Kinder Than Solitude (25 page)

“Can I ask you a question—are we on a date?”

The easiest response would be to make a joke to defuse the girl’s uncanny persistence, but would that suffice? Would that make him a lesser person to her? Sizhuo’s eyes, when Boyang looked at them, seemed to indicate a resolve to never let a single detail pass without
being seen. He wondered if that tenacity came to her naturally. “Traditionally speaking, this should be considered a date.”

“But what if we’re not traditionally speaking?” Sizhuo asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know how you think about these things.”

“Me, or men in general?”

She seemed torn; each option put her in a situation with which she had to reconcile: in wanting his personal opinion she risked putting him in a weighty position in her life; in casting him back into an ocean of men, she would question her own unfairness.

A tenderness stirred in him: he had already known her more than perhaps he was willing to. Every question to which one seeks an answer will inevitably come back, a boomerang to cut into one’s flesh. She was not armored against that danger as she might have thought; no, she was not protected at all: only those who do not seek answers are safe from being touched.

“I’m asking,” Sizhuo started to answer, then paused to reconsider. “I suppose I’m asking about what you, yourself, think.”

Boyang felt a surge of satisfaction, as though he had won a hard battle against a battalion of men, their indistinctive faces retreating fast. “I think of myself as a conventional man in this aspect, and so of course I take it that I’ve asked you out on a date,” he said, keeping his expression thoughtful. “However, you’re asking for more honesty, so I’ll give you more: only very tentatively do I consider this a date.”

“Why tentatively?”

“Because such a conversation should not be happening on a date, don’t you think? When people are wholehearted about any kind of business, they don’t analyze and question why they are there in the first place.”

“I see,” Sizhuo said, and Boyang thought she looked a little defeated. During their first meeting, she had seemed to enjoy herself more, though their conversation had been less demanding then: she
had talked about her work and her childhood in the northern village; he had asked her questions, and in turn gave a few harmless details about his own life.

Neither spoke. The conversation seemed to be going off in an unexpected direction, though Boyang could not decide if he was disappointed. There was no reason for him to be in this girl’s life, and he should be glad that she had the good sense to question his presence. All the same, he wanted to hold on to her a little longer; he even wanted to confide in her—but confide what? he thought, alarmed. The girl seemed to have a center, perhaps unknown to her, like a mysterious vacuum, which effortlessly drew him toward her. Could it be youth, or innocence, that was doing the trick? No, that must not be it. He thought of the other girl from years ago, the orphan who had made a fool of him. There was nothing youthful or innocent in Ruyu even back then; still, the same vacuum, dangerous in that case, had been there to draw him in. Boyang raised the teacup to calm himself. People don’t vanish from one’s life; they come back in disguise.

“Suppose we aren’t really on a date,” Sizhuo said. “Then what do we do now? We shake hands and say good-bye, right?”

Boyang pointed at his watch. “We’ve only been sitting here for twenty minutes,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit rushed to say farewell now?”

“But is it?” She gazed at him.

“Did you come today just to find out if we’re on a date?”

“Perhaps.”

“And now that you know the answer, you’re ready to take off,” he said. “Not even inclined to stay for a friendly chat?”

“What’s the point of a friendly chat when we’re not even friends?”

Indeed, they were no more than strangers who had caught each other’s eye by happenstance—a smile, a nod, eyebrows raised in surprise or marvel or bafflement, but what one should not ask for, and thus should not be granted, is the right to linger. To breach the contract of transience—whether to indulge oneself in the belief that
much more could happen, or to have merely an undisturbed moment to ponder the impossibility of making something out of this, or any kind of, encounter—is to overreach, to demand clarity from life’s muddiness. Certainly Boyang’s ache for permanency, his ache to make sense out of the nonsensical, should have been cured by now. Why couldn’t he simply agree with the girl, wish her a happy life without him, and part ways amicably? Yet he was not ready to let her go. She seemed to be living in a universe of her own making, but how could she—how could anyone—live so seriously and so blindly? Where did her fallibility hide itself? Her lack of corruption reminded him of the folktale in which a child could turn a rock into a piece of gold, yet remained oblivious to the fact that this capacity—more than it would make him rich—would launch him into an unredeemable life: my child, the world is a much worse place than you can ever imagine.

Boyang did not know whether he was jealous of Sizhuo or angry at her on behalf of the world that had already gone bad. It was not exactly an urge to protect that made him linger, nor a desire to destroy, but if she was destined to lose that universe of her own making, he wanted to be the one responsible—he, the corruptor who beat all other corruptors. “It takes time and effort to find a friend in this city, no?” he said. “Why not give us some time?”

“Friendship happens,” Sizhuo said.

“But not love?”

“Love happens, too.”

“So neither is something we can strive for? Or should I say, I’m given no hope in either category?”

Sizhuo looked at Boyang quizzically. He wondered if he had been unwittingly aggressive, but he had little—or too much—to lose: in either case, one was allowed a deviation from the protocol. “How about this?” he said, pointing to the window; across the street, on the side of a building, was a billboard for a fitness center. “I have a membership to the gym there. There are six badminton courts on the second
floor, and we can go there once a week to play badminton. We don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know how to play badminton,” Sizhuo said.

Boyang wanted to kick himself for his oversight. Certainly she, growing up in the village, would think of badminton as a luxury sport, but could he explain to her that he and Moran used to play in the alleyway, dodging people on foot or on bicycles, often having to climb up to the rooftop to retrieve a stray birdie? Could he tell her that in the summers, he and other boys would hunt for the fat, green larvae of cabbage butterflies, put them into birdies, and launch them straight into the sky with their racquets? The poor worms always plunged back to the earth with nothing to meet them but a solid death, yet there had been nothing ominous to him, or even to Moran, about those random executions. Would Sizhuo protest if he told her the story? Coco would have screamed and called the action sick, but Sizhuo had grown up in the countryside where lives were probably butchered or maimed every day. “How about Ping-Pong?” he said.

She smiled, which again made her look resigned. Did the village school where her father taught have a crude concrete block that served as a Ping-Pong table in the yard, as his elementary school had? His childhood, even though it had been a city childhood, had come almost a generation earlier, and could not have been too different from Sizhuo’s.

“I don’t know how to play Ping-Pong.”

“How about racquetball?” he said. “Now, hold it—give me the pleasure to say I don’t know how to play it, either. I’ve watched people play, and the ball sure goes fast. We’ll be too occupied with learning the game to feel awkward about not talking.”

“Why do you want to play racquetball with me if you don’t mind not talking?” she said.

Any activity would be an excuse for him to continue seeing her—this she had no reason not to understand. “I suppose I’m interested in
getting to know you better,” he said. “So I’m scrambling to find anything you’ll agree to do with me so I have an opportunity.”

“Is this how a man of your status courts a woman?”

He looked into her eyes but could find neither malice nor irony in them. “What kind of status are you referring to?”

“You have a car and an apartment, so you must also have a good career?” she said, asking more than stating, and he nodded to confirm her guess. “Does that mean when you court a woman, you can always find something to do with her?”

“To do?”

“What if you lived in a basement with three other provincial boys, and you did not have any savings? You worked six and a half days a week, and yet you knew you would never be able to afford the cheapest apartment in this city. What if all you possessed was your being, and there was nothing you could do but be yourself? Would you still be courting a girl?”

No, he thought; this was not a welcoming world for young men without any means. A few weeks ago, a woman in her early twenties had said in a TV interview that she would prefer an unhappy marriage with a BMW to being in love with a young man who could afford only to carry her on his bicycle. Boyang mentioned the name of the young woman—already her bold practicality had made her a national celebrity—and asked what Sizhuo thought of the woman’s preference.

Sizhuo looked agonized. She crossed and uncrossed her fingers, the first time he had seen her lose her equanimity. “I wish she were completely wrong about everything. I don’t think she was, though,” she said. “This is not the kind of world I thought I’d grow up to live in, you know?”

She was not the first to have realized that, he wanted to point out. What made her different from other disillusioned souls? All young people start with untainted dreams, but how many would retain their
capacities to dream? How many could refrain from transforming themselves into corruptors of other untainted dreams? We are all wardens and executors biding our time; what’s taken from us, what’s killed in us, we wait for our turn to avenge. Such wisdom, had Coco ever been interested, Boyang would not have hesitated to share: he would have sneered, laughed, enjoyed his position the way a cat gently plays with its prey. But what made Sizhuo different—what made him pensive now—was that he wanted a better answer for her; he wanted a better world to offer her. Was this how a father would feel toward a child? He made a face, the question conjuring the most farcical: paternal, he thought, a paternal sugar daddy.

Sizhuo did not take her eyes from his face. “You must find my ranting laughable,” she said, though her face showed no sign of unease due to self-consciousness. “Sometimes I think so, too, but the moment I think that way, I know I’m wrong.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “More at myself because, you know, I’m one of those people who have made the world a bad place for you, and in turn I’m asking you to like me, even to fall in love with me.”

“What do you do that for?”

“To ask you to like me?”

“To help make the world a bad place, if what you said was true.”

“What else can I do?”

Sizhuo looked baffled, as though he were asking her for an answer.

“Nobody can refrain from doing things,” he said. “You see, a child can get by with just being, but we aren’t children forever. We must live by doing things. And either we do harm, or, if we are extremely lucky, we do some good. The problem, as you know, is that the world is an unbalanced place, and it requires more bad than good to maintain that unbalance. If you want to do one good thing—say, if you give money to a beggar child—no big deal, right? But no, it’s not that simple. To be able to do that, you have to deceive yourself into believing
that a bill dropped in her basket is going to help her, to give her one more morsel of food, to spare her one beating from her parents. While in reality, you and I both know that she might have been stolen or rented or sold to the begging ring; by giving her money, instead of doing anyone any good, what you’re really doing is contributing to criminals, helping them profit from doing damage, and encouraging more criminals to steal and sell babies into that trade. So what do I do? I either give her the money, or I don’t, all depending on my mood that day. But either way, I have no illusions about doing anything good for her, or for anyone. I’m sorry, is this too bleak for you?”

Sizhuo shook her head. “Why is the world unbalanced?” she said. “Why does it require more bad than good?”

He could give her his hypothesis about the connection between human hearts and entropy that he sometimes played in his head, but he would have to be drunk to go on with such nonsense. Already he regretted that their conversation was going off on a tangent. He was here to woo a woman. He was not here to be baffled and defeated by the world alongside her. “Why that is,” he said, “I truly don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

No, he did not, he thought, though he knew that was only wishful thinking. The real question was, can anyone afford to know? “Do you?” he asked.

“I do,” she said. “That makes me a fool in people’s eyes, I know, but I don’t mind being a fool.”

“What
do
you mind?”

“Not knowing, and making do with not knowing.”

14

After the celebration on October 1, life went back to the old routines, nearly normal again, though Moran no longer knew what kind of normalcy she was thinking of. There was little hope in the case of Shaoai, who no longer belonged to any school or work unit. Neither Moran nor Boyang had the courage to ask Shaoai about how she spent her days. In the evenings, she could be seen in the house or in the courtyard, moody and distant.

Uncle was no more reticent than before, bearing his trademark smile without fail, and Aunt was as chatty as ever. Yet their stoic efforts could not dispel the despondent fog hanging over their faces. They looked older now, and were sometimes distracted when they tried to follow the neighbors’ conversations. More than before they seemed intimidated by their daughter.

Hardships in lives, Moran was raised to believe, are like unpleasant weather, which one endures because bad weather will break as inevitably as bad luck will run its course. Hope is the sunshine after the storm, the spring thawing after the bitter winter; the goddess of fate, capricious as she is, has nevertheless an impressionable mind, as any young female does, who would smile at those who have perseverance.