Kinder Than Solitude (32 page)

Boyang was in love, but was Ruyu, too? Her disturbed mood and uninterpretable behavior of the previous night did not belong to someone in love. Could it be that she had no reciprocal feeling toward him? That hope, too precarious to be further explored, nevertheless left a door ajar in Moran’s heart. Boyang was one of those people who could get anything he wanted, but there must be a point when that luck ran out. Heartbroken, perhaps he would notice another heart broken for him.

After breakfast, Watermelon Wen’s wife asked Moran to look after the twins. The woman complained that once again it was her turn for the weekend shift on the trolley route, even though everyone in the quadrangle knew she asked for it whenever she could. She and her husband were a loving couple but both had quick tempers: on the weekends when they were home together they tended to get into fights, about children, grocery shopping, or simply some disagreement over a TV drama.

Moran was relieved to have something concrete to do. Already she had tipped over a bowl of porridge at breakfast. It threatened to be a long day, and she waited eagerly for Boyang’s return, yet she dreaded it, too. Loyalty required her to be happy for him, but she was not a good actor; and then, loyalty to whom? The separateness between them had not occurred to Moran until that moment. Since when had they reached the point where what was good for him was for her no longer so?

Ruyu came over to the table under the grape trellis and watched Moran teach the twins paper cutting. The boys complained when what they made turned out crooked. They poked each other with miniatures of Transformers, and asked to be let go so they could battle it out. Moran told them to stay in her sight. There was a trembling in her voice, but she hoped that Ruyu did not detect it.

Ruyu picked up a piece of finished work, and said she did not
know Moran could do paper cutting. Ruyu’s effort at making small talk surprised Moran. There was a calmness in Ruyu’s eyes. Moran wondered, her heart sinking, if she had made a mistake: perhaps Ruyu was in love, too.

“I’m not very good at it,” Moran said, and explained that Boyang’s grandmother was a gifted paper-cutter, and she herself had tried to learn but could only do a few simple patterns. To bring Boyang’s name into the conversation felt like a challenging gesture, or else a surrender, but Ruyu did not acknowledge it as either, as though he did not, this morning, deserve a place in their conversation. Moran picked up a children’s book from the top of a stack, an adventure of two friends, one named Little Question Mark, the other Little Know-It-All.

“We used to joke that Boyang was Little Know-It-All,” Moran said.

“And you were Little Question Mark, of course?”

Moran was about to say yes, but then felt self-conscious that she would be unfairly boasting about a connection that Ruyu did not have with Boyang. “How are you feeling this morning?” Moran asked instead.

“You sound as though I’ve been ill.”

Had Ruyu forgotten the night before? “You looked wretched last night,” Moran said. “You talked about …”

“Never mind what I said.”

“How can I not?” Moran asked. “Are you less unhappy today?”

“There’s your question about happiness again,” Ruyu said. “Why are you trying so hard?”

“At what?”

“At being good,” Ruyu said and stood up.

“But wait,” Moran said, urgent in her pleading. “Don’t go yet.”

“Why?”

Moran looked around and lowered her voice. “Can you tell me what you took from the lab yesterday?”

“When will you stop asking questions, Little Question Mark?”

“I worry about you.”

“But who asked you to worry about me?” Ruyu said and left before Moran could reply.

There was no one Moran could turn to for advice: to talk to any grownup, or to talk to Boyang, would be to break her promise to Ruyu. If only Shaoai had not been in so much trouble herself. She might even know what Ruyu’s real mood was. But to bother Shaoai now, with a crisis perhaps only imaginary, would be inconsiderate.

Loneliness comes with secrets; secrets in turn become the badge of honor for loneliness. Lingering in Moran’s heart was the wish, childlike, childish, for a transparent world, and to be barricaded in her loneliness by Ruyu’s secret—murky, inexplicable—gave Moran the first taste of a life violated. Sometimes she felt feverish; other times she shivered: loneliness, when not understood by its possessor, becomes a hallucination.

An odd thought occurred to Moran: that her life, compared with Shaoai’s or Ruyu’s, was so dull that it must not be a worthwhile one in the eyes of the other two girls. Even Boyang seemed to have a story elsewhere, his parents and his sister forming a world that had not much of an overlap with the quadrangle; he could have a conversation with a graduate student, and without any difficulty he could see himself in a house in America.
Keep your eyes open, or else you won’t know how marvelous the world is
, said a slogan for a travel program on television. The program was the first of its kind, and indeed the world appeared marvelous through its lenses: intrepid bungee jumpers on a cliff in New Zealand; a carefree young couple punting on the River Cam; the empty inner courtyard of Karl Marx’s birthplace, geraniums blossoming on the windowsills; green ivy climbing the redbrick buildings on the Ivy League campuses; the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning mist; Times Square flashing at night.

She could keep her eyes open all the time, but what Moran saw were those around her: her father going over the family accounting book item by item to make sure they had done their best to save a few
extra yuan for a refrigerator; Aunt and Uncle plagued by the fear that Shaoai would be forever kept out of the
system;
queues for rationed food; gray moths living and dying without a purpose. If the world was indeed marvelous it must be so for those whose imagination was livelier than hers. To see, it seemed to Moran, required much more than to open one’s eyes.

But what did Ruyu see of the world? Moran did not know. She could not even say with any confidence what Boyang saw now, though that was because these days his eyes were turned to Ruyu constantly. Perhaps two people in love, having made an entire world by themselves, do not have to look elsewhere. There were songs and poems written about that, but no songs or poems had been, or would be, written about queues or ration stamps or the pettiness of worrying over the price of pork. Moran felt old. What if she would never have anything poetic in her for people to love?

These thoughts, circling and leading nowhere, often left Moran in a trance, and on Thursday morning she was caught in politics when her mind lost its track. When the teacher called her name, she stood up, vaguely aware that she had been asked a question.

“Can you give us an example, classmate Moran?” the teacher prompted her.

When she did not answer right away, Boyang, who sat behind her, whispered, “Bok choy.”

Moran said bok choy, and there were titters here and there.

“Hmm, that is rather a … unique example,” the teacher said. “But can you give us some better ones?”

“Cooking oil?” Moran ventured. “Maybe sugar? Rice? Flour?”

The classroom broke into roaring laughter. Moran turned to look at Boyang, who nodded and held up a thumb. Whatever the teacher had been talking about, Moran certainly had diverted the course of the conversation in a less serious direction. She was not a mischievous student; rarely was she caught in any kind of spotlight, but she
was not remorseful about putting herself momentarily in the shoes of the class clown. For one thing, standing rather than sitting, being the cause of such glee, had jolted her out of her foggy mood.

The teacher signaled for Moran to take her seat. “All concrete examples,” she remarked when the class calmed down. “I wouldn’t disagree with you, though I was hoping for some better ones: the production and distribution of steel, for instance, or coal mining, or railway construction.” She looked at her watch, and then went on to summarize the lesson on Soviet versus Chinese models of planned economy.

At recess Boyang told Moran that the teacher had been asking for examples that demonstrated the advantage of a planned economy, and it had been brilliant of Moran to give her a list of rationed food. For the rest of the day some of the boys mouthed “bok choy” whenever Moran walked past them, though she knew they did not mean ill. She laughed when one of them told her that she should think of applying to the school officials to start a bok choy club; they would all join if she were to be the chairwoman, he said.

It was odd how a small incident like this had cleared her turbid mood. Moran remembered the couplet Teacher Pang and Teacher Li had hung in their living room:
The world, unspectacular, does not offer complicacy; only the foolish complicate their lives with self-inflicted befuddlements
. The world, like her parents and her neighbors, had never treated her unkindly; in return they expected her to act as a person in her position would do: pleasantly, obediently, sensibly.

When they left school that day, Moran decided that she must genuinely appreciate being close to Ruyu and Boyang. They were two extraordinary people, and how lucky she was to be their friend. One day she would look back and miss these days, and right away she chased the sentimental thought from her mind.

They stopped at a department store on the way. It was Aunt’s
birthday, and Ruyu said she wanted to buy a present, and she already knew what it would be. Aunt used to carry a glass container as a tea mug in a net crocheted with colored nylon. The bottle, sturdy, its orange lid bearing the trademark of Tang, had been given to Aunt by her colleague when the latter finished the contents. A few days earlier, when Aunt had been buying pickles, she had put the bottle on the counter, and within a minute someone had stolen it.

None of the families in the quadrangle had tasted Tang, the powdered orange juice imported from America. It had been appointed by NASA as the official drink for astronauts, the TV commercial informed its audience, with a slow-motion single drop of liquid rebounding from a glass of juice, which was in a color so intense that Moran could not help but cringe at the contrast between that orange on the screen and the dinginess off the screen. More and more her life reminded her of the watercolor sets she had had in elementary school, a new set at the beginning of each school year. They were of the cheapest kind, with twelve ovals in a narrow box and a tiny brush. The only time the set looked beautiful was before she opened it: the colors, no matter how diligently she applied and reapplied, were pale to nothing on the paper, and afterward the ovals dried and caked and then fell off in small chunks and fragments. Still, she had never asked her parents for a more expensive set, like the ones some of the other schoolchildren proudly carried. Her parents, if asked, would have scrambled to buy her a good set, Moran knew; they would have skipped a few meals with meat, but she had feared that she could not prove herself worthy of a better set.

But the day Ruyu bought the bottle of Tang was not one of those gloomy days of faded watercolors. Aunt was overwhelmed by the extravagance of the present. It had cost eighteen yuan, more than a month of Moran’s lunch money; the sales assistant, a middle-aged woman, had looked with critical curiosity at Ruyu when she produced two ten-yuan bills, and when she had turned to the register for
the change, she had mumbled to a colleague that she wondered what kind of parents would have spoiled a child with such luxury. Moran had fidgeted, yet Ruyu had stood still as though she had not heard the remark, loud enough and meant for her to hear.

In the evening, Boyang and Moran came over to see Aunt try her birthday present. Shaoai had not come home for dinner that day, and Ruyu could tell that Aunt had felt both sad that Shaoai was not there for her birthday and relieved that the meal, which Uncle had cooked for Aunt, had gone smoothly, without the usual tension.

Aunt lined up several mugs, and solemnly scooped the fine orange powder into each, while Uncle added water from a hot water kettle. Not boiling hot, Uncle explained, as a too high temperature would be detrimental to the vitamin C in the powder. Why not just add tap water, Boyang suggested, and Aunt said that cold water was not good for stomachs. “You all need to learn to take care of your bodies,” Aunt said. “You won’t always be this young.”

It took no time for the powder to dissolve, and the color in each mug was as intense as promised by the TV commercial. “Now go ahead and bring a mug to every family,” Aunt said to Moran and Boyang. “Don’t forget to tell them this is a present from Ruyu.”

“Why? Don’t we get to try it first?” Boyang asked.

“You’ll have yours when you come back,” Aunt said, and asked Uncle if they had more mugs.

“Hold your generosity,” Boyang said. “That bottle will be gone in no time.”

In a rare good mood, Uncle said that Aunt would be happy to see the powder gone, as she would have a new Tang container to carry around proudly. “And this time she can even brag about having drunk the whole bottle ourselves,” he said.

Aunt faked anger and told Uncle to stop poking fun at her. Boyang laughed, and carried two mugs, holding the door open for Moran, who followed him with two in her hands. Ruyu picked up a
mug and said she would save it for Sister Shaoai in the bedroom. And don’t forget Grandpa, Ruyu said to Aunt, which made her pour a small portion out of her own mug and bring it to Grandpa.

It was a cloudless night, and the moon, a day short of being full, cast a layer of silver on the courtyard. When Moran finished her deliveries—the two families had sent compliments and good wishes back with her to Aunt—she found Boyang waiting for her under the grape trellis. A few days earlier Teacher Pang had harvested the grapes to share with the neighbors, but a few clusters, not quite ripe, had been left behind.

Boyang reached for a cluster and handed half to Moran. “See, she
is
a good-hearted person,” he said in a hushed voice.

The comment, coming out of nowhere, startled Moran. For one thing, she wanted to say that she had no idea whom he was talking about, though that would be dishonest. “Who has ever said she’s not?” Moran asked.