Kinder Than Solitude (22 page)

Why they had told her the story Ruyu had no recollection. They had told her all sorts of things, but little remained in her memory. The last thing she would ever want to dwell upon was other people’s childhoods, yet Moran and Boyang had seemed, a moment ago, so vivid that she could almost feel their astonishment at losing the tadpoles.

Ruyu did not remember what she had looked like at that age; of course she remembered her grandaunts well: their voices and gestures, their neatly plucked eyebrows and well-combed buns, which never blurred when she saw them in her mind’s eye. But she could not see herself then, or at any age when she had been in their care. Had her grandaunts had a mirror in their apartment? Ruyu remembered an oval one, not larger than a hand mirror, standing on a metal stand on top of a tall dresser, which her grandaunts would consult before leaving home. Had she ever been handed the mirror, Ruyu wondered, and she could not answer with any certainty. The dresser, she remembered, was extraordinarily tall, with eight levels of drawers, two on each level. It was one of the few of her grandaunts’ possessions that had survived multiple visits by the Red Guards: unlike the smaller items, the dresser could not be hidden, yet the revolutionary youths had spared the heavy furniture, perhaps deeming it too heavy to move downstairs and throw into the fire, or not having the right tools to ax it apart. By the time Ruyu could reach an object on top of the dresser, she must have been nearly ten, she calculated. No, she did not remember looking into a mirror; there must have been times when she had been allowed to do so, but what difference would it have made? She had already missed the opportunities—no, she had not missed them, because they had never been granted her in the first place—for a normal childhood. There was no disappointment in that: disappointment is for those who begin with a plan, those who sow seeds and refuse to accept the barrenness of life.

Much more had been planned for her, much more expected from her at one time or another, and her achievement—could this be her only one?—was to have sabotaged everyone’s good script. But why not? She had never asked to be part of anyone’s interior life, but people, with too much confidence or perhaps too little, seemed ill at ease unless they found some way to change that.

Ruyu’s first marriage had ended when the man to whom she had been married for two years had lost control and beaten her. She had
not defended herself other than to shield her face from his fists, and afterward she had watched with equanimity as the man broke down and cried, calling her a monster who had turned him into a wife beater like his father. What had she done but remain the same person he had seen only twice before marrying her, she had thought later, studying her bruised body in a mirror so that she could have a better sense of the pain she should feel. When she had, through an acquaintance, met the man nine years her senior, it had not been for the prospect of a good life or a happy marriage in America, but for an exit from her grandaunts’ charge and her own Chinese life. When he, with only two weeks of vacation time and the goal of finding a wife, had decided to marry a stranger, a girl not yet twenty, shouldn’t he have prepared himself for all that could possibly come? Surely he had thought of practicalities: his bank account he had never shared with her, each week allocating her an allowance of twenty dollars on top of the grocery money; he had given her the choice of pursuing a degree in either accounting or biostatistics, both of which would allow her to find a job easily and make a substantial contribution to the household; he had, at the beginning of each university semester, registered her for her classes, so that he would know her exact whereabouts at any moment of the day, and he never enrolled her in evening classes, because in the evenings she was expected to waitress at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, which hired immigrants on student visas who had no legal right to work and would work for less than minimum wage. If their marriage was a transaction, Ruyu had accepted his terms, offering, in return for lodging and food and tuition money, her consent to be wifely. To be wifely, to sign over her future for a one-way plane ticket: she had never agreed to love, and had not expected his love; yet it was in the name of love he had raged, and called her the coldest person he had ever met. Even a chunk of ice would have melted after his two years of trying, he had said, calling her names she had not imagined him able to. She wondered if his father had used the same names for his mother.

When he finally calmed down, Ruyu said that she would not call the police—with his PhD almost finished and a job offer from a former colleague of his advisor’s, he could not afford a criminal record, which would eliminate his dream of obtaining a green card in this country. In return, she said, she wanted a divorce and enough money for the next two years of tuition and living expenses. He did not have that kind of money, the man said, and Ruyu replied that she lived simply and did not need much; if he would not agree, she said, she would have to take care of matters by other means.

Scheming, he had called her in an email after their divorce, listing all the things she had done to ensnare him. The sincerity of his fury made Ruyu wonder about the difference between what one was and what one appeared to the world. She had not thought of herself as a calculating person, not because she was better than that, but because she did not find anything in life worth scheming for. She had asked little and would have been fine given less, but to want less, to want nothing, was, in the end, a kind of greediness her husband could not live with.

Ruyu had not thought of marrying again after that. She had gone on to finish her degree in accounting, as she had seen no need to change course. When she graduated, it became clear that she would either have to be ambitious and find a job with a big firm that supported a working visa, or find a legal way to stay in the country so she could work at a job that was less demanding.

Sometimes Ruyu wondered if her second marriage could have lasted longer, even forever, if circumstances had worked out for them. If anyone had the right to complain about her scheming, it could only be Paul, whom Ruyu had met before graduation and had decided to date wholeheartedly for her future stay in this country: the wedding had taken place before her one-year post-degree stay in the country expired.

Paul had grown up in North Dakota, and had on a whim transferred to a state university in California after two years at a local college;
he’d wanted to see a bigger world than his hometown of two thousand people. After graduation, he had found a job at the height of the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley, but, neither brilliant nor ambitious enough, he had been unable to find another job after the bubble burst. By then, Ruyu had gotten her green card through the marriage and was working part-time as a bookkeeper for a few local businesses. Unlike her first husband, Paul had never considered her work essential to household finances; his dream was to make a decent amount of money when his company went IPO, and then to have three or four children to keep Ruyu busy at home. But when that dream had broken, he could not build another dream. And then there were his parents, always there, always hoping that one of their children—all four had gone away, all to big cities—would come back to be part of the family business, which sold kayaking equipment and managed tours for adventurous vacationers.

It was a painful decision for him, too, Paul said; he hoped that she understood in the long run it would be the best for them.

Homecoming of any sort struck Ruyu as a sad comedy. Her first year in America, her ex-husband had brought her to see the university’s homecoming parade, and one float, with a group of older men dressed up in matching suits and waving and grinning under the school banner, made her feel embarrassed for both the men on the float and those who had to watch them with cheers. Human beings are bad actors, but the worst are those who offer more than is required of them: heroes in the shoes of extras. But perhaps that is what people cannot stop doing—inventing consequences because our smallness is too heavy for us to bear. Afterward, in class, Ruyu would sometimes study her classmates and wonder who, among those boys who did not take off their baseball caps and did not stop chewing gum when the professor spoke from the podium, would grow up to be the men on the float.

Ruyu had flatly refused to join in Paul’s homecoming. His picture of their future was claustrophobic for her. There would be the creeks
he had waded and fished when he was young, the ice cream stand where he had bought a cone for a high school girlfriend; Ruyu did not mind that he had a past, but she refused to be absorbed into his, or anyone else’s, history.

Compared to her first divorce, the second was more subdued, less dramatic. She had been fond of Paul, even if she had not loved him; she had learned to be among people—his friends and colleagues—and to dress in a way that made him proud, and to be witty, even flirty at times. If anything, the five years of marriage had taught her that she could fit into any role if she made an effort, though nothing satisfied her more than staying at a distance, watching people until she could see through them. Paul’s dream to become a millionaire, unrealized, had not saddened her. She had not minded seeing his folly confirmed; she felt pleased, even, as she would feel when she saw any mortal’s falling.

The water in the bathtub had turned lukewarm, and reluctantly Ruyu pulled herself out of it. The concerto had long since ended, but she had not noticed the quiet until then. In the vast world out there, those who had crossed paths with her were living in their safe cocoons; and those who had died—her grandaunts, for instance, or Uncle, or Shaoai—what had become of them?

Ruyu did not miss her grandaunts in the sense she had never missed her parents. The four of them had taken enough from her; what had been left was to be either cherished or else discarded with an insensitiveness that matched theirs. Uncle’s death had caused, however transient, a ripple of melancholy in Ruyu’s heart, followed by relief: Uncle had been one of those whose lives were saturated by unwarranted sadness, and what could be a kinder antidote to sadness than death itself?

Shaoai’s death, granted mercifully at long last, must be an antidote, too. Despite sounding ruthless, Ruyu had meant it when she told Edwin that Shaoai’s death had come too late, not only for the one waiting for death but for those around her. With each year’s passing
Ruyu was a year older than Shaoai, whom she had known only as a young woman. A strange feeling stirred in Ruyu when the thought occurred that Shaoai had been young at the time; innocent even, but was it real innocence when it could be—and had been—used to taint another person? And then, the worst battle, Ruyu thought, is fought between the innocent: not knowing how to spare themselves, they don’t for a moment feel mercy for the other.

12

The celebration in Tiananmen Square on October 1 came and went; eventless, Moran could not help thinking with disappointment, as she had wondered if people would find ways to protest the event, which took place only four months after the bloodshed there. But bloodshed, even if it hadn’t been forgotten, cast little shadow on this day. There was no one climbing up the pole of the streetlight to shout out slogans, nor was there any organized sabotage—a homemade explosive tube thrown into the crowd not to hurt people but to cause havoc, a false alarm message to deceive people into an evacuation—as she and Boyang had wishfully imagined.

The only drama of the day happened earlier in the afternoon. When they gathered at the school, Headmistress Liu distributed two lipsticks to every homeroom, saying it was a district order that the girls look more festive. No one pointed out that wearing makeup was prohibited in school, as was clearly written in the students’ manual. When it was Ruyu’s turn, she passed the tube to the next girl in line without applying it.

“But why?” asked the class monitor. “It’s not poisonous.”

Moran bristled, ready to defend her friend. Ruyu was not one to make trouble and attract undue attention to herself, even though she had not put on a festive dress as instructed. She had on, for the day, a long-sleeved cotton smock, greenish gray, one of those she had
brought with her from home; the only color about her, bright against her anemic skin, was the red gauze required for the dancing, which—unlike the other girls who wore the gauze as a scarf or a headband or even as a flower on their chest—she wound around her wrist.

It’s not hygienic, Ruyu replied. The class monitor stared at her, horrified by such an impertinent comment, but Ruyu only half-smiled; her contempt, which she had no intention to hide, contrasted with the class monitor’s fury, her face flushed, her chest heaving, words partially formed and sputtering out.

The class monitor was not a likable girl, and already Moran could see that she would grow up into someone who would not hesitate to mistreat those who were less fortunate than she was. Still, Moran felt bad for her, fearing that in Ruyu’s eyes Moran herself occupied a position not much different from the class monitor’s. Moran sighed, and stepped in between the class monitor and Ruyu. “Let’s not make a big fuss,” said Moran to the monitor placatingly. “It would make Headmistress Liu think you can’t do your job well.”

Everyone seemed to enjoy the night. The students milled in tight circles, as the loudspeakers blared across the ocean of people the fourteen songs they were to dance to. Every thirty minutes there was a fifteen-minute break for fireworks.

When the boom-booming shook the ground, Moran watched her schoolmates cheer, their upturned faces lit by the flashing in the sky. A boy climbed on top of another boy and hailed the crowd: “Look at me!” Few looked, but when the boy jumped back down, he raved about the number of people. Four hundred thousand, he said, you don’t get noticed by four hundred thousand people every day of your life.

A classmate, whose father was said to be the Party branch leader of a photography agency, came over with an expensive-looking camera and asked to take a picture of Ruyu and Moran. Moran suspected that the boy had a crush on Ruyu; several boys in the class did, and through their eyes, Moran felt she could understand more about
Ruyu than she could through her own eyes. Without any reciprocal affection, Ruyu would nevertheless allow them to seek her out at recess, asking them questions and listening to their answers with an attentiveness that must have been both flattering and unnerving for the boys; sometimes they blushed or stammered, unable to stand her scrutiny.