Kinder Than Solitude (12 page)

“The foolish are assigned the good fortune of the fools, the weak, the good fortunes of the weaklings,”
Aunt said now, thinking of her own mysterious lot. These must be nonsensical words to the old man, but it comforted her to quote other people’s wisdom when she herself was perplexed. Her engagement to the young man had lasted five years, during which time she had seen him only twice when he had been on leave from the academy: shortly after graduating, he, serving as a cannoneer, had to flee to Taiwan when his side lost the civil war.

Compared to his sisters’ loss, hers had been negligible, even though some older villagers had shaken their heads at her fate, widowed before wedded. When it became obvious that the separation across the Strait could be lifelong, the sisters told her that it was pointless for her to stay with them. Not wanting to cling to them, yet not being able to stop thinking of herself as part of their life, she had moved on but had never entirely forgotten them as they had expected her to. Once a year she wrote to them; after her marriage and later Shaoai’s birth, she’d enclosed a picture of her family each year. They wrote back to her too, courteous letters bearing their goodwill toward her and her family and dutifully recounting changes in their lives—their taking up residence in a provincial city and joining a neighborhood workshop to produce embroidered silk scarves so they could be part of the working class, their retirement, and, a year later, their discovering a baby left at their door. The years she had lived with the sisters, she serving them partly as a handmaid, they in turn educating her, had never been brought up in the letters, the man who had connected her to them left unmentioned. Once, during the sixth year of the Cultural Revolution, a provincial official, one of those traveling investigators with menacing power, came to the clinic and asked to talk to Aunt. Had she heard anything about the women’s brother,
who had fled China, he wanted to know, indicating that it was a serious matter, with some Taiwanese or American spies involved. Aunt had denied any knowledge; her lie to the stranger had hurt her conscience less than her decision not to speak of the stranger’s visit with her in-laws and her husband: a minor secret too late to be revealed could expand its roots. For a while Aunt had difficulty sleeping: the two sisters and her childhood spent with them taking up too much space in her heart, until she started to take sleeping pills to drive out old memories.

How the two women managed to pull through the many revolutions unscathed Aunt did not know—though who could be certain that they were unscathed? In their letters they did not mention any hardship, and after a while, when they continued to write to her once a year, she was happy that they had not been thrown into a prison somewhere and left to die. Perhaps their god had truly ensured their safety in a hostile world. When she had lived with the sisters, they, no longer having a church to attend in the village, had been carrying out their own rituals of worship; twice a year they traveled to meet their old priest, though his god certainly had not looked after him well, as he had been executed right around ’49 as a counterrevolutionary by the new, Communist government. What the sisters had taught Aunt about their faith had been partially absorbed as a superstition by her, so she would never say no, in her heart, to the possibility of a deity from above. Imagine, she could have been converted by them, had her fiancé not fled China; imagine, on top of being the wife of a Nationalist officer, she could have been a counterrevolutionary by being a religious person!

There was little sense in such brooding. Still, buttoning the old man’s shirt and tucking him under the blanket, Aunt wished she could tell him that it was his good fortune that she was taking care of him now, that she would be the one to see him off when it was his time to exit this world. She could have been married off to a young Nationalist officer and left the country with him; her siblings and
cousins would have been questioned during the Cultural Revolution, and they would have thought it their misfortune to have a sister who was an enemy of the country. I could’ve been another person, she thought of saying to the old man, but he had already been upset once this evening. She patted his cheek and told him to rest before she came back with the evening meal.

7

The dead did not fade when they remained unacknowledged. For the first time, Boyang considered the necessity of a funeral. He had been to a few, all of them arranged in the most extravagant manner, and he had laughed then at the gesture of glorifying the mortal. But funerals are not for the vanity of the dead, he realized now. The dead are gone, and the living need witnesses—more so at funerals than at weddings. Happiness and grief on these occasions both explode like fireworks: happiness, if not on display, retains some value for later; grief turned inward only becomes toxic.

Neither Moran nor Ruyu replied to Boyang’s email, and the void in which he was left, waiting, despite his reluctance to admit it, threatened to give Shaoai’s death more weight. Where’s your good sense, Boyang asked himself; do you need to put up a wanted poster, and how large does the reward money have to be? But laughing at himself did not, as he had hoped, ease his agitation. Endured alone, a death becomes a chronic illness one has to hide from others.

A week passed, and Boyang did not visit Aunt as he had promised. If she asked about Moran and Ruyu, he would not have anything new to tell her; but would she? Perhaps rather than avoiding the question, he was only dreading the silence in place of the question: if Aunt did not bring up Moran and Ruyu, he would feel lonelier and angrier. His own mother, after their one conversation, seemed to have dropped
her curiosity, and it would be unwise if he talked to her again about the case. Certainly she would not mind watching him return to the topic like a hesitant fish circling back to the bait; perhaps she was waiting for that, with a fisherman’s astuteness.

Why was it, Boyang thought one evening, that with so many people crowded into his life, the only ones he could not stop thinking about were those two who had kept to their vows of absence? Their silence granted them a power over him, but people, unless forced into silence, must have chosen it for the exact reason of possessing that power. A vanishing act is an old trick; nevertheless it works on hearts of all ages: could it be that we will never be rid of that child in us, who, panicking about never seeing a beloved face again, is still screaming to this day?

Listless, Boyang looked through the contact list on his cell phone and toyed with a new app, which assigned icons to different contacts. To the men with whom he could have a drink and exchange lewd jokes, he gave an icon of a wineglass or a curvy female body; to the women he wouldn’t mind touching with subtle affection in a dark karaoke room, that of a lipstick. When he reached Coco’s name, he hesitated and looked up at her; she was leaning on the armrest of a chair and watching him, tight lipped. Didn’t he remember, she had said earlier, that they were going to meet her friends at a karaoke bar to celebrate her birthday? Boyang had said he was not in the mood to go out, adding that it was ridiculous to start celebrating a birthday a week in advance; who did she think she was, he asked, Jesus Christ or the Queen of England?

“Aren’t you going to be late for your friends?” he said now. He knew he had agreed to spend the night with her, thinking that a group of mindless girls in a noisy place would be the perfect antidote to the silence. But there was no point apologizing: a man unable to extricate himself from the mercy of others has to find some balance in those who put their lives at his mercy.

In a dry voice, Coco asked him if everything was all right with his
business. Would he like her to make a cup of tea for him, or would he like her to give him a massage?

What he needed most, he said, was some space to breathe and think—and please, no tears, no questions, he added, sinking heavily into the depths of the sofa.

He was not a good actor, and the boorish role he had taken on was no more convincing than the part of the obedient son he played for his mother, whose interest in Boyang, far from maternal, was dissecting. Had Coco had his mother’s wisdom, she would have easily sabotaged his role with mocking incredulity, but Coco did not dare to stray from her script, in which she was a young and pretty woman from a provincial city who could not afford to look for love in this big city but, with her cunning, could get many other things. She slid off the armchair like a melancholy cat. “Would you like me to call tomorrow, then?”

The question, Boyang knew, was asked in the hope that he would want her to spend the night with him. Coco shared a two-bedroom apartment in a decrepit building with three other girls her age. She’d been the first one to find a lover with a good apartment in the city; two of the other girls had followed, though the three had continued to rent, as none of their invitations to the second nests was permanent. The one roommate who had not succeeded in the way the others had, Coco said, was pretty enough but not so smart: she was dating a boy their age who did not have anything to his name but an entry-level job at an advertising agency. Generously, the three other girls allowed the boy to spend a night in the apartment now and then. Boyang wondered if today would be one of those days. He had not been to Coco’s apartment, but he did not have any trouble imagining the place, where the girls, when necessary, withdrew behind their curtained corners and nurtured alone their wounds of being used by the world; inevitably they would regain their spirits and venture out afresh, as that was what their roles required of them. Life is a battle that the lesser ones do not have the luxury of quitting midway.

“Sure, call me tomorrow,” he said, and wished Coco a good night of fun.

Coco struggled with her boots and then her gloves at the door, and Boyang, from where he was sitting, unchivalrously enjoyed her fumbling, feeling too spiteful to offer help. To send Coco back to the cramped apartment where a young couple in love, without any future in the city, clung to each other for a night of meager pleasure, was to teach her a lesson about life, even though it was a lesson she had time and again refused to learn. A week short of turning twenty-two, Coco was already showing signs of fatigue, deeper than could be released by restful sleep or hidden by makeup.

Boyang had met Coco two years earlier at a party. She’d been enrolled in cosmetics school, she had told Boyang; her goal was to find a position as a makeup assistant at a wedding photography studio, and once she had enough experience, to work in the film or TV industry. Do you know any producers, she had asked Boyang, and when he said he might, she stayed at his side for the rest of the party. Who’s paying for your training, he had asked, and she had said her parents, but she had been lying to them, telling them she was enrolled in a nursing program. “Who wants to take care of the old and the sick when she grows up?” she had said to him, wrinkling her nose in a childlike way.

What do you want to be when you grow up, Boyang sometimes wanted to ask Coco, but the line did not belong to that of a sugar daddy: he should feel no responsibility for her misspent youth. Shoo, Boyang said in his mind now, shoo, shoo, while waving at Coco, who, even in her resentment, did not forget to blow him a kiss—a kiss which, sadly, unbeknownst to her, landed nowhere in this indifferent world.

Boyang was glad that no child had been produced in his failed marriage. He would not have been able to protect his child from the harm of the world unless he raised him or her to be the first to inflict
pain; he would also have had to become more successful at his business, so that his child could have a chance to at least become a decent person without being trampled by others. But imagining a child—his child—being a good person was as upsetting to Boyang as imagining that child being evil. Of course there was a wide range between good and evil, but could one be both callous and kind—callous enough to be immune to worldly hurt, yet with enough kindness to be spared the possible divine repercussions for that callousness?

Boyang had not hidden his disinterest in having a child from his parents, and as far as he knew, they were fine with it: his sister had—as efficiently as befitted their parents’ standard—given birth to a pair of brilliant twins. His ambition, he knew, sufficed only to provide himself a comfortable life and allow him to be near his parents as they grew older. He did not feel stuck in the middle of the ladder; if anything, he felt lucky because of his track record of doing the right thing at the right time. He had taken his second year of college off to start a printing company when digital printing had just emerged in the country; after college, he had spent a couple of years working on a software program that input Chinese characters into computers, which he had sold to a big company when he became bored with programming; the stock market and the real estate market he had entered earlier than his peers, and now, with a real estate development project under his name and a couple of unrelated businesses he backed—an organic lavender farm on the outskirts of the city, with single-story vacation rentals nearby to attract trendy urbanites, and an oxygen bar in the central business district, where condensed air imported from Japan was offered at a high price to those who could afford its cleanness—Boyang felt complacent enough. He could see himself climbing a few more rungs, but he did not feel the urge to be in a different place from where he was now: purposefulness, in his view, was overrated. He had none of the potentially bad habits for a man of his status: he drank but not excessively; he was not into drugs;
he kept a girl he could be rid of easily; he had little interest in anything with ideology behind it—he had declined to support a group of underground documentary filmmakers, and he had not bitten, either, when a so-called independent artist approached him for a photography project that involved placing naked men and women in orgiastic poses in various heavily contaminated industry sites.

A beep brought a text message from Coco. “Do not go out and find another woman,” it said, followed by a laughing emoticon, a scowling one, and a parade of kisses.