Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li

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