Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li
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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: