Kinder Than Solitude (26 page)

Moran’s nature was to find hope for others before she could feel hopeful herself. To stay silent was the first step in resigning oneself to
hopelessness, so armed with inherited and wishful thinking, she repeated the stale wisdom to Shaoai when they found themselves alone in the courtyard. It was a Saturday afternoon, a half day at school, and both Boyang and Ruyu disappeared around noon. Moran wondered if Ruyu had a rehearsal; as for Boyang, he must have gone to a basketball or soccer game with other boys.

“Things will become better, Sister Shaoai,” Moran said. “Don’t lose heart. Remember the tale in which the man lost one horse only to find that it brought another horse back to the stable?”

“Since when did you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the wise and the optimistic?” Shaoai said, looking at Moran askance.

Moran blushed. “I don’t want you to feel alone in your situation,” she said.

“You don’t want me to feel alone, huh? And I bet you want many things for others, too, right?”

Moran shook her head confusedly. Too young to know that her affection was the kind that made a child revolt against a mother, she was disheartened by Shaoai’s punishing words.

“It’s ambitious of you to want things for me,” Shaoai said. “But let me give you a solid piece of advice, the same I’ve given my parents: don’t waste your feelings on an unworthy person.”

Moran stammered and said she admired Shaoai as always.

“My dear Moran, in this case I wasn’t talking about myself. Sure, my parents should’ve known by now not to spend their energy worrying about me,” Shaoai said. “And you, don’t you think you’re a bit childish, following your two other friends as though you can’t see they’d prefer to be left by themselves?”

It took Moran a moment to understand what the older girl was insinuating, and by then Shaoai had unlocked her bicycle, leaving Moran in an abyss. Slowly she turned toward her house, fumbling for the key.

There was no reason not to believe Shaoai. Moran wondered if others—her parents, for instance, or Boyang’s grandmother—had
wanted to warn her, too. Since childhood, Moran had seen, in the approving eyes of their elders, a future for her and Boyang. She had refrained from naming it because he had not named it. Loyalty to that future was all she had, yet loyalty to a future, unlike to the past, is a feeling both blind and arrogant. What begins with a label bears an expiration date; by defining something only after its disappearance—a sibling, a friend, a childhood sweetheart—Moran would one day understand that the loss, limited for him because he must have long ago dismissed it with a name, was for her a continuing void.

Moran slipped into bed with her school uniform still on, and under the cover of the blanket she shed quiet tears. A small shift in the past few days, which had been so minute that she had been uncertain whether it was only in her imagination, came back to her with new significance. It used to be that Ruyu would hop on whichever bicycle was closer to her, though one morning last week she had walked around Moran and sat behind Boyang, and ever since had chosen his bicycle.

The next day Moran proposed to Boyang that the three of them use his room rather than Ruyu’s for their night study. To give Sister Shaoai some space, Moran said. After a difficult night she had decided that her friendship with the other two should not change, but she did not want her bravery—or foolishness—to be seen by Shaoai.

Boyang readily agreed. He must have found it hard to be around Shaoai these days, too; Moran wondered if Shaoai had embarrassed Boyang by commenting on the relationship between him and Ruyu. Moran did not detect any change in him toward herself, and Ruyu was distant but no more than before. Perhaps Shaoai had been in such a bad mood that she wanted to hurt others; what she had told Moran might not be true. This thought made Moran hopeful again, and it cast a pitying shadow over her sympathy toward Shaoai. Like anyone with a youthful mind, Moran, too occupied with her own prospect of happiness, had little capacity for real sympathy—the kind that is not perfunctorily expressed out of one’s duty toward another
person’s misfortune. But how many people are strong enough to give—or to receive, even—real sympathy? In distress and in catastrophe, one often looks for the strengthening forces not in people closest to one, but in the perfect indifference in strangers’ faces, who put one’s woes back to where they belong—irrelevant to the extent of being comical.

“Every generation has to learn this lesson,” Moran’s mother said at dinner when the topic turned to Shaoai. “Public protest will never do in this country. Unfortunately, some pay more dearly than others. Now that you’re not a child anymore, use your brain better.”

Moran mumbled an answer. The neighbors did not discuss Shaoai’s situation. All had gone through the political “recheck” over the past few weeks, none but Shaoai with a harsh outcome. They all treated her with the same respect and patience, but behind closed doors, they must have exchanged critical words about Shaoai, as Moran’s parents had.

A moth fluttered into the lamp above the dinner table, and Moran’s father waved his chopsticks as though the gesture alone would make the distraction go away. Moran watched the moth, its wings dusty and gray, its flight purposeless. These moths, no larger than ladybugs, seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the house. They came from the straw-colored worms that lived in the bags of rice her parents had scrambled to buy out of fear of the ever-worsening inflation; it was Moran’s job to winnow out the wiggly worms before cooking the rice. Unlike the mosquitoes and flies her mother hunted down with a single-minded determination, the moths, doing no harm, were left to live and die on their own.

Moran sighed, and her mother, as though she had been waiting for the opportunity, launched into a speech about why a young person like Moran felt she had the right to sigh. Moran listened with an obedient expression. These days, the moths, along with supplies her parents had stored in their battle against inflation—bars of alkaline soap, drab yellow and wrapped in straw paper, boxes of matches that
had become damp and became harder to strike by the day, toilet paper, laundry detergent, inexpensive tea in the form of crude bricks, all growing stale, collecting dust—these made Moran’s heart despondent: every time she turned around, she seemed to bump into another pile of things, stirring another moth from its repose into a frenzy of blind flight. The world had become smaller, dimmer, but was it for her alone?

Such despair Moran had to hide from her parents. Hadn’t her mother survived an impoverished childhood among six siblings, supported by the meager earnings of their father as a pedicab driver? Hadn’t her father weathered years of humiliation as the son of a petit bourgeois?

The same gray moths fluttered in other houses, too, yet Boyang and Ruyu never seemed to be bothered. Why would they be, if life was generous and granted them all the good qualities that Moran herself lacked? But such a bitter thought made her feel guilty: certainly Ruyu had experienced bigger loss; certainly she deserved more kindness, better love.

After the last class of the day, Ruyu went to the music room to practice the accordion. Sometimes, when she played on the porch, Moran came over to watch. She did not want to go into the low-ceilinged cottage, which was gloomy, and indeed she had no right to be in there; besides Ruyu, there were a few other student musicians Teacher Shu supervised—four violinists, two boys who played four-hands on the piano, and a middle school girl who played the xylophone and belonged to a fifty-member, all-girl xylophone ensemble in Japan, where she was the only Chinese student. How the girl could join a Japanese ensemble Moran did not know, and some days, sitting on the porch and listening to the instruments, each preoccupied with its own music, she wondered about the things she had missed or would miss in life. She had no talent for creating anything beautiful—the only music she could make was to whistle a simple tune, wobbling
with uncertainty, and even that drew disapproving looks from her mother because it was unladylike to whistle; her drawings and her handwriting were childish, and she had few skills in any art; even her body and face were nondescript.

Moran turned to study Ruyu—it was one of the best autumn days in Beijing, the sky blue in a crystal way, and Teacher Shu had driven all his charges, other than the two pianists, onto the porch to practice. In the shade of the eave, Ruyu moved her fingers up and down the keyboard in a distracted way, yet when Moran closed her eyes, she could not tell the difference between a halfhearted performance and a dedicated one, as she could not tell the difference between Ruyu’s confidence and her impertinence.

“This must be boring for you,” Ruyu said when she finished a piece. “You shouldn’t feel obliged to wait for me.”

“No, it’s not boring at all,” Moran said. “What is it that you just played?”

Ruyu turned over the sheet of music as though she had not heard the question. “I can walk home,” she said after pausing to read the next sheet. “Or else I’ll catch a ride with Boyang.”

Three days a week, Boyang played basketball, and on the other two days, he played soccer or just hung out with a few boys by the bicycle shed, exchanging tall tales. Sometimes Moran joined them, as they were all friendly with her, though their favorite topics—Michael Jackson, breakdancing, Transformers—did not interest her. Once in a while, she played Ping-Pong, but she was not a great player, and would step aside when the games became competitive. Three girls with whom she had been close in middle school stayed after class, too, talking more than doing anything; Moran’s friendship with them had not continued as easily as she’d expected: there seemed to be a dangerous undercurrent, a triangle of complications in which Moran often got lost, and their words, seemingly pregnant with meaning, sometimes sounded too assiduous or simply silly.

“I don’t mind waiting,” Moran said. “In fact, I like to watch you play.”

Ruyu looked at Moran with a cold scrutiny. “Do you mean you like to watch people play music? Or do you mean you like to watch me?”

Moran blushed. What right, Ruyu seemed to be saying, did Moran have to sit next to Ruyu, claiming to be her friend? “I don’t know. Maybe I just like to listen to real music being played on an instrument.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t play music?” Moran said, wavering under Ruyu’s steadfast gaze. “No one I know plays music.”

“Do you want to?”

Moran looked at the girl on the xylophone, who was practicing with such abandon that even when her eyes were open—and they were huge, almost inhuman eyes, mysteriously deep—she seemed to be seeing nothing. Years later, the girl would transform herself into the drummer for the first female rock band in China, and Moran would see her photo in a magazine: clad in a layer of shiny black leather, she had the same abandon, or exaggerated despair, in her eyes.

Ruyu glanced at the girl. Moran wondered if in Ruyu’s eyes the girl was simply a pretentious actor, or worse, a nuisance. Yet the girl could travel with her instrument on an airplane to Japan, showing her passport to the officials in both countries. Apart from Boyang’s sister, Moran had not known another person who had left the country; none of the people in the quadrangle was even qualified to apply for a passport.

With wordless contempt Ruyu turned to look at Moran, as though to ask her if she wanted to be the girl at the xylophone. “I do wish I could play music,” Moran said. “But not everyone can afford to.”

“Why not? I’m an orphan, and even I can do it.”

It was the first time Ruyu had used the word
orphan
. Moran did not have words to comfort Ruyu, but the claim, with its haughtiness, had been thrown more as a dagger at the world, and Moran, unable to reply, offered herself as the target.

Ruyu returned to her practice and launched into a maddeningly paced polka. Moran understood that she was not a welcome companion on the porch. Pride would have required her to apologize and to absent herself, but whether she left or not seemed to matter little. Of course Ruyu could do many things that no other person could do: it was not because she was an orphan—had Moran been an orphan, she would have been one of those shivering and begging by the roadside; it was not because Ruyu was beautiful—she was, but there were other girls more beautiful, better built than she, yet at times they, too, were susceptible to the uncertainties that Ruyu was immune to; no, Ruyu could do anything she wanted, to others, to the world, because she knew she was someone destined to be special. She felt no burden to prove it to herself or to anyone, nor had she any tolerance for those who were not chosen as she was. What was Moran like in Ruyu’s eyes? Years later, it would strike Moran as either the most fortunate or the most unfortunate happening in her life that the first time she looked at herself through someone else’s eyes, she had chosen Ruyu’s: who was she to Ruyu but someone so ordinary that neither her joy nor her pain would amount to anything but the dross of everydayness?

A few days later, Boyang told Moran that Ruyu had asked to see the university where his parents taught. “Saturday afternoon,” he said. “Shall we go together?”

The university, on the west side of the city, was not far from the Summer Palace, and its campus had been, in its previous incarnation, a residence for the closest cousins and allies of the emperors of the last dynasty. It was said to be one of the most beautiful places in Beijing, yet in all the years Moran had known Boyang, she had never once visited the campus. It was part of the world he did not want to
share with her; nor would she have found herself at ease near it. His parents, she knew, had little regard for her and her parents and people like them.

Ruyu’s request did not come as a surprise. Still, it agonized Moran that what was forbidden for her was something ordinary for Ruyu, who had only to ask to be handed the entry pass. Was Boyang aware of the difference? She looked at him, and he seemed excited by the plan. “Of course we’ll put her on a bus and we’ll meet her at the university. But do you think she’ll handle the bus ride all right? She’d have to change to another route midway. Alternatively, you could ride the bus with her. But then we won’t have the two bicycles, and it’s an awfully big campus to walk around.” Boyang stopped. “What? Did you already plan something else for Saturday?”