A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (9 page)

“Sasha,” Yang said finally. “Is Sasha a Mongolian name?”

“Not really. It’s Russian, a name of my mom’s favorite heroine in a Soviet war novel.”

“That’s why it doesn’t sound Chinese. I would rather it is a Mongolian name,” Yang said. “Sasha, the princess of Mongolia.”

Sasha walked barefoot to Yang’s bed and knelt beside him. He did not move, and let Sasha hold his face with both hands. “Come to America with me,” she said. “We’ll be the prince and the princess of Nebraska.”

“I was not trained to play a prince,” Yang said.

“The script is changed,” Sasha said. “From today on.”

Yang turned to look at Sasha. She tried to kiss him, but he pushed her away gently. “
A beautiful body is only a bag of
bones,
” he sang in a low voice.

Sasha had never seen Yang perform, and could not imagine him onstage; he had played princesses and prostitutes, but he did not have to live with the painted mask and the silk costume. “The Peking Opera is dead,” she said. “Why don’t you give it up?”

“Who are you to say that about the Peking Opera?” Yang said, his face turning suddenly stern.

Sasha saw the iciness in Yang’s eyes and let the topic drop. Afterward, neither mentioned anything about the stay in the hotel. A week later, when Boshen was escorted away from Beijing, Sasha was relieved and scared. There was, all of a sudden, time for them to fill. To her relief and disappointment, Yang seemed to have forgotten the moment when they were close, so close that they were almost in love.

THE PARADE STARTED with music and laughter, colorful floats moving past, on which happy people waved to the happy audience. Boshen looked at Sasha’s face, lit up by curiosity, and sighed. Despite her willfulness and unfriendliness, the thought of the baby—Yang’s baby—made him eager to forgive her. “Do you still not want to tell Yang about the baby?” he said.

“You’ve asked this the hundredth time,” Sasha said. “Why should I?”

“He might want to come to the U.S. if he learned about the baby,” Boshen said.

“There’ll be no baby after tomorrow,” Sasha said. She had tried Yang’s phone number when she had learned of the pregnancy; she had tried his pager, too. At first it was measured by hours and days, and then it became weeks since she had left the message on his pager. He might be living in another apartment with a new telephone number. The pager might no longer belong to him. She knew he had every reason for not getting her message, but she could not forgive his silence. In the meantime, her body changed. She felt the growth inside her and she was disgusted by it. Sometimes she hated it from morning till night, hoping that it would finally go away, somehow, surrendering to the strength of her resentment. Other times she kept her mind away for as long as she could, thinking that it would disappear as if it had never existed. Still, in the end, it required her action. In the end, she thought, it was just a chunk of flesh and blood.

“But why was there a baby in the first place?” Boshen said. Why and how it happened were the questions that had been haunting him since he had heard from Sasha. He wanted to ask her if she, too, had been dazzled by the boy’s body, smooth, lithe, perfectly shaped. He wanted to know if she had loved him as he had, but in that case, how could she have the heart to discard what had been left with her?

Sasha turned to Boshen. For the first time, she studied the man with curiosity. Not handsome or ugly, he had a candid face that Sasha thought she could not fall in love with but nonetheless could trust. A man like Boshen should have an ordinary life, boring and comfortable, yet his craze for Yang made him a more interesting man than he deserved to be. But that must be what was Yang’s value—he made people fall in love with him, and the love led them astray, willingly, from their otherwise tedious paths. Yang had been the one to bring up the idea of spending a night together again, and Sasha the one to ask a friend for the use of her rented room, a few days before Sasha’s flight. It was one of the soggiest summer evenings. After their lovemaking, sweet and short and uneventful, they stayed on the floor, on top of the blanket Sasha had brought for the purpose, an arm’s length between them, each too warm to touch the other. Outside, the landlady’s family and two other neighbor families were sitting in the courtyard and watching a TV program, their voices mixed with the claps of their hands killing the mosquitoes. Sasha turned to look at Yang, who was lying with his back to her. The little pack of condoms she had bought was tucked underneath the blanket, unopened. She had suggested it and he had refused. A rubber was for people who touched without loving each other, Yang had said; his words had made her hopeful again. “Do you want to come to America with me now?” she asked, tracing his back with one finger.

“What am I going to do in America? Be kept as a canary by you?” Yang said and moved farther away from her finger.

“You can spend some time learning English, and get a useful degree in America.”

“Useful? Don’t you already know that I am useless? Besides, nothing humiliates a man more than living as a parasite on his woman,” Yang said, and reached for a silk robe he had packed with him. Before Sasha had the time to stop him, he walked out the door. Sasha jumped to her feet and watched from behind the curtain; Yang walked with a calculated laziness, not looking at the people who turned their eyes away from the television to stare at him. When he reached the brick sink in the middle of the courtyard, he sat on the edge and raised his bare legs to the tap. The water had run for a long moment before the landlady recovered from her shock and said, “Hey, the water costs me money.”

Yang smiled. “It’s so hot,” he said in a pleasant voice.

“Indeed,” the landlady agreed.

Yang turned off the tap and walked back to the room, with the same grace and idleness, knowing that the people in the courtyard were all watching him, his willowy body wrapped in the moon white robe. Sasha stood by the window, cold with disappointment. She became his audience, one of the most difficult to capture, perhaps, but he succeeded after all.

A Disney float approached the corner where Sasha and Boshen stood. “Look,” Sasha said and pointed at a giant glove of Mickey Mouse moving ahead of the float. “There’re only four fingers.”

“I didn’t know that,” Boshen said.

“Yang needs us no more than that glove needs us for our admiration,” Sasha said.

“But our love is the only thing to protect him, and to save him, too.”

Sasha turned and looked into Boshen’s eyes. “It’s people like us who have destroyed him, isn’t it? Why was there
Nan
Dan
in the Peking Opera in the first place?
Men loved him
because he was playing a woman; women loved him because
he was a man playing,
” she said.

“That’s totally wrong.”

“Why else do you want so much to put him back on the stage? Don’t think I’m happy to see him fall. Believe me, I wanted to help him as much as you do. He didn’t have to be a man playing a woman—I thought I would make him understand. But what did I end up with? You’re not the one who has a baby inside; he’s not the one having an abortion,” Sasha said, and started to cry.

Boshen held out his hand and touched Sasha’s shoulder hesitantly. If only she could love the boy one more time. Yang could choose to live with either of them; he could choose not to love them at all but their love would keep him safe and intact; they could—the three of them—bring up the baby together. Yang would remain the princess, exiled, yes, but a true princess, beautiful in a foreign land. If only he knew how to make Sasha love Yang again, Boshen thought.

Sasha did not move away when Boshen put an arm around her shoulder. They must look like the most ordinary couple to strangers, a nervous husband comforting his moody wife after an argument. They might as well be a couple, out of love, he caring only for the baby inside her, she having no feeling left for anything, her unborn child included.

As if responding, the baby moved. A tap, and then another one, gentle and tentative, the first greeting that Sasha had wished she would never have to answer, but it seemed impossible, once it happened, not to hope for more. After a long moment, people in the street shouted, and children screamed out of excitement. Sasha looked up—the lights were lit up in the trees, thousands of stars forming a constellation. She thought about the small Mongolian town where her mother lived alone now, her long shadow trailing behind her as she walked home along the dimly lit alley. Her mother had been born into a wrong time, lived all her adult life in a wrong place, yet she had never regretted the births of her two daughters. Sasha held her breath and waited for more of the baby’s messages. America was a good country, she thought, a right place to be born into, even though the baby had come at a wrong time. Everything was possible in America, she thought, and imagined a baby possessing the beauty of her father but happier, and luckier. Sasha smiled, but then when the baby moved again, she burst into tears. Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Love in the Marketplace

SANSAN IS KNOWN TO HER STUDENTS AS MISS Casablanca. A beautiful nickname if one does not pay attention to the cruel, almost malicious smiles when the name is mentioned, and she chooses not to see. Sansan, at thirty-two, does not have a husband, a lover, or a close friend. Since graduation from college, she has been teaching English at the Educators’ School in the small town where she grew up, a temporary job that has turned permanent. For ten years she has played
Casablanca,
five or six times a semester, for each class of students. The pattern of their response has become familiar, and thus bearable for her. At the beginning, they watch in awe, it being the first real American movie they have watched, without Chinese dubbing or subtitles. Sansan sees them struggle to understand the dialogue, but the most they can do is catch a phrase or two now and then. Still, they seem to have no trouble understanding the movie, and always, some girls end the class with red teary eyes. But soon they lose their interest. They laugh when the women in the movie cry; they whistle when a man kisses a woman on the screen. In the end, Sansan watches the movie alone, with the added sound track from the chatting students.

That is what Sansan is doing with her morning class when someone taps on the door. Only when the knocking becomes urgent does she pause the tape.

“Your mother’s waiting for you outside. She wants to see you,” the janitor says when Sansan opens the door.

“What for?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy with my students?”

“It’s your mother waiting outside,” the janitor says, one foot planted firmly inside the door.

Sansan stares at the janitor. After a moment, she sighs. “OK, tell her I’m coming,” she says. The students all watch on amused. She tells them to keep watching the movie, and knows they will not.

Outside the school gate, Sansan finds her mother leaning onto the wooden wheelbarrow she pushes to the marketplace every day. Stacked in it are a coal stove, a big aluminum pot, packs of eggs, bottles of spices, and a small wooden stool. For forty years, Sansan’s mother has been selling hard-boiled eggs in the marketplace by the train station, mostly to travelers. Sitting on the stool for all her adult life has made her a tiny stooped woman. Sansan hasn’t seen her mother for a year, since her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hair is thinner and grayer, but so will Sansan’s own be in a few years, and she feels no sentiment for either of them.

“Mama, I heard you were looking for me,” Sansan says.

“How else would I know that you’re alive?”

“Why? I thought people talked about me to you all the time.”

“They can lie to me.”

“Of course.” Sansan grins.

“But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?”

“Theirs.”

“You’ve never known how to spell the word ‘shame.’ ”

“Do you come just to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself? I know it by heart now.”

“What god did I offend to deserve you as a daughter?” Her mother raises her voice. A few passersby slow down and look at them with amused smiles.

“Mama, do you have something to say? I’m busy.”

“It won’t be long before you will become an orphan, Sansan. One day I’ll be drowned by all the talk about you.”

“People’s words don’t kill a person.”

“What killed your dad, then?”

“I was not the only disappointment for dad,” Sansan says. Hard as she tries, she feels her throat squeezed tight by a sudden grief. Her father, before his death, worked as a meter reader, always knocking on people’s doors around dinnertime, checking their gas and water meters, feeling responsible for the ever-rising rates and people’s anger. One evening he disappeared after work. Later he was discovered by some kids in a pond outside the town, his body planted upside down. The pond was shallow, waist deep at most; he had plunged himself into the mud, with the force of a leap maybe, but nobody could tell for sure how he did it, or why. Sansan’s mother believed that it was Sansan’s failure at marriage that killed him.

“Think of when you first went to college. Your dad and I thought we were the most accomplished parents in the world,” her mother says, ready to reminisce and cry.

“Mama, we’ve been there many times. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Why? You think I toil all these years just to raise a daughter to shut me up?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” Sansan says.

“Don’t go yet. Stay with me longer,” her mother says, almost pleading.

Sansan tries to soften her voice. “Mama, I’m in the middle of a class.”

“Come home tonight, then. I have something important to tell you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now? I can spare five minutes.”

“Five minutes are not enough. It’s about Tu.” Sansan’s mother steps closer and whispers, “Tu is divorced.”

Sansan stares at her mother for a long moment. Her mother nods at her. “Yes, he’s unoccupied now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sansan says.

“His parents want you to go back to him.”

“Mama, I don’t understand.”

“That’s why you have to come home and talk to me. Now go teach,” Sansan’s mother says, and pushes the wheelbarrow forward before Sansan replies.

SANSAN DISCOVERED CASABLANCA the year Tu wrote a short and apologetic letter from America, explaining his decision not to marry her. Before the letter’s arrival, she showed
The Sound of Music
to her students, humming with every song, ready to abandon the students for America at any minute. After the letter, she has never sung again.
Casablanca
says all she wants to teach the students about life.

Sansan goes back to the classroom and resumes her place on the windowsill, letting her legs dangle the way she remembers her American teachers did in college. At the end of the Paris scene, when Rick gets soaked on the platform in the pouring rain, and then boards the train, a boy says, “How funny. His coat is dry as a camel’s fur now.”

Sansan is surprised that she has missed the detail all along. She thinks of praising the boy for his keen observation, but changes her mind. “One of life’s mysteries is its inexplicability,” she raises her voice and says.

The students roar with laughter. Certainly the line will be passed on, along with the nickname, to the next class, but Sansan does not care. The students, recent graduates from junior high, will be teaching elementary students after the two years of studying in the Educators’ School. Most of them are from villages, and the school is their single chance to escape heavy farm labor. English is taught only to comply with a regulation set by the Education Department; they will never understand what she means, these kids living out their petty desires.

After two classes, Sansan decides to take off, complaining to her colleagues of a headache. Nobody believes her excuse, she knows, but nobody would contradict her, either. They indulge her the way people do a person with a mild and harmless craziness, whose eccentricity adds color to their otherwise dull lives. Among the few people in town who have college degrees, Sansan is the best-educated one. She was one of the two children from the town who have ever made it to the most prestigious college in Beijing, and the only one to have returned. The other one, Tu, the childhood companion and classmate and boyfriend and fiancé at one time or another in her life, is in America, married to a woman more beautiful than Sansan.

And divorced now, ten years too late. Back in her rented room, Sansan sits on her bed and cracks sunflower seeds. The shells rain down onto the sheet and the floor, and she lets them pile up. She craves the popping sounds in her skull, and the special flavor in her mouth. It is the sunflower seeds, sweet and salty and slightly bitter from the nameless spices Gong’s Dried Goods Shop uses to process its sunflower seeds, and the English novels she bought in college— a full shelf of them, each one worthy of someone’s lifetime to study—that make her life bearable. But the sunflower seeds taste different today; Tu’s divorce, like a fish bone stabbed in her throat, distracts her.

Tu would never imagine her sitting among the shells of sunflower seeds and pondering his failed marriage, but she still imagines him on a daily basis. Not a surprise, as she promised Tu at their engagement ceremony. “I’ll be thinking of you until the day when all the seas in the world dry up,” she said. Tu must have said something similar, and Min, the only witness of the ceremony and then Tu’s legal wife on paper, hugged both of them. It was odd, in retrospect, that Min did not take a vow. After all, the engagement between Sansan and Tu, just as the marriage between Min and Tu, was the contract for all three of them.

Min was the most beautiful girl Sansan had met in college, and is, ten years later, the most beautiful person in her memory. In college they lived in the same dorm with four other girls, but for a long time in their first year, they were not close. Min was a city girl, attractive, outgoing, one of the girls who would have anything they set their eyes on, and of course they only set their eyes on the best. Sansan, a girl from a small town, with a heavy accent and a plain face, was far from the best for Min, as a confidante or a friend.

Toward the end of their freshman year, the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square disrupted their study. Min became an active protester in the Square. Miss Tiananmen, the boys voted her; she dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and gestured victory to the Western reporters’ cameras. After the crashing down, she had to go through a difficult time, being checked and rechecked; she ended up belonging to the category that did not need imprisonment but did not have a right to any legal job after graduation, either. When Min came back to school, still beautiful but sad and defeated, Sansan was the first and the only person in the dorm who dared to express sympathy and friendliness toward Min. Sansan was among the few who had not attended any protests. She and Tu had been the only students showing up for classes when their classmates had gone on a strike; later, when the teachers had stopped coming to classes, they had become intimate, falling in love as their parents and the whole town back home had expected them to.

Sansan never thought of her friendly gesture to Min as anything noble or brave; it was out of a simple wish to be nice to someone who deserved a better treatment from life. Sansan was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, then, when Min decided to return the goodwill and become her best friend. Sansan felt a little uneasy, too, as if she had taken advantage of Min’s bad fortune; they would have never become friends under normal circumstances, but then, what was wrong with living with the exceptional, if that’s what was given by life?

At the end of their sophomore year, the Higher Education Department announced a new policy that allowed only those students who had American relatives to be granted passports for studying abroad, something that made no sense at all, but such was their life at the time, living with all the ridiculous rules that changed their lives like a willy-nilly child. Min’s only hope for her future—going to America after graduation—became a burst bubble, and Sansan, when she could not stand the heartbreakingly beautiful face of Min, started to think and act with resolution.

“Are you out of your mind?” Tu said when she announced to him her plan—that he would apply to an American graduate school and help Min out through a false marriage. “I don’t have any American relatives.”

“Your grandfather’s brother—didn’t he go to Taiwan after the Liberation War? Why couldn’t he have gone to America later? Listen, nobody will go to America to check your family history. As long as we get a certificate saying that he’s in America . . .”

“But who’ll give us the certificate?”

“I’ll worry about that. You think about the application,” Sansan said. She saw the hesitation in Tu’s eyes, but there was also a spark of hope, and she caught it before it dimmed. “Don’t you want to go to America, too? We don’t have to go back home after graduation, and work at some boring jobs because we don’t have city residency. Nobody will care about whether you are from a small town when you get to America.”

“But to marry Min?”

“Why not?” Sansan said. “We have each other, but she doesn’t have anyone. The city boys—they all become turtles in their shells once she’s in trouble.”

Tu agreed to try. It was one of the reasons Sansan loved him—he trusted her despite his own doubt; he followed her decision. Persuading Min seemed easy, even though she too questioned the plan. Sansan alone nudged Tu and Min toward the collective American dream for all three of them; she went back to her hometown, and through bribing and pleading got a false certificate about the American grand-uncle of Tu. The plan could have gone wrong but it went right at every step. Tu was accepted by a school in Pennsylvania; Min, with the marriage certificate, got her own paperwork done to leave the country as Tu’s dependent. The arrangement, a secret known only to the three of them, was too complicated to explain to outsiders, but none of the three had a doubt then. One more year and the plan would be complete, when Min would find a way to sponsor herself, and Tu, with a marriage and a divorce under his belt, would come home and marry Sansan.