Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“But that’s a lie. A happy person will never be so quiet!”

She looks up from the bowl of rice. “Baba, you used to be very quiet, remember? Were you unhappy then?”

Mr. Shi, not prepared for such directness from his daughter, is unable to reply. He waits for her to apologize and change the topic, as people with good manners do when they realize they are embarrassing others with their questions, but she does not let him go. Her eyes behind her glasses, wide open and unrelenting, remind him of her in her younger years. When she was four or five, she went after him every possible moment, asking questions and demanding answers. The eyes remind him of her mother too; at one time in their marriage, she gazed at him with this questioning look, waiting for an answer he did not have for her.

He sighs. “Of course I’ve always been happy.”

“There you go, Baba. We can be quiet and happy, can’t we?”

“Why not talk about your happiness with me?” Mr. Shi says. “Tell me more about your work.”

“You didn’t talk much about your work either, remember? Even when I asked.”

“A rocket scientist, you know how it was. My work was confidential.”

“You didn’t talk much about anything,” his daughter says.

Mr. Shi opens his mouth but finds no words coming. After a long moment, he says, “I talk more now. I’m improving, no?”

“Sure,” his daughter says.

“That’s what you need to do. Talk more,” Mr. Shi says. “And start now.”

His daughter, however, is less enthusiastic. She finishes her meal quickly in her usual silence and leaves the apartment before he finishes his.

THE NEXT MORNING, Mr. Shi confesses to Madam, “The daughter, she’s not happy.”

“Daughter a happy thing to have,” Madam says.

“She’s divorced.”

Madam nods, and starts to talk in Persian. Mr. Shi is not sure if Madam knows what divorce means. A woman so boldly in love with the world like her must have been shielded from life’s unpleasantness, by her husband, or her sons maybe. Mr. Shi looks at Madam, her face brightened by her talking and laughing, and almost envies her for the energy that his daughter, forty years younger, does not possess. For the day Madam wears a bright orange blouse with prints of purple monkeys, all tumbling and grinning; on her head she wears a scarf with the same pattern. A displaced woman she is, but no doubt happily displaced. Mr. Shi tries to recall what he knows about Iran and the country’s recent history; with his limited knowledge, all he can conclude is that Madam must be a lucky woman. A lucky man he is, too, despite all the big and small imperfections. How extraordinary, Mr. Shi thinks, that Madam and he, from different worlds and with different languages, have this opportunity to sit and talk in the autumn sunshine.

“In China we say, Xiu bai shi ke tong zhou, ” Mr. Shi says when Madam stops. It takes three hundred years of prayers to have the chance to cross a river with someone in the same boat, he thinks of explaining to Madam in English, but then, what’s the difference between the languages? Madam would understand him, with or without the translation. “ That we get to meet and talk to each other — it must have taken a long time of good prayers to get us here, ” he says in Chinese to Madam.

Madam smiles in agreement.

“There’s a reason for every relationship, that’s what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one’s on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don’t end up randomly as father and daughter, that’s for sure. But the daughter, she doesn’t understand this. She must be thinking I’m a nuisance. She prefers I shut up because that’s how she’s known me always. She doesn’t understand that I didn’t talk much with her mother and her because I was a rocket scientist back then. Everything was confidential. We worked all day and when evening came, the security guards came to collect all our notebooks and scratch papers. We signed our names on the archive folders, and that was a day’s work. Never allowed to tell our family what we were doing. We were trained not to talk.”

Madam listens, both hands folding on her heart. Mr. Shi hasn’t been sitting so close to a woman his age since his wife died; even when she was alive, he had never talked this much to her. His eyes feel heavy. Imagine he’s traveled half a world to his daughter, to make up for all the talks he denied her when she was younger, but only to find her uninterested in his words. Imagine Madam, a stranger who does not even know his language, listens to him with more understanding. Mr. Shi massages his eyes with his two thumbs. A man his age shouldn’t indulge himself in unhealthy emotions; he takes long breaths, and laughs slightly. “Of course, there’s a reason for a bad relationship, too — I must be praying halfheartedly for a thousand years for the daughter.”

Madam nods solemnly. She understands him, he knows, but he does not want to burden her with his petty unhappiness. He rubs his hands as if to get rid of the dust of memory. “Old stories,” he says in his best English. “Old stories are not exciting.”

“I love stories,” Madam says, and starts to talk. Mr. Shi listens, and she smiles all the time. He looks at the grinning monkeys on her head, bobbing up and down when she breaks out laughing.

“Lucky people we are,” he says after she finishes talking. “In America, we can talk anything.”

“America good country.” Madam nods. “I love America.”

THAT EVENING, Mr. Shi says to his daughter, “I met this Iranian lady in the park. Have you met her?”

“No.”

“You should meet her sometime. She’s so very optimistic. You may find her illuminating for your situation.”

“What’s my situation?” his daughter asks without looking up from her food.

“You tell me,” Mr. Shi says. When his daughter makes no move to help the conversation, he says, “You’re experiencing a dark time.”

“How do you know she would shed light on my life?”

Mr. Shi opens his mouth, but cannot find an answer. He is afraid that if he explains he and Madam talk in different languages, his daughter will think of him as a crazy old man. Things that make sense at one time suddenly seem absurd in a different light. He feels disappointed in his daughter, someone he shares a language with but with whom he can no longer share a dear moment. After a long pause, he says, “You know, a woman shouldn’t ask such direct questions. A good woman is deferential and knows how to make people talk.”

“I’m divorced, so certainly I’m not a good woman according to your standard.”

Mr. Shi, thinking his daughter is unfairly sarcastic, ignores her. “Your mother was an example of a good woman.”

“Did she succeed in making you talk?” his daughter asks, and her eyes, looking directly into his, are fiercer than he knows.

“Your mother wouldn’t be so confrontational.”

“Baba, first you accused me of being too quiet. I start to talk, and you are saying I’m talking in a wrong way.”

“Talking is not only asking questions. Talking is you telling people how you feel about them, and inviting them to tell you how they feel about you.”

“Baba, since when did you become a therapist?”

“I’m here to help you, and I’m trying my best,” Mr. Shi says. “I need to know why you ended up in a divorce. I need to know what went wrong and help you to find the right person the next time. You’re my daughter and I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to fall twice.”