in his study along with the rooster Mrs. Pang has bought for my favorite dish. “Mr. Retired Worker!” Mrs. Pang knocks on the door when I arrive. “The kid is here.”

Mr. Pang lifts a corner of the curtains up and looks at me with suspicion. I press my face on the window and peep in. There are shelves of ancient books in the room. His bed is unmade like a messed-up rooster nest. The rooster itself is sauntering and pecking around on his desk. White and gray rooster droppings are drying on the floor, perfectly round like large coins.

“Yuck,” I say, pointing at the floor. Mr. Pang waves and tucks the curtain’s corner into its place.

The fact that Mr. Pang is losing his mind makes me so unhappy that I do not go out to play with the alley girls. Even though I despise Mr. Pang as a parasite, I want him to be a healthy parasite. My knitted eyebrows make Mrs. Pang laugh at dinner. Mr. Pang is not coming to dinner with us anymore. He eats with the rooster in his room.

“What happened?” Mrs. Pang asks.

“Nothing,” I say, shoveling the food into my mouth without swallowing.

“Mad at him?”

“Umm.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like him being this way.”

“He lost his mind long ago. Don’t worry about him.”

I put down my chopsticks and walk around the table to Mrs. Pang. “I am mad at him for you. ” I hug Mrs. Pang and start to cry.

Mrs. Pang wipes my tears off with her hand, her palm scratching like sandpaper. “You are a very kind girl, even better than my own daughters,” she says.

“Why?”

“They said they wished that they had never been born to us,” Mrs. Pang says, still smiling. “You’ll make them ashamed.”

I go back to my seat and continue my dinner, not feeling better.

“Bad things happen,” Mrs. Pang says.

“Not to you.”

“Believe me, this is nothing. I have seen worse things.”

“Why didn’t you marry the younger brother?” I ask.

“Whose brother?”

“His brother, the one you said was very smart and took the entrance exam for him.”

Mrs. Pang laughs as if she has heard the most absurd story in the world. I do not laugh with her. “He has been long gone. He died before he finished college,” Mrs. Pang says.

“That’s very sad.”

“No, it’s not that bad. Sometimes I feel glad for him to have died that early.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a son of the landlord, too. He was such a bright and sensitive boy.” Mrs. Pang looks across the table at the wall behind me for a moment and sighs. “He would have been killed by the Revolution.”

“Why? Was he a bad guy?”

“You don’t have to be a bad guy to get killed,” Mrs. Pang says. “In ’66 the Red Guards whipped to death eighty people from three families in the county next to my old home, and the youngest one was a three-year-old boy. I used to know some of them. Their grandfathers were landlords.”

“Were they not bad guys?”

“They were people just like me,” Mrs. Pang says. “That’s why you would rather see someone you love die young than suffer from living.”

I think for a moment. “My mom and dad never tell me these things.”

“Maybe they will when you grow up.”

“No, they won’t. It is their occupational malady.” In our world in the Institute, a secret is a secret and it is always better to speak less than more.

AFTER DINNER EVERYONE in the quadrangle sits in the yard to enjoy the cooling air. Mr. Pang and Mr. Du’s paralyzed mother are the only two people missing.

The jasmine bushes in the yard are blooming like crazy that summer, the fragrance so strong that one could become dizzy if sitting too close to the bushes. A horde of wasps has built a heavy hive under the roof, buzzing around the grapevines and tasting the grapes before they are large enough for an early harvest. The sticky juice from the pierced grapes is as corrosive as the most poisonous liquid. If you sit under the grape trellis long enough, you would think that you could see the grapes rotting one cluster after another, in a blink their smooth rinds replaced by ugly scars.