A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (8 page)

The boy lowered his eyes at Sasha’s scrutiny, and she felt the urge to chase the beautiful eyes, a huntress of that strange light. “You must have known some girls, no?” she said. “When you went to the opera school, were there girls in the school?”

“Yes,” the boy said, his voice reminding her of a satin dress.

“So?”

“We didn’t talk. They played handmaids and nannies, background roles.”

“So you were the princess, huh?” Sasha laughed and saw the boy blush, with anger perhaps, but it made her more curious and insistent in cornering him. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Which name?”

“How many names do you have?”

“Two. One given by my parents. One given by the opera school.”

“What are they?”

He dipped one finger into a glass of orange juice and wrote on the dark marble tabletop. She followed the wet trace of his finger. It was Yang, a common boy’s name with the character for the sun, the masculine principle of nature, the opposite of Yin.

“A so-so name. What’s your opera name?”

“Sumeng,” he said. A serene and pure dreamer, it meant.

“Worse. Sounds like a weepy name from a romance novel,” Sasha said. “You need a better name. I’ll have to think of one for you.”

In the end she did not use either name, and did not find a better one for him. She called him “my little
Nan Dan,
” and that was what he was to her, a boy destined to play a woman’s part. She paged him often, and invited him to movies and walks in the park. She made decisions for them both, and he let her. She tried to pry him open with questions—she was so curious about him—and slowly he started to talk, about the man he had loved and men who loved him. He never said anything about the opera school or his stage life, and she learned not to push him. He was so vain, Sasha thought when he spent a long time fixing his hair or when he put on an expression of aloofness at the slightest attention of a stranger; she teased him, and then felt tender and guilty when he did not defend himself. She made fun of the other people in Yang’s life, too: his lover, Boshen, whom she believed to be a useless dreamer, and the men who boldly asked him for his number. She believed she was the first person in his life who did not worship him in any way, and he must be following her around because of that. It pleased her.

Was she dating the boy? Sasha’s classmates asked when they saw her with Yang more than once. Of course not, she said. In a month, Sasha was to go to America for graduate school, and it was pointless to start a relationship now. Besides, how smart was it to date a boy who loved no one but himself?

EVEN THE WIND could not cut through the warm bodies lined up on both sides of Michigan Avenue. Sasha pushed through the crowd. They looked so young and carefree, these Americans, happy as a group of pupils on a field trip. She envied these people, who would stand in a long line in front of a popcorn shop waiting for a bag of fresh popcorn, lovers leaning into each other, children hanging on to their parents. They were born to be themselves, naive and contented with their naivety.

“I would trade my place with any one of them,” Sasha said to Boshen, but when he raised his voice and asked her to repeat her words, she shook her head. If only there were a law in America binding her to where her baby belonged so that the baby would have a reason to live!

Sasha herself had once been used by the law to trap her mother in the grassland. One of the thousands of high school students sent down from Beijing to Inner Mongolia for labor reeducation, her mother, in order to join the Party, married a Mongolian herdsman, one of the model inter-racial marriages that were broadcast across the grassland. Five years later, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, all of the students were allowed to return to Beijing. Sasha’s mother, however, was forced to stay, even after she divorced her Mongolian husband. Their two daughters, born in the grassland, did not have legal residency in Beijing, and the mother had to stay where the children belonged.

Sasha pushed forward, looking at every store window. Silky scarves curved around the mannequins’ necks with soft obedience. Diamonds glistened on dark velvet. At a street corner, children gathered and watched the animated story displayed in the windows of Marshall Field’s. If only her baby were a visa that would admit her into this prosperity, Sasha thought, saddened by the memories of Nebraska and Inner Mongolia, the night skies of both places black with lonely, lifeless stars.

“There’s an open spot there,” Boshen said. “Do you want to stand there?”

Sasha nodded, and Boshen followed her. Apart from the brief encounter at the party in Beijing and a few phone calls, he did not know her. He had thought about her often after she had called him about the pregnancy. What kind of girl, he had wondered, would’ve made Yang a father? He had imagined a mature and understanding girl. Beautiful, too. He had made up a perfect woman for Yang and for his own peace of mind, but Sasha had disappointed him. When they settled along the curb, he said, “So, what’s your plan after the operation?”

Sasha stood on tiptoe like a child, and looked in the direction where the parade would start. Boshen regretted right away speaking with such animosity. Seeing nothing, she turned to him and said, “What’s
your
plan in America? Where’s your new wife, anyway?”

Boshen frowned. He had told Yang that the marriage would be used as a cover, and his departure was meant only to be a temporary one. He had promised Yang other things, too, money he would send, help he would seek in the overseas Chinese community for Yang’s return to the stage. Not a day since he had arrived did he forget his promises, but Sasha’s words stung him. His marriage must have been an unforgivable betrayal, in Sasha’s and Yang’s eyes alike. “I can’t defend myself,” Boshen said finally.

“Of course not. You were the one sending him back to the street,” Sasha said.

“It’s been a troubled time,” Boshen said, struggling over the words. “It’s been difficult for all of us. But we certainly should try to help him out.”

Sasha turned to look at Boshen with an amused smile. “You speak like the worst kind of politician,” she said. “Show me the solution.”

“I am thinking.” Boshen hesitated, and said, “I’ve been thinking—if we can tell him that he’ll be able to perform in America, maybe he would want to leave Beijing?”

“And then?”

“We will try here. There’s a
Nan Dan
master in New York. Maybe we can contact him and ask for his help. But the first thing we do is to get Yang out of the country.”

“Does that ‘we’ include me?”

“If you could marry Yang, he would be here in no time. I know him. If there’s one percent chance to go back to the stage, he’ll try.”

“A very nice plan, Boshen,” Sasha said. “But why should I agree to the proposal? What’s in it for me?”

Boshen looked away from Sasha and watched a couple kiss at the other side of the street. After a long moment, he turned to Sasha and tried to look into her eyes. “You must have loved him at least once, Sasha,” he said, his voice trembling.

SASHA HAD NOT planned for love, or even an affair. The friendship was out of whimsy, a convenience for the empty days immediately before graduating from college. The movie they watched one night in July was not planned, either. It was ten o’clock when Sasha purchased the tickets, at the last minute. Yang looked at the clock in the ticket booth and wondered aloud if it was too late, and Sasha laughed, asking him if he was a child and if his lover had a curfew for him.

The movie was
Pretty Woman,
with almost unreadable Chinese subtitles. When they came out to the midnight street, Sasha said, “Don’t you just love Julia Roberts?”

“What’s to love about her?” Yang said.

Sasha glanced at Yang. He was quiet throughout the movie—he did not understand English, but Sasha thought at least he could’ve enjoyed the beautiful actress. “She’s pretty, and funny, and so—American,” Sasha said. “America is a good place. Everything could happen there. A prostitute becomes a princess; a crow turns into a swan overnight.”

“A prostitute never becomes a princess,” Yang said.

“How do you know?” Sasha said. “If only you could come with me to America and take a look at it yourself.”

After a long moment, Yang said, “Every place is a good place. Only time goes wrong.”

Sasha said nothing. She did not want to spend the night philosophizing. When they walked past a small hotel, she asked Yang if he wanted to come in with her. Just for the fun of staying out for a night, she said; he needn’t have to report to his lover anyway, she added. Yang hesitated, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the foyer with her. A middle-aged woman at the reception opened the window and said, “What do you want?”

“Comrade, do you have a single room for two persons?” Sasha said.

The woman threw out a pad for registration and shut the window. Sasha filled in the form. The woman scanned the pad. “Your ID?” she asked.

Sasha handed her ID to the woman. The woman looked at it for a long time, and pointed to Yang with her chin. “His ID?”

“He’s my cousin from Inner Mongolia,” Sasha said in a cheerful voice. “He forgot to bring his ID with him.”

“Then there’s no room tonight.” The woman threw out Sasha’s ID and closed the window.

“Comrade.” Sasha tapped on the glass.

The woman opened the window. “Go away,” she said. “Your cousin? Let me tell you—either you have a marriage license and I will give you a room, or you go out and do that shameless thing in the street and let the cops arrest you. Don’t you think I don’t know girls like you?”

Sasha dragged Yang out the door, his lips quavering. “I don’t believe I can’t find a room for us,” Sasha said finally.

Yang looked at Sasha with a baffled look. “Why do we have to do this?” he said.

“Ha, you’re afraid now. Go ahead if you don’t want to come,” Sasha said, and started to walk. Yang followed Sasha to an even smaller hotel at the end of a narrow lane. An old man was sitting behind a desk, playing poker with himself. “Grandpapa,” Sasha said, handing her ID to the old man. “Do you have a single room for my brother and me?”

The old man looked at Sasha and then Yang. “He’s not fifteen yet so he doesn’t have an ID,” Sasha said, and Yang smiled shyly at the old man, his white teeth flashing in the dark.

The old man nodded and handed a registration pad to Sasha. Five minutes later they were granted a key. It was a small room on the second floor, with two single beds, a rusty basin stand with two basins, and a window that did not have a curtain. Roaches scurried to find a hiding place when Sasha turned on the light. They stood just inside the door, and all of a sudden she did not know what the excitement was of spending a night together in a filthy hotel. “Why don’t we just go home?” Yang said behind her.

“Where’s the place you call home?” Sasha snapped. She turned off the light and lay down on a bed without undressing. “Go back to the man who keeps you if this is not a place for a princess like you,” she said.

Yang stood for a long moment before he got into the other bed. Sasha waited for him to speak, and when he did not, she became angry with him, and with herself.

The next morning, when the city stirred to life, they both lay awake in their own beds. The homing pigeons flew across the sky, the small brass whistles bound to their tails humming in a harmonious low tone. Not far away, Tao music played on a tape recorder, calling for the early risers to join the practice of tai chi. Old men, the fans of Peking Opera, sang their favorite parts of the opera, their voices cracking at high notes. Then the doors down the lane creaked open, releasing the shouting children headed to school, and adults to work, their bicycle bells clanking.

Later, someone turned on a record player and music blasted across the alley. Sasha sat up and looked out the window. A young man was setting up a newspaper stand at the end of the alley, making theatrical movements along with a song in which a rock singer was yelling, “Oh, Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan, he’s a powerful old man. He’s rich, he’s strong, and I want to marry him.”

Sasha listened to the song repeat and said, “I don’t understand why these people think they have the right to trash Genghis Khan.”

“Their ears are dead to real music,” Yang said.

“When I was little, my father taught me a song about Genghis Khan. It’s the only Mongolian song I remember now,” Sasha said, and opened her mouth to sing the song. The melody was in her mind, but no words came to her tongue. She had forgotten almost all of the Mongolian words she had learned, after her parents’ divorce; she had not seen her father for fifteen years. “Well, I don’t remember it anymore.”

“
The broken pillars, the slanted roof, they once saw the
banqueting days; the dying trees, the withering peonies, they
once danced in the heavenly music. The young girls dreamed
of their lovers who were enlisted to fight the Huns. They did
not know the loved ones had become white bones glistening in
the moonlight,
” Yang chanted in a low voice to the ceiling. “Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.”

“What’s the point of remembering the song anyway? I don’t even remember what my father looked like.” Sasha thought about her father, one of the offspring of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan was turned into a clown in the pop song. Mongolia was once the biggest empire in the world, and now it was a piece of meat, sandwiched by China and Russia.

“We live in a wrong time,” Yang said.

Sasha turned to look at Yang. He lay on his hands and stared at the ceiling, his face taking on the resigned look of an old man. It hurt her, and scared her too, to glimpse a world beneath his empty beauty. “We were born into a wrong place, is what our problem is,” she said, trying to cheer him and herself up. “Why don’t you come to America with me, Yang?”

Yang smiled. “Who am I to follow you?”

“A husband, a lover, a brother, I don’t care. Why don’t you get out of Beijing and have a new life in America?” The words, once said, hung in the room like heavy fog, and Sasha wondered if Yang, too, had difficulty breathing. Outside the window, a vendor was sharpening a chopper with a whetstone, the strange sound making their mouths water unpleasantly. Then the vendor started to sing in a drawn-out voice about his tasty pig heads.