Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li

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academic career, but she insisted on disputing the charge: every laboratory in the department was run according to outdated regulations, with chemicals available to all graduate students.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,