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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 (#ulink_a07b90d4-393a-5c1b-bc8f-e9fbcf1e2d24)
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?”
