A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Yiyun Li

by the corner of her mouth. Mrs. Su cleans her with a towel, and for a moment, when her hand stops over Beibei’s mouth and muffles the cry, Mrs. Su feels a desire to keep the hand there. Three minutes longer and Beibei could be spared all the struggles and humiliations death has in store for every living creature, Mrs. Su thinks, but at the first sign of blushing in Beibei’s pale face, she removes the towel. Beibei breathes heavily. It amazes and saddens Mrs. Su that Beibei’s life is so tenacious that it has outlived the love that once made it.

      WITH ONE FINGER, Mr. Su types in his password—a combination of Beibei’s and Jian’s birthdays—at a terminal booth. He is still clumsy in his operation of the computer, but people on the floor, aging and slow as most of them are, are patient with one another. The software dutifully produces graphs and numbers, but Mr. Su finds it hard to concentrate today. After a while, he quits to make room for a woman waiting for a booth. He goes back to the seating area and looks for a good chair to take a rest. The brokerage, in the recent years of a downward economy, has slackened in maintenance, and a lot of chairs are missing orange plastic seats. Mr. Su finally finds a good one among homemade cotton cushions, and sits down by a group of old housewives. The women, in their late fifties or early sixties, are the happiest and chattiest people on the floor. Most of them have money locked into stocks that they have no other choice but to keep for now, and perhaps forever; the only reason for them to come every day is companionship. They talk about their children and grandchildren, unbearable in-laws, soap operas from the night before, stories from tabloids that must be discussed and analyzed at length.

      Mr. Su watches the rolling numbers on the big screen. The PA is tuned in to a financial radio station, but the host’s analysis is drowned by the women’s stories. Most of the time, Mr. Su finds them annoyingly noisy, but today he feels tenderness, almost endearment, toward the women. His wife, quiet and pensive, will never become one of these chatty old hens, but he wishes, for a moment, that one of them were his wife, cheered up by the most mundane matters, mindlessly happy.

      After taking note of the numbers concerning him, Mr. Su sighs. Despite all the research he had done, his investment does not show any sign more positive than the old women’s. Life goes wrong for the same reason that people miscalculate. Husband and wife promise each other a lifelong love that turns out shorter than a life; people buy stocks with good calculations, but they do not take into consideration life’s own preference for, despite the laws of probability, the unlikely. Mr. Su fell in love with his wife at thirteen, and she loved him back. What were the odds for first lovers to end up in a family? Against both families’ wills, they married each other, and against everybody’s warning, they decided to have a baby. Mr. Su, younger and more arrogant then, calculated and concluded that the odds for a problematic baby were very low, so low that fate was almost on their side. Almost, but not quite, and as a blunt and mean joke, Beibei was born with major problems in her brain and spinal cord. It would not be much of a misfortune except when his wife started to hide herself and the baby from the world; Beibei must have reminded his wife every day that their marriage was less legitimate. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Su thought of telling her, but he did not have the heart. It was he who suggested another baby. To give them a second chance, to save his wife from the unnecessary shame and pain that she had insisted on living with. Secretly he also wished to challenge fate again. The odds of having another calamity were low, very low, he tried to convince his wife; if only they could have a normal baby, and a normal family! The new baby’s birth proved his calculation right—Jian was born healthy, and he grew up into a very handsome and bright boy, as if his parents were awarded doubly for what had been taken away the first time—but who would’ve thought that such a success, instead of making their marriage a happier one, would turn his wife away from him? How arrogant he was to make the same mistake a second time, thinking he could outsmart life. What had survived the birth of Beibei did not survive Jian’s birth, as if his wife, against all common wisdom, could share misfortune with him but not happiness. For twenty years, they have avoided arguments carefully; they have been loving parents, dutiful spouses, but something that had made them crazy for each other as young cousins has abandoned them, leaving them in unshareable pain.

      A finger taps Mr. Su’s shoulder. He opens his eyes and realizes that he has fallen asleep. “I’m sorry,” he says to the woman.

      “You were snoring,” she says with a reproachful smile.

      Mr. Su apologizes again. The woman nods and returns to the conversation with her companions. Mr. Su looks at the clock on the screen, too early for lunch still, but he brings out a bag of instant noodles and a mug from his bag anyway, soaking the noodles with boiling water from the drinking stand. The noodles soften and swell. Mr. Su takes a sip of soup and shakes his head. He thinks of going home and talking to his wife, asking her a few questions he has never gathered enough courage to ask, but then decides that things unsaid had better remain so. Life is not much different from the stock market—you invest in a stock and you stick, and are stuck, to the choice, despite all the possibilities of other mistakes.

      At noon, the restaurant commissioned by the stockbrokerage delivers the lunch boxes to the VIP lounges, and the traders on the floor heat lunches in the microwave or make instant noodles. Mr. Su, who is always cheered up by the mixed smells of leftovers from other dinner tables, goes into a terminal booth in a hopeful mood. Someday, he thinks, when his wife is freed from taking care of Beibei, he’ll ask her to accompany him to the stockbrokerage. He wants her to see other people’s lives, full of meaningless but happy trivialities.

      Mr. Su leaves the brokerage promptly at five o’clock. Outside the building, he sees Mr. Fong, sitting on the curb and looking up at him like a sad, deserted child.

      “Mr. Fong,” Mr. Su says. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you come in and find me?”

      Mr. Fong suggests they go for a drink, and then holds out a hand and lets Mr. Su pull him to his feet. They find a small roadside diner, and Mr. Fong orders a few cold plates and a bottle of strong yam wine. “Don’t you sometimes wish a marriage doesn’t go as long as our lives last?” Mr. Fong says over the drink.

      “Is there anything wrong?” Mr. Su asks.

      “Nothing’s right with the wife after she’s released,” Mr. Fong says.

      “Are you going to divorce her?”

      Mr. Fong downs a cup of wine. “I wish I could,” he says and starts to sob. “I wish I didn’t love her at all so I could just pack up and leave.”

      BY LATE AFTERNOON Mrs. Su is convinced that Beibei is having problems. Her eyes, usually clear and empty, glisten with a strange light, as if she is conscious of her pain. Mrs. Su tries in vain to calm her down, and when all the other ways have failed, she takes out a bottle of sleeping pills. She puts two pills into a small porcelain mortar, and then, after a moment of hesitation, adds two more. Over the years she has fed the syrup with the pill powder to Beibei so that the family can have nights for undisturbed sleep.

      Calmed by the syrup, Beibei stops screaming for a short moment, and then starts again. Mrs. Su strokes Beibei’s forehead and waits for the medicine to take over her limited consciousness. When the telephone rings, Mrs. Su does not move. Later, when it rings for the fifth time, she checks Beibei’s eyes, half closed in drowsiness, and then closes the bedroom door before picking up the receiver.

      “Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you tired of me, too?” Mrs. Fong says.

      Mrs. Su tries to find excuses, but Mrs. Fong, uninterested in any of them, cuts her off. “I know who the woman is now.”

      “How much did it cost you to find out?”

      “Zero. Listen, the husband—shameless old man—he confessed himself.”

      Mrs. Su feels relieved. “So the worst is over, Mrs. Fong.”

      “Over? Not at all. Guess what he said to me this afternoon? He asked me if we could all three of us live together in peace. He said it as if he was thinking on my behalf. ‘We have plenty of rooms. It doesn’t hurt to give her a room and a bed. She is a good woman, she’ll take good care of us both.’ Taking care of his thing, for sure.”

      Mrs.