A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Yiyun Li

books, they go out together and play in the yard, Granny Lin pushing him in the swing until it is flying so high that Kang screams with excitement and fear.

      When the weather is nice, they take long walks in the mountains. Weekend tourists swarm into the area, but Granny Lin and Kang are the only two people who do not worry about missing the bus or getting stuck in a traffic jam. They walk hand in hand, Kang’s palm touching Granny Lin’s palm, both sweating. Granny Lin tells old tales about flowers and grasses. When she runs out of stories, she makes up new ones.

      After dinner, Granny Lin leads Kang to the bathroom. She waits outside with a towel and his pajamas, and he sings in the shower the song about the red dragonfly she has taught him. Always he shouts to Granny Lin after the first two minutes, asking if he can come out now. She replies it would be good if he could stay in the shower for another five minutes. The boy goes on singing, his voice pure and perfect.

      Often, without turning off the water, Kang jumps out of the stall at Granny Lin. She pretends to be startled and screams, and he giggles and runs off before she can wrap the towel around his dripping body.

      At night, as he sleeps, he mumbles in his dreams, his arms and legs thrown to all four directions on the blanket. Granny Lin tucks him in and watches him for a long time, the unfamiliar warmth swelling inside her. She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

      GRANNY LIN IS not the first person to have noticed the missing socks. The dorm mothers, for two weeks in a row, tell her that the girls are complaining that their favorite socks are disappearing in the laundry. Granny Lin knows then what has happened to the socks. A few times, she has seen Kang clutch a girl’s unwashed sock. He drops it into the basket when he realizes that she is watching him.

      The next weekend, while Kang is playing a computer game in the activity room, Granny Lin searches his bed. She finds nothing under the mattress, where the kids usually hide things. She folds back the blanket. She picks up the pillow and unzips the pillowcase, and sees five socks inside, rolled up into small bundles like newborn bunnies.

      Granny Lin unrolls them: young girls’ socks with flowered patterns or cartoon animals. She thinks of putting them in her own pocket, but stops at the thought of Kang groping in the pillowcase for the socks, something dear to him for reasons she does not know. She rolls the socks back up and stuffs them into the pillowcase.

      On Monday, Granny Lin asks her supervisor for a half day off and takes the bus to the city, looking for socks with the same patterns as the missing ones. She buys several more packs of girls’ socks in different designs.

      Granny Lin becomes more careful with the laundry now. She makes sure all the girls’ socks are in their bags before Kang arrives. From time to time, she scatters around socks that she has bought, all of them having been washed and dried and then rubbed across the floor.

      They are still the happy couple on weekends, but Granny Lin worries as she counts the missing socks that she has put out for Kang. She wonders if she needs to talk to him and find out the reason for what he is doing. But every time she opens her mouth she loses her resolve.

      On weekends, as they sit in the shadow of the wisteria, Granny Lin wonders if this is the love she missed in her younger years, hand in hand with a dear boy, not asking him to tell her the secret she is not allowed to know.

      THE WEATHER GETS hot, and the dorm mothers put mosquito nets over the students’ beds. The first night, a boy in the bed next to Kang’s gets up after the dorm mother leaves. With a small flashlight in hand, he sticks his head into Kang’s mosquito net and shrieks in a low voice, letting the flashlight shine in Kang’s eyes. Kang does not cry, as the boy hopes, but the boy is surprised and pleased to find Kang stroking his own cheeks with both his hands in floral socks.

      Dorm mothers are called. Seven more socks are discovered, and by the end of the next day everyone in the school knows about the sick boy who steals girls’ socks and does strange things with them.

      Granny Lin watches the kids chase Kang around the school yard, calling him “sicko,” “psycho,” “porn boy,” her heart wrenching as if it were a piece of rag in the washing machine. Kang is no longer allowed to visit the laundry room. She counts the days to the weekend and is afraid that she will break down before the three days pass.

      On Friday afternoon, as they stand in front of the school gate, Granny Lin has to raise Kang’s hand up and wave for him. When the shuttle bus is gone, Granny Lin turns to Kang, who is kicking a pebble in front of him.

      “Kang, come to Granny’s room for a moment,” Granny Lin says.

      “No, I don’t want to,” Kang says, letting go of Granny Lin’s hand.

      “What do you want to do? Let’s take a walk.”

      “I don’t want to take a walk.”

      “How about reading some books? A new case of books came in yesterday.”

      “I don’t want to read.”

      “Let’s get up on the swing.”

      “I don’t want to do anything,” Kang says, pushing Granny Lin’s hand away from his shoulder.

      Granny Lin’s tears swell out of her eyes. She looks down at the top of Kang’s head. To love someone is to want to please him, even when one is not able to. “Think of something you want to do, and we’ll do it together. Think of something you want, and Granny will get it for you. You know Granny loves you.”

      “I want to go home. I want to see my mom,” Kang says. “Granny, do you think we can catch the train and go home for two days?”

      Granny Lin looks down at Kang’s upturned face, seeing the small hope grow bigger in his eyes. Kang grabs her hand. “Granny, just two days. Nobody will know.”

      Granny Lin sighs. “Forgive me, Kang. But Granny cannot do this for you.”

      “But why? You said you’d do anything.”

      “Anything that we can do here, in the school, in the mountains. Kang, good boy, we cannot leave the school.”

      It takes a minute for Kang to burst into tears. Granny Lin tries to quiet him and pull him into her arms. Kang pushes her away, and his eyes, with the cold anger that Granny Lin once saw in Old Tang’s eyes, chill her. Kang runs across the school yard. Granny Lin runs after him, but has to stop and catch her breath after a few steps. Her old body is failing her young heart.

      GRANNY LIN THOUGHT that Kang would be crying in his bed, but the boy is not there. She calls out his name as she walks in the building, checking each unlocked door, the activity room, the music room, the dining hall. She looks under tables and behind curtains, and her heart sinks deeper each time her hope proves unfounded.

      For an hour Granny Lin searches, until it occurs to her that the boy may have left the building, and even the school. Paralyzed by such a thought, and imagining all kinds of disasters, she calls the two guards, who are playing poker in the small room by the school gate. Neither wants to admit the possibility that the boy has squeezed through the gate, both insisting that the boy must be hiding somewhere in the building. More searches are carried out by the three of them. When nothing is yielded, they each start to panic with different worries.

      The police are called. The school supervisor is called. The dorm mothers are called. The guards make phone calls to whomever they can think of. Granny Lin watches one of the young men punch the number with a shaking hand, and wonders why he is so nervous. The guards are only losing a peaceful weekend. They will lose at most a month’s salary, as both are relatives of the trustees. Boys disappear every day—what would they remember of Kang a year from now even if they never found him again? Granny Lin begins to cry.

      But Kang shows up by himself, in the middle of the turmoil, unharmed, hungry, and sleepy. He must have played hide-and-seek with Granny Lin while she was looking for him. Or did he want to punish her for disappointing him? Granny Lin does not know. All she knows is what he told the school