Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London, SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York

Copyright © 2014 by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph © Giulia Fiori / Getty Images

Designed by Kate Gaughran

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007329823

Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007357109

Version: 2015-01-14

To Dapeng, Vincent, and James

You can’t both live and have lived, my dear Christophe.

Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Yiyun Li

About the Publisher

1

Boyang had thought grief would make people less commonplace. The waiting room at the crematory, however, did not differentiate itself from elsewhere: the eagerness to be served first and the suspicion that others had snatched a better deal were reminiscent of the marketplace or stock exchange. A man shouldered him, reaching for multiple copies of the same form. Surely you have only one body to burn, Boyang laughed to himself, and the man glared back, as though personal loss had granted him the right to what he was not owed by the world.

A woman in black rushed in and looked around for a white chrysanthemum that must have been dropped earlier. The clerk, an old man, watched her pin it back onto her collar and smiled at Boyang. “You wonder why they can’t slow down,” he said when Boyang expressed sympathy for what the clerk had to endure. “Day in and day out. These people forget that those who rush to every sweet fruit of life rush to death, too.”

Boyang wondered if the clerk—whom no one wished to meet and, once met, became part of an unwelcome memory—found solace in those words; perhaps he found joy, too, in knowing that those who mistreated him would return in a colder form. The thought made Boyang like him.

When the older man finished his tea, they went over the paperwork for Shaoai’s cremation: her death certificate, the cause of death lung failure after acute pneumonia; the yellowed residence registration card with an official cancellation stamp; her citizen’s ID. The clerk checked the paperwork, including Boyang’s ID, carefully, his pencil making tiny dots under the numbers and dates Boyang had entered. He wondered if the clerk noticed that Shaoai was six years older. “A relative?” the clerk asked when he looked up.

“A friend,” Boyang said, imagining disappointment in the old man’s eyes because Boyang was not a new widower at thirty-seven. He added that Shaoai had been ill for twenty-one years.

“Good that things come to an end.”

There was no option but to agree with the old man’s comfortless words. Boyang was glad that he had dissuaded Aunt, Shaoai’s mother, from coming to the crematory. He would have been unable to guard her from strangers’ goodwill and malevolence alike, and he would have been embarrassed by her grief.

The clerk told Boyang to come back in two hours, and he walked out to the Garden of Perpetual Green. Shaoai would have scoffed at the cypresses and pine trees—symbols of everlasting youth at a crematory. She would have mocked her mother’s sorrow and Boyang’s pensiveness, even her own inglorious end. She, of all people, would have made good use of a life. Her distaste for the timid, the dull, and the ordinary, her unforgiving sharpness: what a waste that edge had rusted, Boyang thought again. The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

At the top of a hill, older trees guarded elaborate mausoleums. A few birds—crows and magpies—prattled close enough that Boyang could hit them with a pinecone, but he would need an audience for such a boyish achievement. If Coco were here, she would know how to poke fun at his shot and to look impressed when he showed her the pine nuts inside the cones, though the truth was she had little interest in these things. Coco was twenty-one, yet already she had acquired the incuriosity of one who has lived long enough; her desire—too greedy for her age, or too meager—was for tangible comforts and material possessions.

At the end of a path a pavilion sheltered the bronze bust of a man. Boyang tapped the pillars. They were sturdy enough, though the wood was not the best quality, and the paint had faded and was peeling in places; according to the plaque the pavilion was less than two years old. A bouquet of plastic lilies laid underneath looked more dead than fake. Time, since the economy had taken off, seemed to move at an unreal pace in China, the new becoming old fast, the old vanishing into oblivion. One day he, too, could afford—if he desired it—to be turned into a stone or metal bust, gaining a minor immortality for people to laugh at. With a bit of luck, Coco, or whatever woman replaced Coco, might shed a tear or two in front of his grave—if not for a world without him, then for her misspent youth.

A woman appeared over the rise of the hill, and upon seeing Boyang turned so abruptly he barely glimpsed her face, framed by a black-and-white patterned scarf. He studied her black coat and the designer bag on her arm, and wondered if she was a rich man’s widow, or better, a mistress. For a moment he entertained the thought of catching up with her and exchanging a few words. If they liked each other, they could stop at a village on the drive back to the city and choose a clean countryside restaurant for some rustic flavors: sweet potatoes roasted in a tall metal barrel, chicken stewed with so-called “locally grown, organic” mushrooms, a few sips of strong yam liquor that would make their stories flow more easily and the lunch worth prolonging. Back in the city, they might or might not, depending on their moods, see each other again.

Boyang returned to the counter at the designated time. The clerk informed him that there would be a slight delay, as one family had insisted on checking everything to avoid contamination. Contamination with someone else’s ashes? Boyang asked, and the old man smiled and said that if there was any place where people’s whims would be accommodated, it was this one. Touchy business, Boyang said, and then asked if a woman had come alone to cremate someone.

“A woman?” the clerk said.

Boyang considered describing the woman to the old man, but then decided that a man with a trustworthy face and gentle sense of humor should be dealt with cautiously. He changed the subject and chatted about the new city regulations on real estate. Later, when the clerk asked him if he would like to take a look at Shaoai’s remains before they were ground to ashes—some families requested that, explained the clerk; some asked to pick up the bones themselves for proper closure—Boyang declined the offer.

That everything had come to an end like this was a relief as unconvincing as the pale sun that graced the dashboard as Boyang drove back to the city. The news of the death he had emailed to Moran and Ruyu. Moran, he knew, lived in America, though where Ruyu was he was not certain: America most probably; perhaps Canada, or Australia, or somewhere in Europe. He doubted that the two of them had remained in touch with each other; his own communications with them had never once been acknowledged. On the first of every month, he sent separate emails, informing—reminding—them that Shaoai was alive. He never spoke of the emergencies, lung failure once, and heart failure a few times: to limit the information would spare him the expectation of a reply. Shaoai had always pulled through, clinging to a world that had neither use nor a place for her, and the brief messages he sent had given him a sense of permanency. Loyalty to the past is the foundation of a life one does not, by happenstance or by will, end up living. His persistence had preserved that untouched alternative. Their silence, he believed, proved that to be the case: silence maintained so emphatically could only mean their loyalties matched his, too.

When the doctor confirmed Shaoai’s death, Boyang had felt neither grief nor relief but anger—anger at being proven wrong, at being denied the reunion that he had considered his right: they—he and Moran and Ruyu—were old in his fantasy, ancient even, a man and two women who had nearly lived out their mortal lives, converging one last time at the lake of their youth. Moran and Ruyu would perhaps consider their homecoming a natural, if not triumphant, epitaph. To this celebration he would bring Shaoai, whose presence would turn their decades of accumulation—marriage, children, career, wealth—into a hoarder’s laughable collection. The best life is the life unlived, and Shaoai would be the only one to have a claim to that truth.

Yet their foolishness was his, too, and to laugh at his own absurdity he needed the other two: laughing by oneself is more intolerable than mourning alone. They might not have seen the death notice in their emails—after all, it was only the middle of the month. Boyang knew, by intuition, that the email addresses he had from Moran and Ruyu were not the ones they used every day, as his, used only for communicating with them, was not. That Shaoai had died on him when he had least expected her to, and that neither Moran nor Ruyu had acknowledged his email, made the death unreal, as though he were rehearsing alone for something he needed the other two women—no, all three of them—to be part of; Shaoai, too, had to be present at her own funeral.

A silver Porsche overtook Boyang on the highway, and he wondered if the driver was the woman he had seen in the cemetery. His cell phone vibrated, but he did not unhook it from his belt. He had canceled his appointments for the day, and the call most probably was from Coco. As a rule he kept his whereabouts vague to Coco, so she had to call him, and had to be prepared for last-minute changes. To keep her on uncertain footing gave him the pleasure of being in control. Sugar daddy—she and her friends must have used that imported term behind his back, but once when he, half-drunk, had asked Coco if that was what she took him for, she laughed and said he was too young for that. Sugar brother, she said afterward on the phone with a girlfriend, winking at him, and later he’d thanked her for her generosity.

It took him a few passes to find a parking spot at the apartment complex, built long before cars were a part of the lives of its occupants. A man who was cleaning the windshield of a small car—made in China from the look of it—cast an unfriendly look at Boyang as he exited his car. Would the man, Boyang wondered while locking eyes with the stranger sternly, leave a scratch on his BMW, or at least kick its tire or bumper, when he was out of sight? Such conjecture about other people no doubt reflected his own ignobleness, but a man must not let his imagination be outwitted by the world. Boyang took pride in his contempt for other people and himself alike. This world, like many people in it, inevitably treats a man better when he has little kindness to spare for it.

Before he unlocked the apartment door with his copy of the key, Aunt opened it from inside. She must have been crying, her eyelids red and swollen, but she acted busy, almost cheerful, brewing tea that Boyang had said he did not need, pushing a plate of pistachios at him, and asking about the health of his parents.

Boyang wished he had never known this one-bedroom unit, which, already shabby when Aunt and Uncle had moved into it with Shaoai, had not changed much in the past twenty years. The furniture was old, from the ’60s and ’70s, cheap wooden tables and chairs and iron bed frames that had long lost their original shine. The only addition was a used metal walker, bought inexpensively from the hospital where Aunt used to work as a nurse before retiring. Boyang had helped Uncle to saw off its wheels, readjust its height, and then secure it to a wall. Three times a day Shaoai had been helped onto it and practiced standing by herself so that her muscles retained some strength.

The old sheets wrapped around the armrests had worn out over the years, the sky-blue paint badly chipped and exposing the dirty metal beneath. Never, Boyang thought, would he again have to coax Shaoai to practice standing with a piece of candy, yet was this world without her a better place for him? Like a river taking a detour, time that had passed elsewhere had left the apartment and its occupants behind, their lives and deaths fossils of an inconsequential past. Boyang’s own parents had purchased four properties in the last decade, each one bigger than the previous one; their current home was a two-story townhouse they never tired of inviting friends to, for viewings of their marble bathtub and crystal chandelier imported from Italy and their shiny appliances from Germany. Boyang had overseen the remodeling of all four places, and he managed the three they rented out. He himself had three apartments in Beijing; the first, purchased for his marriage, he had bestowed upon his ex-wife as a punishing gesture of largesse when the man she had betrayed Boyang for had not divorced his own wife as he had promised.

A black-and-white photograph of Shaoai, enlarged and set in a black frame, was hung up next to a picture of Uncle, who had died five years earlier from liver cancer. A plate of fresh fruit was placed in front of the pictures, oranges quartered, melons sliced, apples and pears, intact, looking waxy and unreal. These Aunt timidly showed Boyang, as though she had to prove that she had just the right amount of grief—too much would make her a burden; too little would suggest negligence. “Did everything go all right?” she asked when she ran out of the topics she must have prepared before his return.

The image of Aunt’s checking the clock every few minutes and wondering where her daughter’s body was disturbed Boyang. He regretted that he had pressed Aunt not to go to the crematory, but at once he chased that thought away. “Everything went well,” he said. “Smoothly.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do without you,” Aunt said.

Boyang unwrapped the urn from the white silk bag and placed it next to the plate of fruits. He avoided looking closely at Shaoai in the photo, which must have been taken during her college years. Over the past two decades, she had doubled in size, and her face had lost the cleanly defined jawline. To be filled with soft flesh like that, and to vanish in a furnace … Boyang shuddered. The body, in its absence, took up more space than it had when alive. Abruptly he went over to the walker by the wall and assessed the possibility of dismantling it.

“But we’ll keep it, shall we?” Aunt said. “It could come in handy someday for me.”

Unwilling to let Aunt steer the conversation toward the future, Boyang nodded and said he would have to leave soon; he was to meet a business partner.

Of course, Aunt said, she would not keep him.

“I’ve emailed Ruyu and Moran,” he said at the door. It was cowardly to bring up their names, but he was afraid that if he did not unburden himself, he would be spending another night drinking more than was good for his health, singing intentionally off-key at the karaoke bar, and telling lewd jokes too loudly.

Aunt paused as though she had not heard him right, so he said again that the news had been sent to Moran and Ruyu. Aunt nodded and said it was right of him to tell them, though he knew she was lying.

“I thought you might like me to,” Boyang said. It was cruel to take advantage of the old woman who was not in a position to protest, but he wanted to talk with someone about Moran and Ruyu, to hear their names mentioned by another voice.

“Moran is a good girl,” Aunt said, reaching up to pat his shoulder. “I’ve always been sorry that you didn’t marry her.”

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime. Boyang was amazed at how effortless it was for Aunt to inflict such fatal pain. It was unlike her to say anything about his marriage. Between them they had shared only Shaoai. He had told Aunt about his divorce, but he had not needed to remind her, as he had had to remind his parents, not to discuss it. And to speak of Moran as a better candidate for his marriage while intentionally leaving out the other name—Boyang felt an urge to punish someone, though he only shook his head. “Marriage or no,” he said, “I need to run now.”

“And to think we haven’t heard from Moran for so long,” Aunt persisted.

Boyang ignored the comment, and said he would come back later that week. When he had asked Aunt about the burial of Shaoai’s cremains, she had replied that she was not ready. He suspected, perhaps unfairly, that Aunt was holding on to the urn of ashes because that was the last thing binding him to this apartment. He and Aunt were not related by blood.

When Boyang got back into his car, he saw that both his mother and Coco had called. He dialed his mother’s number and, after the call, sent a text to Coco saying he would be busy for the rest of the day. Coco and his mother were the two chief competitors for his attention these days. He had not deemed it worthwhile to introduce the two—one was too transient in his life, and the other, too permanent.

Going to his parents’ place after Aunt’s was a comfort. Remodeled as though for an advertisement in a consumer magazine, their home provided a perfect veil behind which the world of unpleasantness receded. Here more than elsewhere Boyang understood the significance of investing in trivialities: beautiful objects, like expensive drinks and entertaining acquaintances, demand that one think little and feel nothing beyond one’s immediate surroundings.

They had taken some friends out for dinner the night before, Boyang’s mother explained. They had too many leftovers, so she thought Boyang might as well come and get rid of the food for them. He laughed, saying he did not know he was their compost bin. His parents had become particular in their eating habits, obsessing over the health benefits, or lack thereof, of everything entering their bodies. He could see that they would order an excessive amount of food for their friends yet touch little themselves.

The topics at dinner were his sister’s American-born twins, the real estate prices in Beijing and in a coastal city where his parents were pondering purchasing a waterfront condo, and the inefficiency of their new housekeeper. Only when his mother had cleaned away the dishes did she ask, as though grasping a passing thought, if Boyang had heard of Shaoai’s death. By then, his father had gone into his study.

That he had kept in touch with Shaoai’s parents and had acted as caretaker when illnesses and deaths had beset their family—this Boyang had seen no reason to share with his parents. If they had suspected any connection, they had preferred not to know. The key to success, in his parents’ opinion, was the capacity to selectively live one’s life, to forget what one ought not to remember, to untangle oneself from lesser and irrelevant others, and to recognize the unnecessariness of human emotions. Fame and material gain are secondary though unsurprising, if one is able to choose the portion of one’s life to live with impersonal wisdom. For this belief they had, as an example, Boyang’s sister, who was a prominent physicist in America.

“So I heard,” Boyang said. Aunt would not have kept the death from the old neighbors, and it did not surprise him that one of them—or perhaps more than one—had called his parents. If there were any pleasure in delivering the news of death it would be that call, castigation barely masked by courteousness.

His mother returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea and passed one to him. He cringed at her nudging the conversation beyond the comfortable repertoire of their usual topics. He showed up whenever she summoned him; the best way to stay distanced, he believed, was to satisfy her every need.

“What do you think, then?” his mother said.

“Think of what?”

“The whole thing,” she said. “One must acknowledge the waste, no?”

“What waste?”

“Shaoai’s life, obviously,” his mother said, adjusting a single calla lily in a crystal vase on the dinner table. “But even if you take her out of the equation, others’ lives have been affected.”

What others, Boyang wanted to say to his mother, would be worth a moment of her thought? The chemical found in Shaoai’s blood had been taken from his mother’s laboratory; whether it had been an attempted murder, an unsuccessful suicide, or a freak accident had never been determined. His family did not talk about the case, but Boyang knew that his mother had never let go of her grudge.

“Do you mean your career went to waste?” Boyang asked. After the incident, the university had taken disciplinary action against his mother for her mismanagement of chemicals. It would have been an unpleasant incident, a small glitch in her otherwise stellar academic career, but she insisted on disputing the charge: every laboratory in the department was run according to outdated regulations, with chemicals available to all graduate students. It was a misfortune that a life had been damaged, she admitted; she was willing to be punished for allowing three teenage children to be in her lab unsupervised—a mismanagement of human beings rather than chemicals.

“If you want to look at my career, sure—that’s gone to waste for no reason.”

“But things have turned out all right for you,” Boyang said. “Better, you have to admit.” His mother had left the university and joined a pharmaceutical company, later purchased by an American company. With her flawless English, which she’d learned at a Catholic school, and several patents to her name, she earned an income three times what she would have made as a professor.

“But did I say I was speaking of myself?” she said. “Your assumption that I have only myself to think of is only a hypothesis, not a proven fact.”

“I don’t see anyone else worthy of your thought.”

“Not even you?”

“What do you mean?” The weakest comeback, Boyang thought: people only ask a question like that because they already know the answer.

“You don’t feel your life has been affected by Shaoai’s poisoning?”

What answer did she want to hear? “You get used to something like that,” he said. On second thought, he added, “No, I wouldn’t say her case has affected me in any substantial way.”

“Who wanted her to die?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me right. Who wanted to kill her back then? She didn’t seem like someone who would commit suicide, though certainly one of your little girlfriends, I can’t remember which one, hinted at that.”

In rehearsing scenarios of Shaoai’s death Boyang had never included his mother—but when does any parent hold a position in a child’s fantasy? Still, that his mother had paid attention, and that he had underestimated her awareness of the case, annoyed him. “I’m sure you understand that if, in all honesty, you tell me that you were the one who poisoned her, I wouldn’t say or do anything,” she said. “This conversation is purely for my curiosity.”

They were abiding by the same code, of maintaining the coexistence between two strangers, an intimacy—if their arrangement could be called that—cultivated with disciplined indifference. He rather liked his mother this way, and knew that in a sense he had never been her child; nor would she, in growing old, allow herself to become his charge. “I didn’t poison her,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

“You’d be much happier to have an answer. I’d be happier, too, if I could tell you for sure who poisoned her.”

“Well then, there are only two other possibilities. So, do you think it was Moran or Ruyu?”

He had asked himself the question over the years. He looked at his mother with a smile, careful that his face not betray him. “What do you think?”

“I didn’t know either of them.”

“There was no reason for you to know them,” Boyang said. “Or, for that matter, anyone.”

His mother, as he knew, was not the kind to dwell upon sarcasm. “I never really met Ruyu,” she said. “Moran of course I saw around, but I don’t remember her well. I don’t recall her being brilliant, am I right?”

“I doubt there is anyone brilliant enough for you.”

“Your sister is,” Boyang’s mother said. “But don’t distract me. You used to know them both well, so you must have an idea.”

“I don’t,” Boyang said.

His mother looked at him, rearranging, he imagined, his and the other people’s positions in her head as she would do with chemical molecules. He remembered taking his parents to America to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. At the airport in San Francisco, they’d seen an exhibition of duck decoys. Despite the twelve-hour flight, his mother had studied each of the wooden ducks. The colors and shapes of the different decoy products fascinated her, and she read the old 1920s posters advertising twenty-cent duck decoys, using her knowledge of inflation rates over the years to calculate how much each duck would cost today. Always so curious, Boyang thought, so impersonally curious.

“Did you ever ask them?” she said now.

“Whether one of them tried to murder someone?” Boyang said. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I think you’re overestimating your son’s ability.”

“But do you not want to know? Why not ask them?”

“When? Back then, or now?”

“Why not ask now? They may be honest with you now that Shaoai is dead.”

For one thing, Boyang thought, neither Moran nor Ruyu would answer his email. “If you’re not overestimating my ability, you are certainly overestimating people’s desire for honesty,” he said. “But has it occurred to you it might’ve only been an accident? Would that be too dull for you?”

His mother looked into her tea. “If I put too many tea leaves in the teapot, that could be considered a mistake. No one puts poison into another person’s teacup by accident. Or do you mean that Moran or Ruyu was the real target, and poor Shaoai happened to take the wrong tea? To think, it could’ve been you!”

“My drinking the poison by accident?”

“No. What I’m asking is: what do you think of the possibility of someone trying to murder you?”

The single calla lily—his mother’s favorite flower—looked menacing, unreal with its flawless curve. She blew lightly over her tea, not looking at him, though he knew that was part of her scrutiny. Was she distorting the past to humor herself, or was she revealing her doubt—or was the line between distorting and revealing so fine that one could not happen without the other? For all he knew, he had lived in her selective unawareness, but perhaps this was only an illusion. One ought not to have the last word about one’s own mother.

He admitted that the thought had never occurred to him. “It’s a possibility, you know,” she said.

“But why would anyone have wanted to kill me?”

“Why would anyone want to kill anyone?” she said, and right away Boyang knew that he had spoken too carelessly. “If someone steals poison from a lab, that person intends to do harm to another person or to herself. For all I know, the harm was already done the moment that chemical was stolen. And I’m not asking you why. Why anyone does anything is beyond my understanding or interest. All I would like to know is who was trying to kill who, but unfortunately you don’t have an answer. And sadly, you don’t seem to share my curiosity.”

2

When the train pulled into Beijing’s arched station on August 1, 1989, Ruyu, adjusting her eyes from the glare of the afternoon to the shadowed grayness of the station, did not yet know that one’s preparation for departure should begin long before arrival. There were many things that she, at fifteen, had still to learn. To seek answers to one’s questions is to know the world. Guileless in childhood, private as one grows older, and, for those who insist on the certainty of adulthood, ignored when they become unanswerable, these questions form the context of one’s being. For Ruyu, however, an answer that excluded all questions had already been provided.

The passengers moved to both ends of the car. Ruyu remained seated and looked through the grimy window. On the platform, people pushed one another out of the way with their arms, as well as—more effectively—their bags and suitcases. Someone—though Ruyu did not know who, nor did she feel compelled to be curious—would be waiting for her on the platform. She took a pair of barrettes from her school satchel and clipped them in her hair. This was how her grandaunts had described her to her hosts in a letter they’d sent a week before her journey: a white shirt, a black skirt, and two blue barrettes in the shape of butterflies, a brown willow trunk, a 120-bass accordion in a black leather case, a school satchel, and a canteen.

The last two passengers, a pair of middle-aged sisters-in-law, asked her if she needed help. Ruyu thanked them and said no, she was fine. During the nine-hour journey, the two women had studied Ruyu with unconcealed curiosity; that she had only taken sips of water, that she had not left her seat to use the washroom, that she had not let go of her clasp of her school satchel—these things had not escaped their eyes. They had offered Ruyu a peach and a pack of soda crackers and later a bottle of orange juice purchased through the window at a station, all of which Ruyu had declined politely. They had between themselves approved of her manner, though that had not stopped them from feeling offended. The girl was small-built, and appeared too young for a solo journey in the opinion of the women and other fellow travelers; but when they had questioned her, she had replied with restraint, revealing little of the nature of her trip.

When the aisle was cleared, Ruyu heaved the accordion case off the luggage rack. Her school satchel, made of sturdy canvas, she had had since the first grade, and its color had long faded from grass green to a pale, yellowish white. Inside it, her grandaunts had sewn a small cloth bag, in which were twenty brand-new ten-yuan bills, a large amount of money for a young girl to carry. With great care, Ruyu pulled the trunk from under her seat—it was the smallest of a set of three willow trunks that her grandaunts owned, purchased, they had told her, in 1947 in the best department store in Shanghai, and they had asked her to please be gentle with it.

Shaoai recognized Ruyu the moment she stumbled onto the platform. Who would have thought, besides those two old ladies, of stuffing a girl into such an ancient-looking outfit and then, on top of that, making her carry an outdated, childish school satchel and a water canteen? “You look younger than I expected,” Shaoai said when she approached Ruyu, though it was a lie. In the black-and-white photo the two grandaunts had sent, Ruyu, despite the woolen, smock-like dress that was too big for her, looked like an ordinary schoolgirl, her eyes candidly raised to the camera; they were the eyes of a child who did not yet know and was not concerned with her place in the world. The face in front of Shaoai now showed a frosty inviolability a girl Ruyu’s age should not have possessed. Shaoai felt slightly annoyed, as though the train had brought the wrong person.

“Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, recognizing the older girl from the family picture sent to her grandaunts: short hair, angular face, thin lips adding an impatient touchiness to the face.

From the pocket of her shorts Shaoai produced the photo Ruyu’s grandaunts had mailed along with their letter. “So that you know you’re not being met by the wrong person,” Shaoai said, and then stuffed the photo back into her pocket.

Ruyu recognized the photo, taken when she had turned fifteen two months earlier. Every year on her birthday—though whether it was her real birthday or only an approximation of it she had wondered at times without asking—her grandaunts took her to the photographer’s for a black-and-white portrait. The final prints were saved in an album, each fit into four silver corners glued on a new page, with the year written on the bottom of the page. Over the years the photographer, who had begun as an apprentice but was no longer a young man, had never had Ruyu change her position, so in all the birthday portraits she sat straight, with her hands folded on her lap. What Shaoai had must be an extra print, as Ruyu’s grandaunts were not the kind of people who would disturb a perfectly ordered album and leave a blank among four corners. Still, the thought that a stranger had kept something of her unsettled Ruyu. She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt.

“You should get some cooler clothes for the summer,” Shaoai said, looking at Ruyu’s long skirt.

In Shaoai’s disapproving look Ruyu saw the same presumptuousness she had detected in the middle-aged women on the train. So the older girl was no different from others—quick to put themselves in a place where they could advise Ruyu about how to live. What separated Ruyu from them, they did not know, was that she had been chosen. What she knew would never be revealed to them: she could see, and see through, them in a way they could not see her, or themselves.

Shaoai was twenty-two, the only daughter of Uncle and Aunt, who were, in some convoluted way Ruyu’s grandaunts had not explained, relatives of the two old women. “Honest people,” her grandaunts had pronounced of the family who had promised to take her in for a year—or, if things worked out, for the next three years, until Ruyu went to college. There were a couple of other families in Beijing, also of remote connections, whom her grandaunts had considered, but both households included boys Ruyu’s age or not much older. In the end, Shaoai and her parents had been chosen to avoid possible inconvenience.

“Do you need a minute to catch your breath?” Shaoai asked, and picked up the trunk and the accordion before Ruyu could reply. She offered to carry one of the items herself, and Shaoai only jerked her chin toward the exit and said she had helpers waiting.

Ruyu was not prepared for the noises and the heat of the city outside the station. The late afternoon sun was a white disc behind the smog, and over loudspeakers a man was reading, in a stern voice, the names and descriptions of fugitives wanted for sabotaging the government earlier that summer. Travelers for whom Beijing was only a connecting stop occupied the available shade under the billboards, and the less lucky ones lay under layers of newspapers. Five women with cardboard signs swarmed toward Shaoai and, with competing voices at high volume, recommended their hostels and shuttle services. Shaoai deftly swung the trunk and the accordion case through the crowd, while Ruyu, who’d hesitated a moment too long, was surrounded by other hawkers. A middle-aged woman in a sleeveless smock grabbed Ruyu’s elbow and dragged her away from the other vendors. Ruyu tried to wiggle her arm free and explain that she was only visiting relatives, but her feeble protest was muffled by the thick fog of noise. In her provincial hometown, rarely would a stranger or an acquaintance come this close to her; when she was younger, her grandaunts’ upright posture and grave expression had protected her from the invasion of the world; later, even when she was not being escorted by them, people would leave her alone in the street or in the marketplace, her grandaunts’ severity recognized and respected in her own unsmiling bearing.

It took Shaoai no time, when she returned, to free Ruyu from the hawkers. Where is my accordion, Ruyu asked when she noticed Shaoai’s empty hands. The accusation stopped Shaoai. With my helpers, of course, she said; why, you think I would abandon your valuable luggage just to rescue someone who has her own legs to run?

Ruyu had never been in a situation where she had to run away; her grandaunts—and in recent years she was aware that she, too—had the ability to make people recede from their paths. As an infant she had been left on the doorstep of a pair of unmarried Catholic sisters, and she was raised by the two women who were not related to her by blood. Like two prophets, her grandaunts had laid out the map of her life for her, that her journey would take her from their small apartment in the provincial city to Beijing and later abroad, where she would find her real and only home in the Church. Outside of the one-bedroom apartment she shared with them, neighbors and schoolteachers and classmates were unnecessarily inquisitive about her life, as though the porridge she ate at breakfast or the mittens dangling from a string around her neck offered clues to a puzzle beyond their understanding. Ruyu had learned to answer their questions with cold etiquette. Still, she despised their ignorance: their lives were to be lived in the dust; hers, with the completeness of purity.

Shaoai’s helpers, waiting in the shade of a building by the roadside, were a boy and a girl. Shaoai introduced them: Boyang, the stout boy with tanned skin who was roping the accordion case to the back rack of his bicycle, had white flashing teeth when he smiled; Moran, the skinny, long-legged girl sitting astride her bicycle, had already secured the willow trunk behind her. They were neighbors, Shaoai said; both were a year older than Ruyu, but she would be in the same grade with them in her new school. Boyang and Moran glanced at the accordion case when school was mentioned, so they must have been informed of the plan. Ruyu did not have legal residence in Beijing; when her grandaunts had first proposed her stay, Uncle and Aunt had written back, explaining that they would absolutely love to help out with Ruyu’s education but that most high schools would not admit a student who did not have city residency. Ruyu is a good musician, her grandaunts replied, and enclosed a copy of the certificate of her passing grade 8 on her accordion. How Uncle and Aunt had convinced the high school—Shaoai’s alma mater—to admit Ruyu on account of her musical talents, Ruyu did not know; her grandaunts, when they had received the letter requiring that the accordion and the original copy of the grade 8 certificate accompany Ruyu to Beijing, had not shown surprise.

That night, Ruyu lay in the bed that she was to share with Shaoai and thought about living in a world where her grandaunts’ presence was not sensed and respected, and for the first time she felt she was becoming the orphan people had taken her to be. Already Beijing made her feel small, but worse than that was people’s indifference to her smallness. On the bus ride from the train station to her new home, a man in a short-sleeved shirt had stood close to Ruyu, and the moment the bus had begun to move, he seemed to press much of his weight on her. She inched away from him, but his weight followed her, imperceptible to the other passengers, for when Ruyu looked at the two middle-aged women sitting in a double seat in front of her, hoping for some help, the two women—strangers, judging from how they did not talk or smile at each other—turned their faces away and looked at the shops out the window. The predicament would have lasted longer if it hadn’t been for Shaoai, who, after purchasing their tickets from the conductor, had pushed through the crowd and, as though reaching for the back of a seat to steady herself, squeezed an arm between the man and Ruyu. Nothing had been said, but perhaps Shaoai had elbowed the man or given him a stern look, or it was simply Shaoai’s presence that had made the man retreat. For the rest of the bus ride Shaoai stood close, a steely presence between Ruyu and the rest of the world. Neither girl spoke, and when it was time for them to get off, Shaoai tapped Ruyu on the shoulder and signaled her to follow while Shaoai pushed through the bodies. The short-sleeved man, Ruyu noticed, fixed his eyes on her face as she moved toward the exit. Even though there were quite a few people between them, Ruyu felt her face burn.

On the sidewalk, Shaoai asked Ruyu if she was too dumb to protect herself. Rarely did Ruyu face an angry person at a close distance; both her grandaunts had equable temperaments, believing any kind of emotional excitability a hurdle to one’s personal improvement. She sighed and turned her eyes away so as not to embarrass Shaoai.

For a split second, Shaoai regretted her eruption—after all, Ruyu was a young girl, a provincial, an orphan raised by eccentric old ladies. Shaoai would have willingly softened, and even apologized, if Ruyu had understood the source of her anger, but the younger girl did not make a gesture either to mollify Shaoai or to defend herself. In Ruyu’s silence, Shaoai sensed a contemptuous extrication. “Haven’t your grandaunts taught you anything useful?” Shaoai said, angrier now, both at Ruyu’s unresponsiveness and at her own temper.

Nothing separated Ruyu more thoroughly from the world than its malignance toward her grandaunts. To ward off people’s criticism of her grandaunts was more than to justify how they had raised her: to defend them was to defend God, who had chosen her to be left at their door. “My grandaunts have taught me more than you could imagine,” Ruyu said. “If you don’t like my coming to stay with your family, I understand. I’m not here for you to like, and my grandaunts are not for you to approve or disapprove of.”

Shaoai had stared at Ruyu for a long moment, and then shrugged as though she no longer was in the mood to argue with Ruyu. When they had reached Shaoai’s home the episode seemed to have been put behind them.

Please—Ruyu folded her hands on her chest—please show me that a big city is nothing compared to you. The bamboo mattress under her was no longer cooling her off, but she refrained from moving to a new spot and stayed on the edge of the bed Shaoai had pointed to as her side. The only window in the room, a small rectangular one high on the wall, admitted little night air, and inside the mosquito netting Ruyu felt her pajamas sticking to her body. A television set, its volume low, was blinking in the living room, though Ruyu doubted that Uncle and Aunt were watching it. For a while they had been talking in whispers, and Ruyu wondered if they had been talking about her or her grandaunts. Please, she said again in her mind, please give me the wisdom to live among strangers until I leave them behind.

Ruyu’s grandaunts had not taught her to pray. Her upbringing had not been a strictly religious one, though her grandaunts had done what they could to give her an education that they had deemed necessary to prepare her for her future reunion with the Church. They themselves had not attended any services since 1957, when the Church was reformed by the Communist Party into the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association; nor did they keep any concrete evidence of their previous spiritual lives. Still, from a young age, Ruyu had understood that what set her apart from other children was not the absence of her parents but the presence of God in her life, which made parents and siblings and playmates and even her grandaunts extraneous. She had begun to talk to him before she entered elementary school. “Our Father in Heaven,” she’d heard her grandaunts say when she had been a small girl, and it was with a conversation with him that Ruyu would end each day, talking to him as a child would talk to an imaginary friend or to herself, a presence at once abstract and solidly comforting. But he was neither a friend nor a part of herself; he belonged to her as much as he belonged to her grandaunts. None of the people she had met so far in Beijing, Ruyu knew, shared with her the secret of his presence: not Uncle and Aunt, who had told her that she was one of the family now and had asked her not to feel shy about making requests; not the neighbors, the five other families who had all come out to the courtyard upon her arrival, talking to her as though they had known her forever, a man teasing her about her accordion, which seemed too big for her narrow shoulders, a woman disapproving of her outfit because it would give her a heat rash in this humid weather; not the boy Boyang or the girl Moran, both of whom were quiet in front of their seniors, but who, Ruyu knew from the looks the two exchanged, had more to say to each other; and not Shaoai, who, queenly in her impatience toward the fuss the neighbors made over the newcomer, had left the courtyard before they had finished welcoming Ruyu.

Please make the time I have to spend with these strangers go fast so that I can come to you soon. She was about to finish the conversation, as usual, with an apology—always she asked too much of him while offering nothing in return—when the front door opened and then banged shut; the metal bell she had seen hanging from the door frame jingled and was hushed right away by someone’s hand. Aunt said something, and then Shaoai, who must have been the one who’d come into the house, replied with some sort of retort, though both talked in low voices, and Ruyu could not hear their exchanges. She looked through the mosquito netting at the curtain that separated the bedroom from the living room—a white floral print on blue cotton fabric—and at the light from the living room creeping into the bedroom from underneath the curtain.

The house, more than a hundred years old, had been built for traditional family life, the center of the house being the living room, the entries between the living room and the bedrooms open, with no doors. The smallest bedroom, no larger than a cubicle and located to the right of the main entrance, was the entire world occupied by Grandpa—Uncle’s father, who had been bedridden for the last five years after a series of strokes. Earlier in the evening, when Aunt had shown Ruyu around the house, she’d raised the curtain quickly for Ruyu to catch a glimpse of the old man lying under a thin, gray blanket, the only life left in his gaunt face a pair of dull eyes that rolled toward Ruyu. He had said something incomprehensible, and Aunt had replied in a loud yet not unkind voice that there was nothing for him to worry about. They were sorry they could not offer Ruyu her own bedroom, Aunt said, and then pointed to the curtain that hid Grandpa and added in a low voice: “Who knows. This room could be vacant any day.”

The bedroom Ruyu was to share with Shaoai was the biggest in the house and used to belong to Uncle and Aunt. Aunt apologized for not having had time to make many changes, besides installing a new student’s desk in the corner of the room. The other bedroom—Shaoai’s old bedroom—was not large enough to accommodate the desk, so it wouldn’t do, Aunt explained, since Ruyu needed her own quiet corner to study. Ruyu mumbled something halfway between an apology and an acknowledgment, though Aunt, flicking dust off the shade of the desk lamp—new also, bought on sale with the desk, she said—did not seem to hear. Ruyu wondered if her grandaunts had considered how their plan for her would change other people’s lives; if they had known anything, they had not told her, and it perplexed her that a small person like herself could cause so much inconvenience. At dinnertime, Shaoai had scoffed when Aunt reminded her to show Ruyu how to clip the mosquito netting, saying that even a child could do that, to which Aunt had replied in an appeasing tone that she just wanted to make sure Ruyu felt informed about her new home. Uncle, reticent, with a sad smile on his face, had come to the dinner table in a threadbare undershirt, but had hurried back to the bedroom when Aunt had frowned at him, and returned in a neatly buttoned shirt. From the expectant looks on Aunt’s and Uncle’s faces, Ruyu knew that the dinner had been prepared for her with extra effort, and, later in the evening, when she fetched water from the wooden bucket next to the kitchen for her washstand, she overheard Uncle comforting Aunt, telling her that perhaps the girl was simply tired from her journey, and Aunt replying that she hoped Ruyu’s appetite would return, as it’s certainly not healthy for a person her age to eat only morsels like a chickadee.

Someone walked close to the bedroom, a shadow looming on the curtain. Ruyu closed her eyes when she recognized Shaoai’s profile. Aunt whispered something to which Shaoai did not reply before entering the bedroom. She stopped in the semidarkness and then turned on the light, a bare bulb hanging low from the ceiling. Ruyu closed her eyes tighter and listened to Shaoai fumble around. After a moment, an electric fan turned on, its droning the only sound in the quietness of the night. The breeze instantly lifted the mosquito netting, and with an exaggerated sigh Shaoai tucked the bottom of the netting underneath the mattress. “You have to be at least a little smarter than the mosquitoes,” she said.

Ruyu did not know if she should apologize and then decided not to open her eyes.

“You shouldn’t wrap yourself up in the blanket,” Shaoai said. “It’s hot.”

After a pause, Ruyu replied that she was all right, and Shaoai did not pursue the topic. She turned off the light and changed in the darkness. When she climbed into the bed from her side and readjusted the mosquito netting, Ruyu regretted that she had not prepared herself by turning away so that her back faced the center of the bed. It was too late now, so she tried to hold her body still and breathe quietly. Please, she said, sensing that she was on Shaoai’s mind, please mask me with your love so they can’t feel my existence.

Later, when Shaoai was asleep, Ruyu opened her eyes and looked at the mosquito netting above her, gray and formless, and listened to the fan swirling. She had been off the train for a few hours now, but still her body could feel the motion, as though it had retained—and continued living—the memory of traveling. There was much to get used to in her new life, a public outhouse at the end of the alleyway Moran had shown her earlier; an outdoor spigot in the middle of the courtyard, where Ruyu had seen Boyang and a few other young men from the quadrangle gather after sunset, topless, splashing cold water onto their upper bodies and taking turns putting their heads under the tap to cool down; a bed shared with a stranger; meals supervised by anxious Aunt. For the first time that day, Ruyu felt homesick for her bed tucked behind an old muslin screen in the foyer of her grandaunts’ one-room apartment.

3

Celia’s message on Ruyu’s voice mail sounded panicked, as though Celia had been caught in a tornado, but Ruyu found little surprise in the emergency. That evening it was Celia’s turn to host ladies’ night. These monthly get-togethers had started as a book club, but, as more books went unfinished and undiscussed, other activities had been introduced—wine tasting, tea tasting, a question-and-answer session with the president of a local real estate agency when the market turned downward, a holiday workshop on homemade soaps and candles. Celia, one of the three founders of the book club, had nicknamed it Buckingham Ladies’ Society, though she used the name only with Ruyu, thinking it might offend people who did not belong to the club, as well as some who did. Not everyone in the book club lived on Buckingham Road. A few of them lived on streets with less prominent names: Kent Road, Bristol Lane, Charing Cross Lane, and Norfolk Way. Properties on those streets were of course more than decent, and children from those houses went to the same school as hers did, but Celia, living on Buckingham, could not help but take pleasure in the subtle difference between her street and the others.

Ruyu wondered if the florist had misinterpreted the color theme Celia had requested, or if the caterer—a new one she was trying out, upon a friend’s recommendation—had failed to meet her expectations. In either case, Ruyu’s presence was urgently needed—could she please come early, Celia had said in the voice mail, pretty please?—not, of course, to right any wrong but to bear witness to Celia’s personal tornado. Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities. Celia’s martyrdom, in most people’s—less than kind—opinion, amounted to nothing but a dramatic self-centeredness, but Ruyu, one of the very few who took Celia’s sacrifice seriously, understood the source of her suffering: Celia, though lapsed, had been brought up by Catholic parents.

Edwin and the boys were off to dinner and then to a Warriors game, Celia told Ruyu when she arrived at the Moorlands’. A robin had flown into a window that morning, knocking itself out and setting off the alarm, Celia said, and thank goodness the window was not broken and Luis—the gardener—was here to take care of the poor bird. The caterer was seventeen minutes late, so wasn’t it wise of her to have changed the delivery time to half an hour earlier? In the middle of recounting an exchange between the deliveryman and herself, Celia stopped abruptly. “Ruby,” she said. “Ruby.”

“Yes,” Ruyu said. “I’m listening.”

Celia came and sat down with Ruyu in the breakfast nook. The table and the benches were made of wood reclaimed from an old Kensington barn where Celia’s grandmother, she liked to tell her visitors, used to go for riding lessons. “You look distracted,” Celia said, pushing a glass of water toward Ruyu.

The woman Celia thought of as Ruby should have unwavering attention as an audience. Ruyu thanked Celia for the water and said that nothing was really distracting her. To Celia’s circle of friends—many of whom would arrive soon—Ruyu was, depending on what was needed, a woman of many possibilities: a Mandarin tutor, a reliable house- and pet-sitter, a last-minute babysitter, a part-time cashier at a confection boutique, an occasional party helper. But her loyalty, first and foremost, belonged to Celia, for it was she who had found Ruyu these many opportunities, including the position at La Dolce Vita, a third-generation family business owned by a high school friend of Celia’s.

Celia did not often notice anything beyond her immediate preoccupation, but sometimes, distraught, she was able to perceive other people’s moods. In those moments she adamantly required an explanation, as though her tenacious urge to know someone else’s suffering offered a way out of her own. Ruyu wondered whether she looked disturbed and wished she had touched up her face before entering the house.

“You are not yourself today,” Celia said. “Don’t tell me you had a tough day. The day is already bad enough for me.”

“Here’s what I have done today: I was in the shop in the morning; I stopped at the dry cleaners; I fed Karen’s cats; I took a walk,” Ruyu said. “Now, tell me how hard my day could be.”

Celia sighed and said that of course Ruyu was right. “You don’t know how I envy you.”

Ruyu had been told this often, and once in a while she almost believed Celia to be sincere. “You sounded dreadful in your voice mail,” Ruyu said. “What happened?”

What happened, Celia said, was pure outrage. She went away and came back with a pair of white T-shirts. Earlier that afternoon she had attended a meeting for the fundraising of a major art festival in San Francisco, and on the committee was a writer whose teen detective mysteries were recent bestsellers. “You’d think it’s not too much to ask a writer to sign a couple of shirts for his fans,” Celia said. “You’d think any decent man would have more respect than this.” She dropped the T-shirts on Ruyu’s lap in disgust, and Ruyu spread them on the table. In black permanent marker and block letters, the writer had written, “To Jake, a future orphan” and “To Lucas, a future orphan,” followed by his unrecognizable signature.

Perhaps the writer had only meant it as a joke, a sabotaging wink to the boys behind their mother’s back; or else it’d been more than a joke, and he’d felt called to reveal an absolute truth that a child did not learn from his parents. “Unacceptable,” Ruyu said, and folded up the shirts.

“Now, what do I do with them? I promised the boys I would get them his signature. How do I explain to them that this person they admire is a jerk? An asshole, really,” Celia said, and gulped down some wine as if to rinse away the bad taste. “Thank goodness Edwin picked them up from school so I didn’t have to deal with this until later.”

Poor gullible Celia, believing, like most people, in a moment called later. Safely removed, later promises possibilities: changes, solutions, rewards, happiness, all too distant to be real, yet real enough to offer relief from the claustrophobic cocoon of now. If only Celia had the strength to be both kind enough and harsh enough with herself to stop talking about later, that heartless annihilator of now. “Exactly what,” Ruyu said, “will you say to them later?”

“That I forgot?” Celia said uncertainly. “What else can I say? Better for your children to be annoyed with you, better for your husband to be disappointed by you, than break anyone’s heart. I’ll tell you, Ruby, it’s smart of you not to have children. Smarter of you to not want another husband. Stay where you are. Sometimes I think about how simple and beautiful your life is—and that, I say to myself, is how a woman should treat herself.”

Had Celia been a different person, Ruyu might have found her words distasteful, malicious even, but Celia, being Celia, and never doubting the truth of her own words, was as close to a friend as Ruyu would admit into her life. She unfolded the shirts and studied the handwriting, and asked Celia if she had another pair of white T-shirts. Why? Celia asked, and Ruyu said that they might as well fix the problem themselves. You don’t mean it, Celia said, and Ruyu replied that indeed she did. What’s wrong with borrowing the writer’s name and making two boys happy?

Celia hesitantly offered another set of T-shirts, and Ruyu asked Celia what message she wanted her children to wear to school.

“Are you sure this is the right thing to do? I don’t want my children to think I lie to them.”

The writer, Ruyu wanted to remind Celia, had not lied. “I’m the one lying here,” she said. “Look away.”

“What if the other kids at school realize that the signatures are fake? Is it even legal to do this?”

“There are worse crimes,” Ruyu said. Before Celia could protest, Ruyu wrote, in her best approximation of the writer’s handwriting, a message of hope and affection to the beloved Jake and Lucas. After signing and dating the shirts, Ruyu folded them and said she would get rid of the original evidence to spare Celia any wrongdoing.

A car engine was heard outside the house; another car door opened and then closed. Celia’s guests were arriving, and she assumed the nervous, high-pitched energy of onstage-ness. Ruyu waved for Celia to go and greet her guests. She stuffed the two unwanted T-shirts in her bag, went into the boys’ bedrooms, and placed the ones she’d signed on their pillows.

The evening’s topic was a recent bestseller written by a woman who called herself a “Chinese tiger mom.” As always the gathering started with the exchange about children and husbands and family vacations and coming holiday recitals and performances. Ruyu drifted in and out of the living room, refilling wineglasses and passing out food, her position somewhere between a family friend and a hired hand. Affable with the guests, many of whom used her service in one way or another, Ruyu nevertheless stayed out of conversations, contributing only an encouraging smile or a courteous exclamation. Knowing how the women saw her, Ruyu did not find it difficult to play that role: an educated immigrant with no advanced job skills; a single woman no longer young; a renter; a hire trustworthy enough, good and firm with dogs and children alike and never flirtatious with husbands; a woman lucky to have been taken under Celia’s wing; a bore.

When the book discussion began, Ruyu withdrew to the kitchen. At most gatherings she would not have absented herself so completely, as she did enjoy sitting on the periphery. She liked to listen to the women’s voices without following what they said, and look at their soft-hued scarves, their necklaces designed by a local artist they patronized as a group, and their shoes, elegant or bold or unself-consciously ugly. To be where she was, to be what she was, suited her. One would have to take oneself much more seriously to be someone definite—to pose as a complete outsider; or to claim the right to be a friend, a lover, a person of consequence. Intimacy and alienation both required an effort beyond Ruyu’s willingness.

Celia stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. “Don’t you want to sit with us?” she asked. Ruyu shook her head, and Celia waved before walking away to the bathroom. If Celia pressed her again, Ruyu would say that the topics of parenting, school options for children, and the tiger mom—who was not even Chinese but called herself Chinese for sensational reasons—held little interest for her.

Ruyu studied the flowers on the table, an assortment of daisies and irises and fall leaves arranged in a half pumpkin, around which a few persimmons had been artfully placed. She moved one persimmon farther away and wondered if anyone would notice the interfered-with composition, less balanced now. Celia’s life, busy and fluid with all sorts of commitments and crises, was nevertheless an exhibition of mindfully designed flawlessness: the high, arched windows of her home overlooked the bay, inviting into the living room an ever-changing light—golden Californian sunshine in the summer afternoons, gray rain light in the winter, morning and evening fog all year round; the three silver birch trees in front of the house—birch, Celia had told Ruyu, must be planted in clusters of three, though why she did not know—complemented the facade with their white bark, adding asymmetry to the otherwise tedious front lawn; the shining modernness of the kitchen was softened by a perfect display of still lifes—fruits, flowers, earthen jars, candles in holders, their colors in harmony with seasons and holidays; and the many corners in the house, each its own stage, showcased a lonely cast of things inherited or collected on this or that trip. Celia’s family, always on the run—soccer practice, music lessons, pottery classes, yoga, fundraising parties, school auctions, trips to ski, to hike, to swim in the ocean, to immerse in foreign cultures and cuisines—had done a good job of leaving the house undisturbed, and Ruyu, perhaps more than anyone else, enjoyed the house as one would appreciate a beautiful object: one finds random pleasure in it, yet one does not experience any desire to possess it, or any pain when it passes out of one’s life.

From the living room, the women’s voices meandered from indignation to doubt to worry to panic. Over the past few years Ruyu had got to know each of the women, through these gatherings and working for some of them, well enough to pity them when they had to come into a group. None of them was uninteresting, but together they seemed to negate one another’s individual existence by their predictability. Never did anyone show up disheveled, never did any one of them dare to admit to the others that she was lonely, or sad, or suffocated under the perfect facade of a good life. It must be the isolation that sent them to seek out others like them, but in Celia’s living room, sitting together, the women seemed only more bravely isolated.

Ruyu had first met Celia seven years ago, when Celia had been looking for a replacement for their live-in nanny, who was returning to Guatemala with enough money to build two houses—one for her parents, and one for herself and her daughter. Of course it crushed her heart that Ana Luisa had to leave, Celia had said when she called Ruyu, who had replied to Celia’s ad on a local parenting website; but wouldn’t anyone feel happy for her? Ruyu had been an oddity among the more ordinary applicants—she had no previous child-care experience, and she lived rather out of the way. But having a Mandarin-speaking nanny would be an advantage over having one who spoke Spanish, Celia had explained to Edwin before she called Ruyu.

She did not have a car, Ruyu had said when Celia invited Ruyu to the house for an interview, and there was no public transportation where she lived, so could Celia, if interested, drive down to interview her? Later, when Ruyu was securely placed in Celia’s life, Celia liked to tell her friends how wonderfully clueless Ruyu had been. Who, if not Celia, would have driven one and a half hours to meet a potential nanny?

Why indeed had she agreed, Ruyu wanted to ask Celia sometimes, but the answer was not important, as what mattered was that Celia did go out of her way to meet Ruyu, and—this Ruyu had never doubted—if not Celia, there would be someone else willing to do the same.

When Celia arrived at Ruyu’s cottage, which, with its own garden and views of the canyon, would have been called “a gem” in a real estate ad, Celia could not hide her surprise and dismay. There was no way she could afford Ruyu, she said; all she had was an au pair’s suite on the first floor of her house.

But that would suit her well, Ruyu said, and explained that her employer was getting married in a few months, and she would like to move away before the wedding, since there was no reason for her to stay on as his housekeeper. Celia, Ruyu could see, was baffled by the relationship between the cottage and the three-storied colonial on the estate, which Celia must have seen while driving past—as well as that between Ruyu and Eric, whom Ruyu only referred to as her employer.

Curious, Celia later described the Chinese woman to Edwin; peculiar even, but all the same she was pleasant, clean, spoke perfect English, and deserved some help. Ruyu had not talked about the exact nature of her relationship with her employer, but Celia had guessed rightly that sex, with an agreement, was part of the employment. About other things in her background, Ruyu had been open with Celia during that first meeting: she had married her first husband at nineteen, a Chinese man who had been admitted to an American graduate school; she’d married him to leave China. Her second marriage, to an American, was to get herself a green card, which her first husband would have eventually helped her get, but she did not want to stay in the marriage for the five or six years it would have taken. She’d earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from a state university and had worked on and off but never really built a career, which was fine with her because she did not like numbers or money. For the past three years, she’d been working as a housekeeper for her employer, and she was looking forward to moving on—no, she didn’t mean to marry again, Ruyu had said when Celia, out of curiosity, asked her if she was going to look for another husband; what she wanted, Ruyu said, was to find a job to support herself.

When Celia called again, a week later, she did not offer Ruyu the nanny position but said that she had found a cottage, furnished, which would be available for three months during the summer. Would Ruyu be open to taking it—she’d have to pay the three months’ rent up front—and working for Celia on a part-time basis? She would be happy to help Ruyu settle down, find her another cottage after the summer, and refer her to a few other families who could use Ruyu here and there. Without hesitation Ruyu had said yes.

The garage door opened, the noise reminding Ruyu of the immodest grumbling from inside one’s stomach. She was fascinated, even after years in America, by the intimate contract that sound confirmed: a door opens and then closes, yet through it neither departure nor arrival is damagingly permanent. Sitting in Celia’s kitchen and listening to her husband’s return, Ruyu allowed herself, for a brief moment, to imagine the possibility of such a life. Not a difficult task, in fact, as two men among the people of the world had offered her that—yet in the end, she was the one who had left. Had she stayed in either marriage she would have had to become one of those women in the living room, and the thought amused her. “Your problem,” Eric had said when she informed him of her moving plan only after finalizing it with Celia, “is that you don’t want enough. Though I suppose that also means things will always work out for you.”

Eric had been wise not to over-offer, as her two ex-husbands had, but he did indulge her, granting her all the space she needed, and making clear she should never feel bound in any way to him. Sometimes she wondered if, for that reason, she should have treated him better. But how does one treat a man better—by becoming more dependent on him, by asking more from him? All the same, what was the point of thinking of that now? A few years ago, Eric had made the local news for his involvement in a fundraising scandal during his campaign for assemblyman—so much for his wanting more.

Celia, who must have been listening also, took leave of the discussion and told Ruyu to show the T-shirts to the boys, her pitch a bit high because, Ruyu knew, of her nervousness about lying to her family. It was in these moments that Ruyu felt a tenderness toward Celia, who, despite her constant need for attention and her petty competition with her friends and neighbors, was, in the end, a woman with a good and weak heart.

A while later, with the boys in bed, Edwin came into the kitchen. In the living room, the women were still arguing about the best way to bring up a child to be competitive in a global market. A heated discussion today, he commented, and touched the stem of a wine glass before changing his mind. He poured water for himself.

Certainly Celia had chosen the right book, Ruyu said, and moved to the sink before Edwin sat down at the table. “I’ll start to put things away,” she said. “Celia has had a long day.”

Edwin asked if he could help, though Ruyu could tell it was a halfhearted offer. Probably all he wanted was for the women debating the future of American education to vacate his house. There was not much she needed him to do, Ruyu said. Edwin kept the conversation going, talking about trivialities—the Warriors’ win that night, a new movie Celia was talking about going to see that weekend, the Moorlands’ Thanksgiving plans, a bizarre report in the paper about a man impersonating a doctor and prescribing his only patient, an older woman, a regimen of eating watermelons in a hot tub. Ruyu wondered if Edwin was talking to her out of a sense of charity; she wished she could tell him that it was okay for him to treat her, at this or any other moment, like a piece of furniture or appliance in his well-kept house.

Edwin worked for a company that specialized in electronic books and toys for early childhood learning. Though Ruyu did not know what exactly he did—it had something to do with creating certain characters appealing to the minds of toddlers—she wondered if Edwin, a tall and quiet man born and raised in the Minnesota countryside, would have been better off as a sympathetic family physician or a brilliant yet awkward mathematician. To spend one’s workdays thinking about talking caterpillars and singing bears seemed diminishing for a man like Edwin, but perhaps it was a good choice, the same way Celia was a good choice of wife for him.

“Things are well with you?” Edwin asked when he ran out of topics.

“How can they not be?” Ruyu replied. There was not much in her life that was worth inquiring about, the general topics of children and jobs and family vacations not an option in her case.

Edwin brooded over his water glass. “You must find their discussion strange,” he said, pointing his chin at the living room.

“Strange? Not at all,” Ruyu said. “The world needs enthusiastic women. Too bad I am not one of them.”

“But do you want to be one?”

“You either are one, or you are not,” Ruyu said. “It has nothing to do with wanting.”

“Do they bore you?”

She would not, if asked, have considered Edwin or Celia or any of her friends a bore, but that was because she had never really taken a moment to think about what Edwin, or Celia, or anyone else for that matter, was. Edwin’s face, never overly expressive, seemed particularly vague at the moment. Ruyu rarely allowed her interaction with him to progress beyond pleasantries, as there was something about Edwin that she could not see through right away. He did not speak enough to make himself a fool, yet what he did say made one wonder why he didn’t say more. Had he been no one’s husband she would have taken a closer look, but any impingement on Celia’s claim would be a pointless complication.

After a long pause, which Celia would have readily filled with many topics, and which Edwin seemed patient enough to wait through, Ruyu said, “Only a bore would find other people boring.”

“Do you find them interesting, then?”

“Many of them hire me,” Ruyu said. “Celia is a friend.”

“Of course,” Edwin said. “I forgot that.”

What was it he had forgotten—that the women in the living room provided more than half of Ruyu’s livelihood, or that his own wife was the angel who’d made such a miracle happen? Ruyu placed the plates in the dishwasher. She wished that Edwin would stop feeling obligated to keep her company while she played the role of half hostess in his house. In the cottage, she cooked on a hot plate and ate standing by the kitchen counter, and the dish drain, left by a previous renter, was empty and dry most of the time. In Celia’s house Ruyu enjoyed lining up the plates and cups and glasses, which, unlike people, did not seek to crack and break their own lives. When she continued in silence, Edwin asked if he had offended her.

“No,” she sighed.

“But do you think we take you for granted?”

“Who? You and Celia?”

“Everyone here,” Edwin said.

“People are taken for granted all the time,” Ruyu said. Every one of the women in the living room would have a long list of complaints about being taken for granted. “I’m not a unique case who needs special attention.”

“But we complain.”

Ruyu turned and looked at Edwin. “Go ahead and complain,” she said. “But don’t expect me to do it.”

Edwin blushed. Do not expose your soul uninvited, she would have said if Edwin were no one’s husband, but instead she apologized for her abruptness. “Don’t mind what I said,” she said. “Celia said I wasn’t my right self today.”

“Is anything the matter?”

“Someone I used to know died,” Ruyu said, feeling malicious because she would not have told this to Celia even if she were ten times as persistent.

Edwin said he was sorry to hear the news. Ruyu knew he would like to ask more questions; Celia would have been chasing every detail, but Edwin seemed uncertain, as though intimidated by his own curiosity. “It’s all right,” Ruyu said. “People die.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“No one can do anything. She’s dead already,” Ruyu said.

“I mean, can we do something for you?”

Superficial kindness was offered every day, innocuous if pointless, so why, Ruyu thought, couldn’t she give Edwin credit for being a good-mannered person with an automatic response to the news of a death that did not concern him? She had only known the deceased for a short time, she said, trying to mask her impatience with a yawn.

“Still—” Edwin hesitated, looking at the water.

“Still what?”

“You look sad.”

Ruyu felt an unfamiliar anger. What right did Edwin have to look in her for the grief he wanted to be there? “I don’t have the right to feel that way. See, I am a real bore. Even when someone dies, I can’t claim the tragedy,” Ruyu said. Abruptly she changed the topic, asking if the boys were excited to see the T-shirts signed for them.

Edwin seemed disappointed, and shrugged and said it mattered more to Celia than to the boys. “Mothers, you know?” he said. “By the way, did you grow up with a tiger mom?”

“No.”

“What do you think of this fuss, then?”

If only she could, as was called for by the situation, say something witty—but rolling one’s eyes and saying witty things were as foreign to her as eight-year-old Jake’s contempt for his friend’s family, who ate the wrong kind of salmon; or Celia’s fretting over their Christmas lights, lest they seem too flashy or too modest. The freedom to act and the freedom to judge, undermining each other, amount to little more than a well-stocked source of anxiety. Is that why, Ruyu wondered, Americans so willingly make themselves smaller—by laughing at others, or, more tactfully, at themselves—when there is no immediate danger to hide from? But danger in the form of poverty and flying bullets and lawless states and untrustworthy friends provides, if not a route to happiness, at least clarity to one’s suffering.

Ruyu looked harshly at Edwin. “I don’t think,” she said, “it is a worthwhile subject.”

4

Midsummer in Beijing, its extreme heat and humidity occasionally broken by a relieving thunderstorm, gave the impression that life today would be that of tomorrow, and the day after, until forever: the watermelon rinds accumulated at the roadside would go on rotting and attracting swarms of flies; murky puddles in the alleyways from overspilled sewers dwindled, but before they entirely disappeared another storm would replenish them; old men and women, sitting next to bamboo perambulators in the shadows of palace walls, cooled down their grandchildren with giant fans woven of sedge leaves, and if one closed one’s eyes and opened them again one could almost believe that the fans and the babies and the wrinkle-faced grandparents were the same ones from a hundred years ago, captured by a rare photograph in the traveling album of a foreign missionary, who would eventually be executed for spreading evil in a nearby province.

Life, already old, did not age. It was this Beijing, with its languid mood, that Moran loved the most, though she worried it meant little to Ruyu, who seemed to look at both the city and Moran’s enthusiasm askance. Moran tried to see Beijing for the first time with a newcomer’s eyes and felt a moment of panic: perhaps there was nothing poetic in the noises and smells, in the uncleanness and over-crowdedness of the city. When we place our beloved in front of the critical eyes of others, we feel diminished along with the subject being scrutinized. Had Moran been a more experienced person, had she mastered the skill of self-protection, she would have easily masked her love with a cynical or at least distant attitude. Tactless in her youth, she could only corner herself with hope that turned into despair.

“Of course none of them is really a sea,” Moran said apologetically as she leaned her bicycle on a willow tree and sat next to Ruyu on a bench. They were on the waterfront of the Western Sea, a manmade lake, and Moran had pointed out the direction of the other seas: the Back Sea, the Front Sea, and the Northern Sea, to which Boyang and Moran had taken Ruyu the day before, as it was one of the essential places for a tourist to visit. In the past week they had taken Ruyu to temples and palaces, as they would have shown the city to a cousin from out of town.

“Why are they called seas, then?” Ruyu asked. She was not interested in the answer, yet she knew that each question granted her some power over the people she questioned. She liked to watch others feeling obliged, and sometimes more foolishly, elated, to answer her: people do not know that the moment they respond they put themselves on a stand for their interrogators to judge.

“Maybe because Beijing is not next to the ocean?” Moran said, though without any certainty.

Ruyu nodded, feeling lenient enough not to point out that Moran’s words made little sense. Within days of her arrival, Ruyu knew that Moran had been placed in her new life because of the convenience such a person would provide, though that did not stop her from wishing that Moran could be kept at a distance, or did not exist at all.

“Have you ever been to the seaside?” Moran asked.

“No.”

“Neither have I,” Moran said. “I would like to see the ocean someday. Boyang and his family go every summer.”

This was so like Moran, Ruyu thought, offering information when no one asked her to. The flowers every family kept on windowsills, Moran had explained to Ruyu when she’d caught Ruyu looking at the blossoms the morning after her arrival, were geraniums, and they were known to expel bugs. The two magnolia trees at the center of the courtyard were at least fifty years old, planted as “husband and wife” trees for good fortune. In late summer everyone would watch out for wasps because the grapevines Teacher Pang cultivated at the end of the courtyard were known for their juicy grapes. The pomegranate tree by the fence, which was now dropping heavy-petaled, fire-colored blossoms, did not bear edible fruit, though a tree in the next quadrangle, which was not blooming quite as well, produced the sweetest pomegranates. She’d explained each family’s background: Teacher Pang and his wife, Teacher Li, were both elementary school teachers, and they had agreed not to work in the same school or district because it would have been boring to be around the same people all the time; only the youngest of their three children was still in school, the older two having jobs at factories, but all three lived at home. Old Shu, a widower whose children had all married, lived with his mother, who would turn a hundred next summer. Watermelon Wen, a loud and happy bus driver, had earned his nickname because he had a round belly; he and his wife, an equally loud and round trolley conductor, had a pair of twin boys not yet in school. Sometimes their mother would not differentiate them and called them both Little Watermelon. Moran’s own parents worked in the Ministry of Mines, her father a researcher and her mother a clerk.

Only stupid people, in the opinion of Ruyu’s grandaunts, would freely dispense what little knowledge they possessed; at times even teachers were not exempted from that category. Ruyu had always found the world a predictable place, as it was filled with people who would, with words and actions, confirm her grandaunts’ convictions of the smallness of any mortal mind.

Ruyu watched Moran weave a few willow leaves into a sailboat and release it into the water. Foolishly occupied, she could hear her grandaunts comment. “Why don’t you go with Boyang to the seaside?” she asked.

Moran laughed. “I’m not part of his family.”

Ruyu gazed at Moran, as though she was waiting for the latter to defend her shoddy logic with more sensible words, and Moran realized that perhaps family meant something different for Ruyu. Before her arrival, Moran and Boyang had talked between themselves, but neither knew what it was like to be an orphan. Years ago, when Teacher Pang and Teacher Li had purchased the first black-and-white television set of the quadrangle, the residents used to gather in their house for any kind of entertainment. Once there was a movie about the famine in Henan province, in which a girl, who had lost both parents, walked to the crossroads and stuck a long stem of grass in her hair, indicating to the passersby that she was for sale. Moran was six then, the same age as the girl in the movie, and she was so impressed by the lofty calmness of the orphan on screen that she started to cry. What a kindhearted girl, the elders in the quadrangle had commented, not knowing that Moran had cried out of the shame of being an inferior person: she would never be as beautiful and strong as that orphan.

Moran had thought often about the movie before Ruyu’s arrival. Did Ruyu know anything about her parents at all, Moran had wondered; was she the kind of girl who would sit at a crossroads, waiting to be purchased with a contemptuous smile against her orphan’s fate? What Aunt said of Ruyu’s grandaunts and her upbringing was vague, and it was hard for Moran to imagine Ruyu’s life. Boyang, though, had brushed off the perplexity easily, as Moran had known he would.

“What I mean is—” Moran explained now. “It’s his family tradition to go to the seaside in the summer.”

“Why doesn’t your family go?”

If only Boyang were here, Moran thought, he would have poked fun at his parents and at himself for their being a vacationing family. None of the other families Moran knew vacationed—people only traveled when they had to, for weddings and funerals and other emergencies. The concept of moving life elsewhere for a week or two sounded pretentious, done only by idle foreigners in imported movies. “Different families have different ways,” Moran said. Still, she could not help but feel a regret that she had never traveled outside Beijing. In fact, being one of the inner-city children, she could count on one hand the times she had been to the outer districts—a spring field trip in middle school to the Great Wall by train, a few bicycle outings with Boyang that consisted of riding for two or three hours to a temple or a creek, picnicking, and then riding back. “Do you and your grandaunts take vacations?” Moran asked, and at once noticed frostiness in Ruyu’s eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry to be nosy.”

Ruyu nodded forgivingly yet did not say anything. She had never doubted her rights to question others, but to allow another person to ask her a question was to grant that person a status that he or she did not deserve: Ruyu knew that she answered to no one but her grandaunts and, beyond them, God himself.

It was the first time Moran had spent time alone with Ruyu, and already she had made mistakes that alienated Ruyu. Again Moran wished that Boyang were there to redirect the conversation. But it was Sunday, and on Sundays Boyang visited his parents, both professors at a university on the west side of the city, where they had a nice apartment near campus. Their daughter, Boyang’s sister, was ten years older than he. She had been a child genius, and after a total of three years in high school and college, she had won a scholarship to study with a Nobel laureate in America, and now, a few months short of turning twenty-six, she had already been granted tenure as a physics professor. “University of California, Berkeley,” Boyang’s parents had explained to the neighbors during a rare visit to the quadrangle to spread the news, their enunciation of each syllable agonizing Moran. She knew that in their eyes, her parents and others were people with inferior intelligence and negligible ambitions. Even Boyang, the smartest boy Moran knew, they considered insignificant compared to his sister. Moran sometimes wondered whether his parents had wanted him in the first place, as he had been raised, since birth, by his paternal grandmother, a longtime resident of the quadrangle; he had not had a chance to get to know his sister before she was sent off to America, nor was he close to his parents, whom he visited every Sunday, eating two meals alongside them and sometimes doing housework that required a young man’s strength.

Four boys under ten walked past Ruyu and Moran and splashed into the water, all of them naked to the waist, the two youngest wearing inner tubes around their slippery bodies. “Do you swim?” Moran asked, glad for the distraction.

“No.”

“Maybe I can teach you. This is the best spot for winter swimming. Boyang and I haven’t been able to get permission to swim here past autumn equinox. In a few years, though, I’m sure we will, and by then you will be more comfortable swimming. When we are old enough—eighteen, I’m thinking, or twenty—we can all come for the swimming festival on the winter solstice.”

Swifts skimmed the water’s surface with their sharp tails; cicadas trilled in the willow trees. A man pedaled a flatbed tricycle along the lakefront road, singing out the brand names of beers he kept on chunks of ice, and was stopped here and there by a child running out of an alley with money in his raised hand, sent to buy a bottle or two for his elders. It was the peak of summer, and the heat had not abated in the late afternoon, yet Moran spoke of winter, and the winters to come, with the same ease with which one would speak of going home for supper. Even odder was Moran’s confidence—Ruyu had noticed the same confidence in Boyang, too—when speaking of a future in which Ruyu was included. That she was here—staying in Aunt’s house, attending the high school in which Boyang and Moran took great pride—had been made possible by her grandaunts, who had made her understand before her departure that in truth this relocation was God’s plan for her, as it had been his plan for her to be cared for by them. That she was here by the lake … No doubt Moran would think of it as her own doing, as she’d been the one to ride the bicycle with Ruyu on the back, and she’d been the one to decide that, rather than going to a movie or to a nearby store for an ice pop, they were to come to her and Boyang’s favorite place, a sea that was no more than a pond.

With both vexation and curiosity, Ruyu turned and studied Moran, who was pointing at the silhouette of a dwarf temple on top of the hill, behind which the sun was starting to set. There used to be ten temples around the area, and the three seas had been called the “Ten-Temple Seas,” though Boyang and Moran had found only three remaining temples. “That one is dedicated to the goddess governing water,” Moran said, and when Ruyu did not say anything, she turned and found herself facing a quizzical gaze. “I’m sorry, did I bore you with all this talk?”

Ruyu shook her head.

“Sometimes my mother worries that I’m too talkative and no decent man will marry me,” Moran said and laughed.

Ruyu had noticed that Moran laughed more than smiled; this gave her face a look of open silliness, which seemed better suited to the role of a big sister or an older aunt. “Why don’t you have any siblings?” Ruyu asked.

Theirs had been the last generation born before the single-child policy had begun, and many of Moran’s classmates, and probably many of Ruyu’s old schoolmates, too, had siblings. Perhaps Ruyu was asking only because it was not often that she met an only child. Humbly, Moran admitted that she did not know why, but then added that hers was not an unusual case; Sister Shaoai was also an only child.

“Do you want a sibling?”

It must have been the orphan in Ruyu who was asking these questions; it was rare that Ruyu spoke so much—around the quadrangle she was always quiet. “We’re all close,” Moran said. “You’ll see, we are like siblings in the quadrangle. For instance, Boyang and I grew up like a brother and a sister.”

“But he has his own sister.”

She was older, Moran explained. She was almost from a different generation.

“Why does he not live with his parents?” Ruyu asked.

“I don’t know,” Moran said. “I think it’s because they’re very busy with their work.”

“But his sister lived with their parents before she went to America?”

“It was a different case with her,” Moran said, feeling uneasy, afraid of saying the wrong things about Boyang and his family. Already she felt she was betraying him in some way that she could not understand. He preferred not to talk about his parents, and his grandmother spoke of Boyang’s uncles and aunts who lived in other cities more than she talked about Boyang’s father, her eldest son. Moran wondered if the family harbored an unsavory past, though she would never ask, as seeking an answer to her curiosity would make her less worthy of Boyang’s friendship.

“How so? Is he not their child by blood?”

“Of course he’s their biological child,” Moran said, worried that by simply speaking such truths she was compromising her best friend.

“Why ‘of course’?”

Taken aback, first by Ruyu’s insensible calmness and then by her own stupidity, Moran fell into a profound bewilderment. Growing up in the quadrangle was like growing up with an extended family, and nothing made her happier than loving everyone unreservedly. Certainly she had heard tales about neighbors in other quadrangles who did not get along and sabotaged one another’s life: uprooting newly cultivated flowers, adding extra salt to a neighbor’s dish where a kitchen was shared, swiping a frozen chicken left on a windowsill overnight in the winter, making unpleasant faces and noises to frighten small children the moment their parents turned away. These stories baffled Moran, as she could not see what people would gain from such pettiness. In the last year of middle school some of the girls in Moran’s class had become cruel, trapping other girls—the pretty ones, the sensitive ones, and the lonely ones—with a net of mean-spirited rumors. If there had been any harm intended for her—and there must have been at times, though Moran had Boyang, best friends for as long as either remembered—she’d hardly ever considered herself in a vulnerable position. Even within a family, people could behave viciously toward one another; the evening newspapers offered abundant evidence with their tales of domestic conflicts and unspeakable crimes. Still, for Moran, the world was a good place, and she believed that it would be a good place for Ruyu now that she was their friend. Yet the ease with which Ruyu had raised the possibility of deceit and abandonment regarding Boyang’s upbringing dispirited Moran, as though she, unprepared, had failed an important test to win Ruyu’s respect.

“Are you offended?” Ruyu asked.

Might it be natural for someone like Ruyu to doubt everything? Right away Moran felt ashamed of her own unfriendly quietness. “No, not at all. It’s only that I’m not used to the way you ask questions,” she said.

“How do other people ask questions?”

At least their conversation was not taking place in the quadrangle. Anyone overhearing them would think Ruyu unnaturally childish for her age, and, even if no one would admit it, Moran knew that a connection would be readily made between Ruyu’s background and her lack of tact. With a maternal patience, Moran explained to Ruyu that normally one did not ask questions that would cause others discomfort; in fact, she continued, one did not start a conversation by asking questions but waited for the other person to talk about herself.

“What if people won’t tell you anything about themselves?” Ruyu said.

“When people are your friends, they will tell you things. And when you’re with friends, you can also tell them about yourself,” Moran said. She wished Ruyu could understand that neither she nor Boyang would press Ruyu about her past. The truth was, Moran had believed—even before Ruyu’s arrival—that no matter what kind of a past Ruyu had, once she lived among them, she would become less of an orphan.

Ruyu watched a bug move on the water, its slender limbs leaving barely perceptible traces. For a brief moment she found the insect interesting, but when she turned her eyes away, she forgot about it. “Why is Sister Shaoai always angry?” she asked. “She hates me being here, doesn’t she?”

Moran looked agonized. “No, she doesn’t. She’s just upset at the moment.”

Ruyu looked back at the water, but the bug was gone. She did not know the name of the insect; in fact, she had never spent much time looking at any bug, bird, or tree. Her grandaunts lived strictly indoors and only left the apartment when necessary; their home, pristinely kept, did not participate in the holidays with decorations of any kind, or in the seasons with plants on the windowsills; thick curtains, always drawn, kept the weather at a distance.

When Ruyu did not question further, Moran felt pained. She wished she could explain better to Ruyu Shaoai’s situation: she had been active in the democratic protest early in the summer and was waiting for her verdict, which she’d learn once school started. She hadn’t been a leader in the protest but would nevertheless face disciplinary action from the university; nobody knew whether this would be a general or a severe “political warning,” a suspension of her university study, or, worse, expulsion. Moran’s parents, when they talked about Shaoai, worried that her dismissiveness about her future would not help her; they did not say much, but Moran knew that they, and other neighbors too, wished Shaoai would recant the statement she had posted on the school bulletin board the day after the massacre, calling the government a breeding farm of fascists. But these things, Moran’s parents had warned her, were not to be discussed outside their house.

Moran turned around instinctively, but apart from a few pedestrians farther off on the sidewalk, she did not see any suspicious loiterers eavesdropping on them. “I know Sister Shaoai looks unfriendly sometimes,” she said. “But trust me, she is a good person.”

People asked her to trust them all the time, Ruyu thought, as though it never occurred to them that by so pleading, they had already proved themselves untrustworthy. Her grandaunts had never asked her to trust them, and, unfamiliar with the concept, she had once been deceived by the use of the phrase: a girl in first grade had often begged to be taken to her apartment; her grandaunts did not like visitors, Ruyu had explained, but the girl had pleaded to be trusted and promised not to tell a soul about the visit. After a while Ruyu had acquiesced, yet the day after the visit everyone in the class seemed to have learned something about her home, and even a couple of teachers came to ask her about her grandaunts’ books. But to have been betrayed by someone unworthy was less humiliating than having perturbed her grandaunts. They had waited for a few days before saying, as though making a passing comment, that they did not much care for the friend Ruyu had brought home. After that Ruyu had never allowed herself to be befriended by anyone.

“How can you be certain that Sister Shaoai is a good person?” Ruyu said.

Moran watched the boys splashing in the lake. It agonized her that she could not make Ruyu see the real Shaoai: when Moran and Boyang had been the boys’ age, Shaoai had been the one to take them to the lake, throwing them into deeper water to make them paddle, laughing at them when they swallowed water, yet all the time she had been within an arm’s reach. Even if Shaoai was not a nurturing kind of person, both Moran and Boyang knew her to be a reliable friend. “Have you heard the saying that the longer a road is, the more one is to learn about a horse’s stamina; the more time passes, the better one gets to see another person’s heart?” Moran said. “I think by and by you will know Sister Shaoai better.”

Ruyu smiled. Why would I, the thin smile said, want to know Shaoai better? Moran’s face turned red: the wordless dismissal, not of herself but of someone she respected and admired, made her more diffident in front of Ruyu than ever.

“When are we going back?” Ruyu said, indicating the setting sun.

Moran was disappointed with herself. She knew Ruyu did not trust her. Why should she? Moran thought as she pedaled her bicycle through an alley, so used to Ruyu’s weight on the rear rack that for a moment she forgot that it was her usual habit to chatter on while pedaling Ruyu around. Moran did not like unfinished conversations; for her, life was a series of ideal moments, all comprehensible, sometimes with small difficulties but always with a larger dose of joy. She did not like finding herself in a murky situation which she could not explain to another person, yet there was the loyalty toward Shaoai, whose trouble Moran had been told to keep to herself. If she stopped pedaling and better clarified Shaoai’s anger, would Ruyu understand it?

5

When Moran’s phone rang early Saturday morning, she dreaded taking the call, and listened while the answering machine clicked on. No message was left, and a minute later, the phone rang again. It was not yet six o’clock, too early for anything but calamity. Moran picked up the call and heard both her parents’ voices on the other end, and for a moment she could not concentrate while her mother talked about trivialities. “And you,” her father said when her mother seemed to have run out of small talk. “How are you?”

“Good.”

“Your voice sounds hoarse,” her mother said. “Did you catch a cold?”

“Only dry,” Moran said. “I was sleeping.”

“Listen,” her father said, and Moran felt a twinge of panic, as he was one who preferred listening to being listened to. “We’re sorry to be calling so early. But we just heard that Shaoai passed away ten days ago.”

Moran asked her parents to hold on for a second, and closed the bedroom door. She lived alone in a rental, and she was used to—and she was certain her house was also used to her—carrying out a life filled with everyday noises but not human conversations. Beyond the closed door was the uncluttered space where, other than a few pieces of impersonal furniture from IKEA, a small collection of objects kept her company: a single silver vase, to which she often forgot to offer flowers; a pair of metal bookends shaped like an old man in a top hat and billowing raincoat, bending low on his cane; a stack of handmade paper, thick, sepia-toned, too beautiful to write on; and a reproduction of a Modigliani painting—a portrait of a certain Mme. Zborowska, whose eyes, under heavy, sleepy lids, looked almost blind in their pupil-less darkness. None of these objects had come into Moran’s life with specific meanings; she had picked them up here and there while traveling, and had allowed herself to form an attachment to them because they were only souvenirs of places that did not belong to her, which she would never see again. In return, by quietly closing the door, she protected these things she loved from the intrusion of an early morning phone call. Later she would not once think of them as burdened witnesses of a death from a distant past.

“We thought you should know right away,” her father said.

It was not an unexpected death, she wanted to tell her parents; a relief for all, she wanted to assure them, but the words would be clichés her parents and their old neighbors would have already exchanged. Her parents had called to hear different words, and yet Moran had only silence to offer.

“We thought of paying a visit of condolence,” her mother said. “But what can we say to Shaoai’s mother? What would you say to her?”

Moran flinched. Unlike her father, who rarely confronted her, her mother was able to turn a simple narrative into a question that demanded an answer. “I would think, for everybody’s good, it’s wise not to visit,” Moran said, being careful with her words so that she would not open the door to more questioning.

“But that makes us coldhearted. Imagine someone in her position.”

It was hard enough for her mother to have an absentee daughter; to add, on top of that, another mother’s pain of losing a daughter who’d been more than half dead the past twenty-one years? “Don’t imagine,” Moran said.

“But how can one stop thinking about these things? I understand that I’m more fortunate than Shaoai’s mother, but what if you hadn’t got involved in the case in the first place? You would have been living in Beijing, and at least our family would have stayed together. I know you think of me as selfish, but do you see my point?”

“No, I don’t think of you as selfish.”

“I hope you understand that a mother has to be selfish.”

Ever so expectedly, the phone line, cracking just a little, spoke of her mother’s tears and her father’s reticence. They were in separate rooms, she knew, holding two receivers, because it was easier for them not to see each other’s eyes when they were talking to her. “I don’t suppose we should discuss these things now,” Moran said. “See, it upsets you.”

“Why shouldn’t I be upset? Shaoai’s mother at least knows who killed her daughter, but we’ve never known what took our daughter away from us.”

“Nobody knows what happened to Shaoai,” Moran said.

“But it was Ruyu. It had to be her. It could only be her. Am I wrong?”

Her parents must have often wondered about this between themselves, but they had never once asked Moran. Why ask now, when silence, already in place, should be left untouched; even death does not suffice as a pretext to disturb the past. “Nobody knows what happened,” Moran said again.

“But you did know. You covered it up for her, didn’t you?”

Moran’s father coughed. “You understand, Moran, that your mother is asking not because we want to blame you,” he said. “Nobody can go back and change anything, but your mother and I, you see—it’s hard for us when things don’t make sense.”

Where does one begin, Moran thought, to make sense of anything? The desire for clarity, the desire not to live in blindness—these desires are not far from the desire to deceive: one has to be like a sushi chef, cutting, trimming, slicing, until one’s life—or one’s memory of that life—is transformed into presentable bites. “Let’s change the topic, shall we?” she said. “I was wondering what you’d think of going to Scandinavia for a holiday next summer. I heard it’s beautiful there in June.”

“We’re tired of playing tourist,” Moran’s mother said. “We’re old now. Shaoai is dead. Someday we will die, too. Is it not time for you to come home and see us?”

Not wanting to grant her parents even the vaguest hope, Moran said that she was not ready to talk about that. She promised that she would call again in a week, knowing that by then, her father would have convinced her mother to be more strategic and not to pressure her. Moran ended the phone call before her parents could protest. They loved her more than she loved them; for that reason, she would always win an argument at the end of the day.

Her parents’ only child, Moran had not been back to Beijing since she had left for America sixteen years earlier. For the first six years, when she had been studying for a PhD in chemistry, she had not seen her parents once, citing the hassle for visa application and a shortage of traveling funds as the reasons for her absence. During that period a marriage, which had both distressed and embarrassed her parents, had taken place and then ended, yet that they had not crossed paths with her married life seemed to make it less real to them; at least that was Moran’s hope. To this day, she suspected that they had not told anyone in Beijing about her failed marriage, and they were relieved to have not met Josef, who was a year older than her mother.

After the divorce, Moran moved away from the midwestern town where she and Josef had been living, and, when she could afford it, she started paying for her parents to travel and meet her elsewhere—for a bus tour through central and western Europe, on which she dutifully accompanied them, taking their pictures with grand arches and ancient relics in the background, making sure she herself was not in any of the photos; for two weeks in Cape Cod, where they were an odd family on the beach and in the ice cream shops—she was too old to be a child vacationing with her parents, and they, having little to cling to in an unfamiliar town, marked their days by chatting with people their age who pushed baby strollers or built sandcastles with their grandchildren. There and elsewhere, Moran’s parents greeted grandparents warmly, their English allowing them just enough vocabulary to express their admiration of other people’s good fortune.

Moran took comfort in believing that, for what she had deprived her parents of, she had offered other things in return: Thailand, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Sydney, the Maldives, foreign places that crowded their photo albums with natural and manmade beauty. Over the years they had accepted that they would never be invited to see Moran’s everyday life in America, but they had not given up hope that one day she would return to Beijing, however short the visit might be. Always Moran turned a deaf ear toward the mention of her hometown. Places do not die or vanish, yet one can obliterate their existence, just as one can a lover from an ill-fated affair. For Moran, this was not a drastic action: one needs only to live coherently, to be one’s exact self from one day to the next, to make such a place, such a person, recede.

It took a long while after the phone call before she opened Boyang’s email. The message was brief, giving the cause of death and the date of the cremation, which had happened six days earlier. The paucity of details felt accusatory—though what right did she have to hope for more, when she herself had never deviated from the coldness of silence? Once a year, Moran wired two thousand dollars to Boyang’s account, her contribution to Shaoai’s caretaking, but she did not acknowledge his monthly emails. The bare bones of his life—his successful career as a businessman in various fields, the latest in real estate development, his unsuccessful marriage—she had learned from her parents, though her quietness in response to any news regarding him must have led them to a conclusion about her disinterestedness. They had not mentioned him when they had called about Shaoai’s death.

The phone rang again. Moran hesitated and then picked it up. “Just one more thing,” her mother said. “I know things are harder for you than for us. At least your father and I have each other. I understand you don’t want us to interfere with your life, but wouldn’t you agree that it’s time to think about marriage again? But don’t misunderstand me. I am not pressuring you. All I am saying is—no doubt you think this is a cliché—but maybe you should stop living in the past? Of course we respect your every decision, but we’d be happier if you found someone new in your life.”

It was odd that her parents, against all evidence, thought of her as living in the past, though Moran did not argue, and promised to consider their viewpoint. She wondered which past—and which set of people associated with said past—her parents considered the enemy of her happiness: her life in Beijing or her marriage to Josef? Her parents should have known by now that her problem, rather than living in the past, was not allowing the past to live on. Any moment that slipped away from the present became a dead moment; and people, unsuspicious, over and over again became the casualties of her compulsive purging of the past.

Moran lived the most solitary and contented life she believed possible for herself. She worked for a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, where she occupied a small testing room alone and operated an instrument that measured the viscosity of various health and hygiene products for quality control. Despite her extensive research background in chemistry, her work did not require much skill beyond a tolerance for tedium. Yet it provided her what she needed: a stable livelihood, and a reason to be in America. What else could she ask for? She had no children, and her concerns, when she read about climate change or carcinogens found in food or water, were not concrete, because she did not feel eligible to worry about the future of mankind. She did not have close friends, but remained friendly enough with neighbors and colleagues so as not to be considered an eccentric spinster. Though her life lacked the poignancy of great happiness and acute pain, she believed she had found, in their places, the blessing of solitude. She took a long and brisk walk every morning, rain or shine, and again after work; twice a week she volunteered at a local animal shelter, and other evenings she spent in the library, reading old novels that were rarely touched by others. Her job was soothing in a way she imagined most people’s work was not—she liked the samples of manmade colors and fragrances, the unchangingness of the protocols, the predictability of the outcomes. When there were idle moments at work, she daydreamed about places and times other than her own, in which strangers lived as vividly as she would allow them: a girl named Grazia, who had died from tuberculosis at fifteen and was buried in a Swiss mountain town, forgotten by all but her poor French governess; an aging cobbler bending over pieces of leather and dull nails in a Parisian shop, his eyesight deteriorating by the day, his heart skipping a beat or two; a young shepherd in Bavaria caught in listless pining for his next-door neighbor, a girl three years older and already engaged to the village butcher. Moran took the precaution of looking busy, in case someone peeked into the testing room, though she suspected that in her colleagues’ eyes, she, like the instrument she managed, was a well-tuned machine—a machine that, once trusted, could easily be forgotten. She did not hold this against her colleagues, most of them having stoically, if not happily, settled down to a suburban life. If they felt any superiority over Moran, she could not sense it, though this was likely a result of the safe distance she kept herself from them; nor did she feel any advantage over the others—her colleagues, she believed, enjoyed or weathered their marriages, parenthoods, promotions, and holidays as she herself weathered solitude. One would be foolish to consider oneself better, or even different, merely because one could claim something others could not. The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude—both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice—make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.

Moran wished now to return to her Saturday routine, which had been disturbed by her parents’ calls and Boyang’s email, but the news of a death, any death, was enough to prove the flimsiness of a calm life. The last time Moran had seen Shaoai was before her departure for America; by then, Shaoai had already lost much of her sight and her hair, her sinewy body taking on a dangerous plumpness, her mind no longer lucid behind her clouded eyes. What would twenty-one more years have done to that prisoner in her own body, Moran wondered, but did not force herself to answer. It was easier to imagine Grazia lying in a cabin and looking at the snowcapped mountains: a pitcher stood on her bedside table, the morning sunlight trapped in the still clearness of the water; an unfinished embroidery sampler of a Goethe poem lay next to her, reminding Grazia of the day when she, at five, had started to stitch with pink and white threads chunky alphabets.

When Moran had first arrived in America, people from local churches had paid her visits. She had replied, not as a mere excuse, though it must have seemed a glib one, that she did not have the imagination to become a believer. She knew now it was not imagination she lacked. The cobbler in Paris had lost his only son in a street battle; he did not know whom to blame, fate or revolution, and his confused tears stung Moran’s heart more than her own parents’ sighs. The woman in Bavaria had married without regret, unaware of her young neighbor’s desolation. She’d died when she gave birth to a baby girl, and, some days, when Moran felt an icy animosity toward herself, she would let the young shepherd steal the baby girl and drown her and himself; other days, guilty about the violence she’d carelessly inflicted upon unsuspicious souls—for what reason but to make herself feel the pains that she did not allow in her life?—Moran would let the baby grow up, becoming more precious in the eyes of the brokenhearted man next door than she was to herself and the rest of the world.

Suppose one could allow oneself to be closer to the real world than to that of one’s imagination. Suppose she had had someone next to her at the moment her parents called, so that Shaoai’s death could be discussed. Right away Moran banged that door closed. To be caught at hoping—even if it was just by herself, but it could only be by herself—was like being caught once when she had timidly played a simple tune on a piano at a colleague’s party. A child, not yet four, not old enough for piano lessons as her older siblings were, came quietly into the room, where Moran had found a moment away from the guests. Hello, Moran said, and the girl studied her with a proprietress’ pity and annoyance. What right, her eyes seemed to be saying, do you have to touch the piano? Moran blushed; the girl pushed her aside and banged the keys with both hands, and despite the violent disharmony, the girl seemed to be satisfied by her performance. This, she seemed to be showing Moran, was how you played an instrument.

It was the girl whom Moran remembered now as she took her usual route to the neighborhood park, a grove that had not much to offer except an outdated playground with a metal skeleton of a train engine and a few squeaky swings, all rusty. Not everyone had the right to music, the girl’s eyes said, just as not everyone had the right to claim beauty, hope, and happiness.

An old woman, tightly bundled in an oversized coat and a scarf, waited patiently for her black poodle, clad in a yellow vest, to finish investigating a rock. Moran muttered a greeting and was about to pass the pair when the old woman raised her small face. “Tell you what, don’t ever forget the date of your last period.”

Moran nodded. When people talked to her, she always looked attentive, as though recognizing the significance of their words.

“Every time I go to the doctor’s they ask that question,” the old woman said. “Like it matters at my age. If I have one piece of advice to give, go home and write it down somewhere you can find easily.”

Moran thanked the old woman and walked on. Easily she could see herself lingering, listening to the woman retell the story of her long wait at the doctor’s, or at the vet’s office, or of a recent visit from her grandchildren, but such conversations with strangers had taken place enough times, in grocery stores and dry cleaners and hair salons and airports, that sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty.

When she returned, there was a message from Josef on her answering machine. Odd that more than one person had called her today. She waited until the evening to call back. She wanted him to think that she had things to do on a Saturday.

When Josef picked up the phone, his voice was frail. Had Rachel talked with her, he asked, and Moran felt her heart sink. Rachel was the youngest of the four children of Josef and Alena; two years earlier, when Josef had retired from his job as a librarian at a local community college, he had sold the house and bought a condo a few blocks from Rachel and her husband, as they were about to have their third child. Three years younger than Moran, Rachel had been the only one of Josef’s children to openly oppose her father’s marriage to Moran.

“Is there something Rachel needs to tell me?” Moran asked. She remembered her panic when her parents had called earlier. She had dreaded hearing that Josef was dead.

Moran had always known that someday a phone call would come, worst if from one of Josef’s children. Still, hearing it from Josef himself—about his multiple myelomas, new since they had last seen each other in June—did not make the message any less harsh. For a moment she was struck by the odd sensation that he was already gone; their conversation, a memory for the future, sounded unreal, Josef’s tone apologetic, as though he had erred and unwisely contracted cancer.

How long has he known, she asked, and he said four weeks. Four weeks, Moran said, feeling her anger swelling—but before she could launch into a tirade, Josef said that the prognosis had not been dire. Survived by a caring ex-wife, his obituary would read, Josef joked when silence set in.

How long would he last, Moran wondered. How long does anyone, or anything, last? A marriage that had begun with enough affection could have gone right, love teased out with tenderness where passion was wanting, childlessness never a disappointment, as it was not a result of the age difference between Josef and Moran but of her adamant disinterest in motherhood. On holidays, Josef’s children and grandchildren would visit, and friends—men and women twenty or thirty years Moran’s senior, who had been Alena and Josef’s friends and who had taken care of Josef after Alena’s accident—would continue their tradition of seasonal get-togethers, which they’d begun long before Moran had existed for any of them.

A caring ex-wife must be the best consolation prize, Moran thought, for a man to have, or for a woman to be called. Even if Josef’s children would oblige him, she would look like an awkward extra in an otherwise perfectly staged story in his obituary. For years Moran had been a regular visitor to a website that compiled obituaries from around the country. She never tired of the gently touched-up summaries of strangers’ lives. Without her intrusion, Josef’s life would be one of those perfect tales of love and loss: a solid upbringing in a solid midwestern town; a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart ended abruptly by a careless driver; a beloved father and grandfather to four children and eleven grandchildren; a longtime member of the local choir, an avid gardener, a generous friend, a good man.

“I’m coming to see you,” she said, deciding already that she would book the flights and the stay at her usual B&B after the phone call.

“But it’s not June yet,” Josef said.

During the past eleven years, Moran had visited Josef every June on his birthday, a lunch meeting rather than a dinner, because birthday dinners belonged to families, and he had children and grandchildren to celebrate with. He acted grateful for his birthday lunches, as though he did not know that they were for her sake more than for his.

June was a long while away, and who knew if he would still be here when June came again? The same thought must have occurred to Josef, and he reassured Moran that the prognosis was good: the doctors thought there was still time, at least a couple years, depending on how the treatments went.

Why, then, was he telling her at all; why not wait until they saw each other next June and spare her seven months of suspense? But she knew she was being unfair. He must have waited to break the news to other people, too—she should not expect to be among those called right away. “A plan should always be amendable,” she said. “Unless it’s bad timing for me to come?”

Josef said it was not bad timing at all. The hesitation in his voice—imagined or real, she could not tell—stung Moran: in death as in life she had no claim on anything. In a lighter tone she told him not to worry, as she would be out of his hair before Thanksgiving. She would book her return ticket for Wednesday, she said; other than Rachel, his children and their families would probably come and join him on that day.

“You think I’m worried about your staying through the holiday?”

“I don’t want to impose,” she said. Her decision to visit, she knew, was already an imposition, but Josef was too kind to point that out. Her inconsistency, which she allowed only him to see, was in itself a love she had not given anyone else, though it was not the kind of love to have done him, or anyone else for that matter, any good.

“Ever so like you,” Josef sighed. “To worry about things you don’t need to.”

“You’re bound to people,” Moran said, though what she meant was that his time was bound to those around him. To think a person bound in any way—by blood, by legal documents of marriage or employment, by unsigned commitments to friends and neighbors and fellow human beings—is an illusion, though time is a different matter. In making commitments to others, what one really commits is one’s time: a meal, a weekend, a marriage as long as it lasts, a final moment by the deathbed; to make the mistake of going beyond that, to commit one’s true self—everyone has a story or two about that hard-learned lesson of giving more than is asked. “I can’t just come and ask to be among them.”

“Why not, Moran?”

“I thought you would have known by now that I don’t belong,” Moran said. That she had not belonged and could not blend in were the reasons she had given when she’d asked for a divorce. Blend in—what an absurd notion, as though a marriage ought to work like the hand of a masterful craftsman, slowly softening one’s edges and changing one’s hues until one becomes perfectly invisible. Josef, disappointed then, had nevertheless articulated that his conception of their marriage had never involved her adapting herself to his world.

But to mention his world, Moran knew, was to gain an unfair advantage. Having come into the marriage by herself—she had cited visa difficulties for her parents’ absence at the wedding—she had only herself to account for, while Josef had his family, which in the end had been used as part of her excuse to exit the marriage.

Of course, Josef said now, he understood her concern. She wished he would not say that; she wished he would be less accommodating. She would get in touch once she had the flights booked, she said. He said okay, though his voice sounded defeated. Why couldn’t she be kinder to him?

After a moment of hesitation, Josef said there was one more thing she needed to know before she came: these days Rachel drove him around.

During her previous visits, Moran had not seen Rachel, and she’d wondered if Josef concealed their annual lunches from his children and friends. In their minds, she had been the calculating one: marrying Josef for security when it was needed for a new immigrant, divorcing him the moment she got her citizenship and a job offer. She imagined his having to plead with Rachel to drive him to meet Moran, guilty as a man caught cheating yet stubborn in his helplessness. “I’ll rent a car,” she said. “That way I can drive you anytime, if you need.”

Josef thanked her. “Till then, Moran?” he said.

A dread of the immediate silence made Moran breathe in sharply. “Josef,” she said, feeling, against all reason, widowed.

“Yes?”

She wanted to say that someone she knew from a long time ago had died, but it was selfish to unburden the news onto a dying man. She wanted to beg him not to let go of his hope, even though, had she been in his position, she would have easily chosen resignation. She wanted to apologize for things she had not done for him, and things she had done wrongly to him. But now, as he waited patiently on the phone, she knew that these words, true to her heart, would sound melodramatic once said. “Are you all right?” Josef asked gently.

“Of course I’m all right,” she said, and added that if she had any talent worth boasting about, it was to always be all right.

Josef ignored the meanness—to herself more than to him—in her words. He had never been a fan of sarcasm. “Is there something upsetting you, Moran?”

Was he asking if her heart had been broken by another man? He would, of course, offer solace, as he had once consoled Rachel when she had broken up with her college boyfriend—but how could Moran explain to him that what was broken was not her heart but her faith in solitude? When she had asked for the divorce, she had told him that only a small part of his life would go to waste. There were his children and grandchildren, his friends and his house, all of which had crossed paths with her minimally, all of which would remain his, as they had never been hers. Considering how excruciatingly long a life was, she had said, the five years they had spent together were no more than a detour. What she had not told him was that, giving up the marriage, she had decided to live in a more limited way: all she wanted was to have her mind and her heart uncluttered, and with discipline she had since maintained a savage routine that cleansed her life to sterility. But today, two calls had come, announcing one death and another impending, and what filled the uncluttered space but pain that the most stringent cleansing would not alleviate? She missed Josef; she missed people.

“What’s the matter, Moran?”

Nothing was the matter, she reassured him. It had perhaps dawned on him over the years that she was no longer looking for a companion, though she could tell that he continued to hope otherwise, counting on the day she could no longer travel for his birthday because she had someone else’s feelings to consider. “I’m sorry I am nasty to you,” she said.

“You surely aren’t,” Josef said.

“Let’s not argue over this,” she said, though who else would she argue with? She told him to take care of himself, and she would see him soon. When the call was disconnected, she felt pressed in, as though his voice had left a crack through which loneliness flooded into her room. She remembered a story she had read when young, about a Dutch boy finding a hole in a dam, and putting his finger into the hole to stop the ocean. In the story, the sea, which had once been a frolicking friend for the boy, murmured sinister seduction into his ear as the numbness from his finger expanded to his arm and then to his whole body. Why not, Moran said to the boy and to herself, let go of your heroic resistance and see what happens next?

But nothing happened. The silence, unlike the murmuring sea, did not engulf and drown her, and the woman in Modigliani’s painting watched on, merciful in her insouciance.

Moran put on her coat and then wound a scarf around her neck, and a minute later emerged into the street. Dusk was falling, the wind picking up, sweeping leaves along the sidewalk. Lamps lit up people’s windows, and here and there could be heard the opening and closing of a mailbox, the sound of a car engine coming to a full rest after the rumbling of a garage door, the buzzing of an erratic street lamp. The sound track of a suburban evening could be as deceivingly idyllic as that of a mountain village in Switzerland: the cars driven home were as eager to reach the end of their journey as were the sheep and cows trekking homeward; the barks here and there of dogs that had spent the day alone and now heard their owners’ approaching steps were as exuberant as those of the sheepdogs who, after a day of working, smelled warm fried food upon nearing the cottages. Behind each door, beyond the gazes of strangers curious or insensitive, another day’s happiness and unhappiness converged, adding or subtracting, modifying or concealing, leading or misleading those susceptible hearts to a place different, however imperceptibly, from yesterday’s.

Once upon a time, cooking in the kitchen where for years Alena had made meals for her husband and their four children, listening for Josef’s car but not really waiting for him, Moran had made up a life for herself apart from Josef, as she later would make up lives for Grazia and the cobbler and the heartbroken shepherd. It was not disappointment in her marriage, as Josef had thought, that had led her to do that, but her belief in the imperativeness of not living fully in any given moment. Time is the flimsiest surface; to believe in the solidity of one moment till one’s foot touches the next moment, equally trustworthy, is like dream-walking while expecting the world to rearrange itself into a fairy tale path. Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope.

The life imagined in the kitchen of Josef’s house was not far from what Moran conducted now: loneliness and solitude had been rehearsed while she chopped vegetables. It had been her only defense against having her heart moved to a strange place, by Josef, by their marriage, by time. Sometimes when she did not hear the garage door, or her mind was lost in the hissing of cooking oil under a closed lid, she would be startled by the sudden reappearance of Josef. Who are you, and why are you here in my life, she had half-expected him to ask her, half-wondering whether he, catching in her eyes a momentary hostility, had been waiting for her to ask him the same question.

In her adult life, Moran believed, she had not failed to foresee what was going to happen: her migration to America, her marriage to and later divorce from Josef. People would say that she was simply living toward what she thought she had seen, but that was not true. One could have wrong visions, one could have vain hopes, but deceiving oneself is more difficult than deceiving the world. Impossible, in Moran’s case.

The odd thing, though, was that her clarity of vision did not apply to the past. Early in their relationship Josef had been curious about her life in China. She had been unable to share as much as he had wished for, and he had felt hurt, or at least saddened, by her evasiveness. But how does one share the memories of a place without placing oneself in it? Certainly there were moments that would stay alive for as long as she did. Her mother, before pulling Moran out of her fortress of quilts and blankets in the winter mornings, had rubbed and warmed up her own hands while singing a song advocating early rising for a healthier life. Her father’s bicycle bell, a rusty one that sounded as though it had caught a perennial cold, had been stolen one day; who, the family had wondered, wanted an old bell while there were plenty of shiny ones that rang clear and loud? Neighbors’ faces came to her, those who had died appearing vividly alive, those who had aged remaining young. In first grade, the district clinic had come to check the blood counts of the schoolchildren; she’d told Boyang to massage his earlobe so his blood would flow better, and he, trusting her as ever, was yelled at by the nurse afterward, because his red earlobe did not stop bleeding after it was punched by a thin needle.

But how could anyone, Moran wondered now, warrant the trustworthiness of one’s memories? The certainty with which her parents spoke of Ruyu’s culpability was the same certainty with which they believed in their own daughter’s innocence. Those seeking sanctuary in misremembering did not separate what had happened from what could have happened.

Moran had not believed—still could not believe—that Ruyu had meant to do anyone harm. A murder needed motivation, a plot, or else it needed a moment of despair and insanity, as, in her own imagination, the young shepherd had experienced when he drowned his own love along with an innocent child. Moran had not known Ruyu well when they were young; even in retrospect she could not say that she understood Ruyu: she was one of those who defied being known. She had shown no remorse or concern when Shaoai was found poisoned. Had that made Ruyu more culpable than others? But the same could be said of Moran’s own divorce: many among Josef’s friends and family believed her manipulative, saying she’d got what she wanted from the marriage and discarded it the moment she had accomplished her goal. The excuse she had given Josef was halfhearted, the reticence she had maintained in front of others defiant, which made her guiltier than if she had asked for forgiveness.

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