Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li
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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