Kinder Than Solitude (7 page)

“Why doesn’t your family go?”

If only Boyang were here, Moran thought, he would have poked fun at his parents and at himself for their being a vacationing family.
None of the other families Moran knew vacationed—people only traveled when they had to, for weddings and funerals and other emergencies. The concept of moving life elsewhere for a week or two sounded pretentious, done only by idle foreigners in imported movies. “Different families have different ways,” Moran said. Still, she could not help but feel a regret that she had never traveled outside Beijing. In fact, being one of the inner-city children, she could count on one hand the times she had been to the outer districts—a spring field trip in middle school to the Great Wall by train, a few bicycle outings with Boyang that consisted of riding for two or three hours to a temple or a creek, picnicking, and then riding back. “Do you and your grandaunts take vacations?” Moran asked, and at once noticed frostiness in Ruyu’s eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry to be nosy.”

Ruyu nodded forgivingly yet did not say anything. She had never doubted her rights to question others, but to allow another person to ask
her
a question was to grant that person a status that he or she did not deserve: Ruyu knew that she answered to no one but her grandaunts and, beyond them, God himself.

It was the first time Moran had spent time alone with Ruyu, and already she had made mistakes that alienated Ruyu. Again Moran wished that Boyang were there to redirect the conversation. But it was Sunday, and on Sundays Boyang visited his parents, both professors at a university on the west side of the city, where they had a nice apartment near campus. Their daughter, Boyang’s sister, was ten years older than he. She had been a child genius, and after a total of three years in high school and college, she had won a scholarship to study with a Nobel laureate in America, and now, a few months short of turning twenty-six, she had already been granted tenure as a physics professor. “University of California, Berkeley,” Boyang’s parents had explained to the neighbors during a rare visit to the quadrangle to spread the news, their enunciation of each syllable agonizing Moran. She knew that in their eyes, her parents and others were people with inferior intelligence and negligible ambitions. Even Boyang, the
smartest boy Moran knew, they considered insignificant compared to his sister. Moran sometimes wondered whether his parents had wanted him in the first place, as he had been raised, since birth, by his paternal grandmother, a longtime resident of the quadrangle; he had not had a chance to get to know his sister before she was sent off to America, nor was he close to his parents, whom he visited every Sunday, eating two meals alongside them and sometimes doing housework that required a young man’s strength.

Four boys under ten walked past Ruyu and Moran and splashed into the water, all of them naked to the waist, the two youngest wearing inner tubes around their slippery bodies. “Do you swim?” Moran asked, glad for the distraction.

“No.”

“Maybe I can teach you. This is the best spot for winter swimming. Boyang and I haven’t been able to get permission to swim here past autumn equinox. In a few years, though, I’m sure we will, and by then you will be more comfortable swimming. When we are old enough—eighteen, I’m thinking, or twenty—we can all come for the swimming festival on the winter solstice.”

Swifts skimmed the water’s surface with their sharp tails; cicadas trilled in the willow trees. A man pedaled a flatbed tricycle along the lakefront road, singing out the brand names of beers he kept on chunks of ice, and was stopped here and there by a child running out of an alley with money in his raised hand, sent to buy a bottle or two for his elders. It was the peak of summer, and the heat had not abated in the late afternoon, yet Moran spoke of winter, and the winters to come, with the same ease with which one would speak of going home for supper. Even odder was Moran’s confidence—Ruyu had noticed the same confidence in Boyang, too—when speaking of a future in which Ruyu was included. That she was here—staying in Aunt’s house, attending the high school in which Boyang and Moran took great pride—had been made possible by her grandaunts, who had made her understand before her departure that in truth this relocation
was God’s plan for her, as it had been his plan for her to be cared for by them. That she was here by the lake … No doubt Moran would think of it as her own doing, as she’d been the one to ride the bicycle with Ruyu on the back, and she’d been the one to decide that, rather than going to a movie or to a nearby store for an ice pop, they were to come to her and Boyang’s favorite place, a sea that was no more than a pond.

With both vexation and curiosity, Ruyu turned and studied Moran, who was pointing at the silhouette of a dwarf temple on top of the hill, behind which the sun was starting to set. There used to be ten temples around the area, and the three seas had been called the “Ten-Temple Seas,” though Boyang and Moran had found only three remaining temples. “That one is dedicated to the goddess governing water,” Moran said, and when Ruyu did not say anything, she turned and found herself facing a quizzical gaze. “I’m sorry, did I bore you with all this talk?”

Ruyu shook her head.

“Sometimes my mother worries that I’m too talkative and no decent man will marry me,” Moran said and laughed.

Ruyu had noticed that Moran laughed more than smiled; this gave her face a look of open silliness, which seemed better suited to the role of a big sister or an older aunt. “Why don’t you have any siblings?” Ruyu asked.

Theirs had been the last generation born before the single-child policy had begun, and many of Moran’s classmates, and probably many of Ruyu’s old schoolmates, too, had siblings. Perhaps Ruyu was asking only because it was not often that she met an only child. Humbly, Moran admitted that she did not know why, but then added that hers was not an unusual case; Sister Shaoai was also an only child.

“Do you want a sibling?”

It must have been the orphan in Ruyu who was asking these questions; it was rare that Ruyu spoke so much—around the quadrangle she was always quiet. “We’re all close,” Moran said. “You’ll see, we
are like siblings in the quadrangle. For instance, Boyang and I grew up like a brother and a sister.”

“But he has his own sister.”

She was older, Moran explained. She was almost from a different generation.

“Why does he not live with his parents?” Ruyu asked.

“I don’t know,” Moran said. “I think it’s because they’re very busy with their work.”

“But his sister lived with their parents before she went to America?”

“It was a different case with her,” Moran said, feeling uneasy, afraid of saying the wrong things about Boyang and his family. Already she felt she was betraying him in some way that she could not understand. He preferred not to talk about his parents, and his grandmother spoke of Boyang’s uncles and aunts who lived in other cities more than she talked about Boyang’s father, her eldest son. Moran wondered if the family harbored an unsavory past, though she would never ask, as seeking an answer to her curiosity would make her less worthy of Boyang’s friendship.

“How so? Is he not their child by blood?”

“Of course he’s their biological child,” Moran said, worried that by simply speaking such truths she was compromising her best friend.

“Why ‘of course’?”

Taken aback, first by Ruyu’s insensible calmness and then by her own stupidity, Moran fell into a profound bewilderment. Growing up in the quadrangle was like growing up with an extended family, and nothing made her happier than loving everyone unreservedly. Certainly she had heard tales about neighbors in other quadrangles who did not get along and sabotaged one another’s life: uprooting newly cultivated flowers, adding extra salt to a neighbor’s dish where a kitchen was shared, swiping a frozen chicken left on a windowsill overnight in the winter, making unpleasant faces and noises to frighten small children the moment their parents turned away. These
stories baffled Moran, as she could not see what people would gain from such pettiness. In the last year of middle school some of the girls in Moran’s class had become cruel, trapping other girls—the pretty ones, the sensitive ones, and the lonely ones—with a net of mean-spirited rumors. If there had been any harm intended for her—and there must have been at times, though Moran had Boyang, best friends for as long as either remembered—she’d hardly ever considered herself in a vulnerable position. Even within a family, people could behave viciously toward one another; the evening newspapers offered abundant evidence with their tales of domestic conflicts and unspeakable crimes. Still, for Moran, the world was a good place, and she believed that it would be a good place for Ruyu now that she was their friend. Yet the ease with which Ruyu had raised the possibility of deceit and abandonment regarding Boyang’s upbringing dispirited Moran, as though she, unprepared, had failed an important test to win Ruyu’s respect.

“Are you offended?” Ruyu asked.

Might it be natural for someone like Ruyu to doubt everything? Right away Moran felt ashamed of her own unfriendly quietness. “No, not at all. It’s only that I’m not used to the way you ask questions,” she said.

“How do other people ask questions?”

At least their conversation was not taking place in the quadrangle. Anyone overhearing them would think Ruyu unnaturally childish for her age, and, even if no one would admit it, Moran knew that a connection would be readily made between Ruyu’s background and her lack of tact. With a maternal patience, Moran explained to Ruyu that normally one did not ask questions that would cause others discomfort; in fact, she continued, one did not start a conversation by asking questions but waited for the other person to talk about herself.

“What if people won’t tell you anything about themselves?” Ruyu said.

“When people are your friends, they will tell you things. And
when you’re with friends, you can also tell them about yourself,” Moran said. She wished Ruyu could understand that neither she nor Boyang would press Ruyu about her past. The truth was, Moran had believed—even before Ruyu’s arrival—that no matter what kind of a past Ruyu had, once she lived among them, she would become less of an orphan.

Ruyu watched a bug move on the water, its slender limbs leaving barely perceptible traces. For a brief moment she found the insect interesting, but when she turned her eyes away, she forgot about it. “Why is Sister Shaoai always angry?” she asked. “She hates me being here, doesn’t she?”

Moran looked agonized. “No, she doesn’t. She’s just upset at the moment.”

Ruyu looked back at the water, but the bug was gone. She did not know the name of the insect; in fact, she had never spent much time looking at any bug, bird, or tree. Her grandaunts lived strictly indoors and only left the apartment when necessary; their home, pristinely kept, did not participate in the holidays with decorations of any kind, or in the seasons with plants on the windowsills; thick curtains, always drawn, kept the weather at a distance.

When Ruyu did not question further, Moran felt pained. She wished she could explain better to Ruyu Shaoai’s situation: she had been active in the democratic protest early in the summer and was waiting for her verdict, which she’d learn once school started. She hadn’t been a leader in the protest but would nevertheless face disciplinary action from the university; nobody knew whether this would be a general or a severe “political warning,” a suspension of her university study, or, worse, expulsion. Moran’s parents, when they talked about Shaoai, worried that her dismissiveness about her future would not help her; they did not say much, but Moran knew that they, and other neighbors too, wished Shaoai would recant the statement she had posted on the school bulletin board the day after the massacre, calling the government a breeding farm of fascists. But these things,
Moran’s parents had warned her, were not to be discussed outside their house.

Moran turned around instinctively, but apart from a few pedestrians farther off on the sidewalk, she did not see any suspicious loiterers eavesdropping on them. “I know Sister Shaoai looks unfriendly sometimes,” she said. “But trust me, she is a good person.”

People asked her to trust them all the time, Ruyu thought, as though it never occurred to them that by so pleading, they had already proved themselves untrustworthy. Her grandaunts had never asked her to trust them, and, unfamiliar with the concept, she had once been deceived by the use of the phrase: a girl in first grade had often begged to be taken to her apartment; her grandaunts did not like visitors, Ruyu had explained, but the girl had pleaded to be trusted and promised not to tell a soul about the visit. After a while Ruyu had acquiesced, yet the day after the visit everyone in the class seemed to have learned something about her home, and even a couple of teachers came to ask her about her grandaunts’ books. But to have been betrayed by someone unworthy was less humiliating than having perturbed her grandaunts. They had waited for a few days before saying, as though making a passing comment, that they did not much care for the friend Ruyu had brought home. After that Ruyu had never allowed herself to be befriended by anyone.

“How can you be certain that Sister Shaoai is a good person?” Ruyu said.

Moran watched the boys splashing in the lake. It agonized her that she could not make Ruyu see the real Shaoai: when Moran and Boyang had been the boys’ age, Shaoai had been the one to take them to the lake, throwing them into deeper water to make them paddle, laughing at them when they swallowed water, yet all the time she had been within an arm’s reach. Even if Shaoai was not a nurturing kind of person, both Moran and Boyang knew her to be a reliable friend. “Have you heard the saying that
the longer a road is, the more one is to learn about a horse’s stamina; the more time passes, the better one gets to see another person’s heart
?” Moran said. “I think by and by you will know Sister Shaoai better.”

Ruyu smiled. Why would I, the thin smile said, want to know Shaoai better? Moran’s face turned red: the wordless dismissal, not of herself but of someone she respected and admired, made her more diffident in front of Ruyu than ever.