Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li

      Shaoai’s helpers, waiting in the shade of a building by the roadside, were a boy and a girl. Shaoai introduced them: Boyang, the stout boy with tanned skin who was roping the accordion case to the back rack of his bicycle, had white flashing teeth when he smiled; Moran, the skinny, long-legged girl sitting astride her bicycle, had already secured the willow trunk behind her. They were neighbors, Shaoai said; both were a year older than Ruyu, but she would be in the same grade with them in her new school. Boyang and Moran glanced at the accordion case when school was mentioned, so they must have been informed of the plan. Ruyu did not have legal residence in Beijing; when her grandaunts had first proposed her stay, Uncle and Aunt had written back, explaining that they would absolutely love to help out with Ruyu’s education but that most high schools would not admit a student who did not have city residency. Ruyu is a good musician, her grandaunts replied, and enclosed a copy of the certificate of her passing grade 8 on her accordion. How Uncle and Aunt had convinced the high school—Shaoai’s alma mater—to admit Ruyu on account of her musical talents, Ruyu did not know; her grandaunts, when they had received the letter requiring that the accordion and the original copy of the grade 8 certificate accompany Ruyu to Beijing, had not shown surprise.

      That night, Ruyu lay in the bed that she was to share with Shaoai and thought about living in a world where her grandaunts’ presence was not sensed and respected, and for the first time she felt she was becoming the orphan people had taken her to be. Already Beijing made her feel small, but worse than that was people’s indifference to her smallness. On the bus ride from the train station to her new home, a man in a short-sleeved shirt had stood close to Ruyu, and the moment the bus had begun to move, he seemed to press much of his weight on her. She inched away from him, but his weight followed her, imperceptible to the other passengers, for when Ruyu looked at the two middle-aged women sitting in a double seat in front of her, hoping for some help, the two women—strangers, judging from how they did not talk or smile at each other—turned their faces away and looked at the shops out the window. The predicament would have lasted longer if it hadn’t been for Shaoai, who, after purchasing their tickets from the conductor, had pushed through the crowd and, as though reaching for the back of a seat to steady herself, squeezed an arm between the man and Ruyu. Nothing had been said, but perhaps Shaoai had elbowed the man or given him a stern look, or it was simply Shaoai’s presence that had made the man retreat. For the rest of the bus ride Shaoai stood close, a steely presence between Ruyu and the rest of the world. Neither girl spoke, and when it was time for them to get off, Shaoai tapped Ruyu on the shoulder and signaled her to follow while Shaoai pushed through the bodies. The short-sleeved man, Ruyu noticed, fixed his eyes on her face as she moved toward the exit. Even though there were quite a few people between them, Ruyu felt her face burn.

      On the sidewalk, Shaoai asked Ruyu if she was too dumb to protect herself. Rarely did Ruyu face an angry person at a close distance; both her grandaunts had equable temperaments, believing any kind of emotional excitability a hurdle to one’s personal improvement. She sighed and turned her eyes away so as not to embarrass Shaoai.

      For a split second, Shaoai regretted her eruption—after all, Ruyu was a young girl, a provincial, an orphan raised by eccentric old ladies. Shaoai would have willingly softened, and even apologized, if Ruyu had understood the source of her anger, but the younger girl did not make a gesture either to mollify Shaoai or to defend herself. In Ruyu’s silence, Shaoai sensed a contemptuous extrication. “Haven’t your grandaunts taught you anything useful?” Shaoai said, angrier now, both at Ruyu’s unresponsiveness and at her own temper.

      Nothing separated Ruyu more thoroughly from the world than its malignance toward her grandaunts. To ward off people’s criticism of her grandaunts was more than to justify how they had raised her: to defend them was to defend God, who had chosen her to be left at their door. “My grandaunts have taught me more than you could imagine,” Ruyu said. “If you don’t like my coming to stay with your family, I understand. I’m not here for you to like, and my grandaunts are not for you to approve or disapprove of.”

      Shaoai had stared at Ruyu for a long moment, and then shrugged as though she no longer was in the mood to argue with Ruyu. When they had reached Shaoai’s home the episode seemed to have been put behind them.

      Please—Ruyu folded her hands on her chest—please show me that a big city is nothing compared to you. The bamboo mattress under her was no longer cooling her off, but she refrained from moving to a new spot and stayed on the edge of the bed Shaoai had pointed to as her side. The only window in the room, a small rectangular one high on the wall, admitted little night air, and inside the mosquito netting Ruyu felt her pajamas sticking to her body. A television set, its volume low, was blinking in the living room, though Ruyu doubted that Uncle and Aunt were watching it. For a while they had been talking in whispers, and Ruyu wondered if they had been talking about her or her grandaunts. Please, she said again in her mind, please give me the wisdom to live among strangers until I leave them behind.

      Ruyu’s grandaunts had not taught her to pray. Her upbringing had not been a strictly religious one, though her grandaunts had done what they could to give her an education that they had deemed necessary to prepare her for her future reunion with the Church. They themselves had not attended any services since 1957, when the Church was reformed by the Communist Party into the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association; nor did they keep any concrete evidence of their previous spiritual lives. Still, from a young age, Ruyu had understood that what set her apart from other children was not the absence of her parents but the presence of God in her life, which made parents and siblings and playmates and even her grandaunts extraneous. She had begun to talk to him before she entered elementary school. “Our Father in Heaven,” she’d heard her grandaunts say when she had been a small girl, and it was with a conversation with him that Ruyu would end each day, talking to him as a child would talk to an imaginary friend or to herself, a presence at once abstract and solidly comforting. But he was neither a friend nor a part of herself; he belonged to her as much as he belonged to her grandaunts. None of the people she had met so far in Beijing, Ruyu knew, shared with her the secret of his presence: not Uncle and Aunt, who had told her that she was one of the family now and had asked her not to feel shy about making requests; not the neighbors, the five other families who had all come out to the courtyard upon her arrival, talking to her as though they had known her forever, a man teasing her about her accordion, which seemed too big for her narrow shoulders, a woman disapproving of her outfit because it would give her a heat rash in this humid weather; not the boy Boyang or the girl Moran, both of whom were quiet in front of their seniors, but who, Ruyu knew from the looks the two exchanged, had more to say to each other; and not Shaoai, who, queenly in her impatience toward the fuss the neighbors made over the newcomer, had left the courtyard before they had finished welcoming Ruyu.

      Please make the time I have to spend with these strangers go fast so that I can come to you soon. She was about to finish the conversation, as usual, with an apology—always she asked too much of him while offering nothing in return—when the front door opened and then banged shut; the metal bell she had seen hanging from the door frame jingled and was hushed right away by someone’s hand. Aunt said something, and then Shaoai, who must have been the one who’d come into the house, replied with some sort of retort, though both talked in low voices, and Ruyu could not hear their exchanges. She looked through the mosquito netting at the curtain that separated the bedroom from the living room—a white floral print on blue cotton fabric—and at the light from the living room creeping into the bedroom from underneath the curtain.

      The house, more than a hundred years old, had been built for traditional family life, the center of the house being the living room, the entries between the living room and the bedrooms open, with no doors. The smallest bedroom, no larger than a cubicle and located to the right of the main entrance, was the entire world occupied by Grandpa—Uncle’s father, who had been bedridden for the last five years after a series of strokes. Earlier in the evening, when Aunt had shown Ruyu around the house, she’d raised the curtain quickly for Ruyu to catch a glimpse of the old man lying under a thin, gray blanket, the only life left in his gaunt face a pair of dull eyes that rolled toward Ruyu. He had said something incomprehensible, and Aunt had replied in a loud yet not unkind voice that there was nothing for him to worry about. They were sorry they could not offer Ruyu her own bedroom, Aunt said, and