Kinder Than Solitude

8

“Please know that every day I live for when I come to you. Please let the strangers around me remain strangers. They don’t know you, and they pity me because they don’t know you.”

Ruyu stopped, sensing something had gone awry. She used to love this last moment of her day, when nothing stood between God — her future — and herself: even her grandaunts, who had retreated behind the curtain to have their private conversation with him, did not matter for the time being. Ruyu did not know, however, that believing was the only way for her grandaunts to maintain their dignity in a life that had taken too much from them: the death, too early, of a weak-willed mother, the disappearance of a brother for whom they had exhausted their love and hope, properties confiscated, privilege of belonging to the Church deprived. The world was a bleak stopover for the sisters, in which they, armed against it with a religion that had become more of their own making as time passed, were either unaware of the shadow they had cast in an orphan’s life or else regarded it as irrelevant; she, in turn, her pupils adjusted to a perennial dusk, deemed what she perceived in their formidable shadow the only life worth living, sterility mistaken for purity, aloofness for devoutness.

Since Ruyu had come to Beijing, however, the calm brought by her conversation with God had vanished. Could it be that he was keeping himself distant just as a test? Or was it possible that he had stayed behind, leaving her among strangers? Pleas made to him, love and loyalty expressed repeatedly and desperately — these, unacknowledged, were strewn around her, corpses of unwanted words like those dead flies when summer ended. How odd, Ruyu thought now, that other insects would disappear when winter came, but flies would drop dead on windowsills or at the corners of a room, not allowed to escape, even in death, their ugliness displayed publicly.

Perhaps there’s a reason for that, as there’s a reason for anything; her grandaunts would say God alone knows what it is. But if God could forsake the flies and deprive them of private deaths, how could she know if she was different in his eyes from those flies? Her grandaunts had never had doubts in God, but what if they had made a mistake — what if he, like her parents, found little merit in her to keep her?

A panic hit Ruyu with such violence that she felt as though she were being attacked by a physical force, her breath taken away by an acute pain. She opened her eyes and unclasped her hands, yet nothing had changed in her surroundings: the lamp on the desk was shining steadily; the gloved hands of Mickey Mouse on the clock face moved forward by even leaps. She was alone in the bedroom she shared with Shaoai, her back to the entrance, the curtain undisturbed. Uncle and Aunt had already gone to bed. Grandpa had been fed the sleeping pill that would keep him quiet through the night. Shaoai and a friend of hers from college were in the living room watching TV with the volume turned low. From the open window, Ruyu heard the startled cry of a cicada, with desperate urgency, before it went silent. The first autumn crickets chirped in the grass, their night song melancholy.

Ruyu ordered herself to focus. Any minute now, Shaoai and her friend Yening might turn off the television and come into the bedroom. Yening had returned from her hometown on a late-afternoon train for the new semester at the university, and she was going to spend the night with them before moving back into her dorm. It had seemed natural to all that the bed Ruyu shared with Shaoai — a double bed — would be just fine for the three girls.

“Please forgive me, and please give me courage to be worthy of your love,” Ruyu started again, though her fear that she was a nuisance to him was growing more intense. She remained in the same position without opening her eyes, waiting for the fierce pain she was experiencing to pass, all the while knowing that the pain could be nothing but his punishment. He had seen all there was to see, and he would be seeing to it that all would be well for her. Why, then, was she still asking him every day for strength, which she should have had by now? Wouldn’t he be irritated by her failure to live up to his standards; wouldn’t he be burdened by her neediness; by her love, which she did not have a way to show; by her constantly asking more from him, always asking, always?

Soundlessly someone entered the room, but only when she dropped a pillow on the bed did Ruyu sense her presence. Ruyu turned around abruptly to face Yening, who was sitting on the bed, her eyes fixed on Ruyu yet unfocused, perhaps seeing nothing but phantoms in her own mind. At dinner, Ruyu had noticed that Yening, a tall and wispy girl, had been courteous toward everyone but had not eaten or talked much. Aunt had not bombarded her with questions, nor had she pushed more food onto the guest; though, nervous, with her incessant chattering, Aunt had been stupider than ever. Ruyu had noticed — and having a visitor among them confirmed her observation — that Aunt seemed superstitiously fearful of quiet, as though any moment not filled with some kind of back-and-forth indicated a failure on her part, or worse, some sort of impending disaster.

“I thought you were watching TV with Shaoai,” Ruyu said when the older girl did not speak or avert her stare. There was something in Yening that Ruyu found unsettling, but she was too young to know the reason: the older girl occupied the same impertinent role in life as Ruyu did; the hardest loss is to be defeated by one’s own strategy in others’ hands.

Yening shrugged. From the living room they could hear Shaoai change channels. “What were you doing when I came in?” Yening asked.

“Nothing.”

“You can’t be doing nothing.”

“I was only sitting here and thinking.”

“Thinking of what? Or whom?”

Ruyu shrugged, then realized that she had just learned the distasteful gesture from Yening.

“Were you, by any chance, talking to your god? Shaoai said you conversed with your god more than you conversed with us mortals,” Yening said, choosing her words with a malicious care.

Ruyu stared back. Yening waited, and when no reply came, she pointed to the accordion case in the corner of the room with her chin. “Is that your accordion?”

“Yes.”

“I heard no one around here could make you condescend to play.”

Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had sent her friend in to humiliate her. Why else would Shaoai even talk to her friend about Ruyu? Shaoai did not like Ruyu, that much was clear: she seldom talked to Ruyu, which was, in fact, fine because Shaoai rarely talked to anyone these days without making sharp comments. But at night she never seemed to tire of putting on a show of hostility and disgust. She waited until Ruyu went to bed and then would turn off the light while continuing to read with a handheld lamp, furiously turning pages and sometimes ending her reading by throwing the book out of the mosquito netting so that it dropped on the floor with a thud. Ruyu, who got up as early as possible — fortunately, Shaoai never woke up early enough to trap Ruyu with another round of confrontational displays — sometimes stole a glance at the book on the floor if the cover was facing up. For several days in a row it was a book called The Second Sex by someone named de Beauvoir; the book’s title made Ruyu uncomfortable, and once she knew its yellow spine and dog-eared look, she avoided looking at the title even if it was staring back at her from the floor. There were other books too, thinner, all with disagreeable titles: Nausea, The Flies, The Plague. One book, though, had caught Ruyu’s attention—The Confessions of a Child of the Century; she would like to know what the book was about, but she dared not move a page for fear that Shaoai would wake up and catch her.

“I played the piano at your age,” Yening said. Ridiculous, Ruyu thought, her speaking as though they were from different generations. “I practiced all the time. I didn’t have enough time, though, and wouldn’t have minded having forty-eight hours a day for piano. I’m surprised, according to our friend out there, that you haven’t touched your instrument since you came.”

“The accordion is a loud instrument.”

“All instruments are loud.”

“I don’t want to disturb Grandpa.”

“How do you know you can even disturb him?” Yening said, and then softened her voice. “I’m worried that you’ll lose your touch if you don’t practice every day.”

“I can wait until school starts. Moran said there’s a music room in the school.”

“Still, your neighbors must think you’re too haughty to play for them.”

“Nobody thinks that,” Ruyu protested.

“How can you be so certain?” Yening asked, opening her eyes innocently before narrowing them again. “You’re too young to know anything. You don’t know half of what people think of you,” she said with the dismissive gentleness people reserve for crippled animals and dead babies.

Ruyu flinched. Indeed, quite a few neighbors had asked her to perform an evening concert for the quadrangle. She’d shaken her head politely at the requests and wondered why people were persistent in their efforts to make her do things that she had made clear she would not do. She neither liked nor disliked the accordion, which had been chosen for her by her grandaunts. In fact, the instrument suited her poorly. Its bulky body felt like an inelegant extension of her chest. Sounds coming from it were too loud, the music she played — polkas and waltzes from places she imagined as being perennially sunny — too cheerful. Back home, she sometimes practiced by pressing the keyboards without unbuttoning the bellows; only then could she see herself as a musician, the silent tunes an extension of her thoughts, heard by nobody, heeded by no one.

“What charming, endearing innocence,” Yening said, smiling to herself as if savoring the comment, but before Ruyu replied, she started to pat her pillow. “Which side of the bed do you take?” she said, her face all of a sudden frosty, as though she had exhausted her goodwill and wished to be left alone.

Later, lying awake, Ruyu heard Shaoai climb into bed between her and Yening. Neither of the girls was pleasant, and Ruyu wondered how they’d become friends. Or perhaps that was how things had to be for those two, one person’s edge constantly cutting into the other person’s edge, those who hurt others seeking likewise to be hurt.

Much later, Ruyu was awakened by an angry exchange of whispers. She did not know what time it was or how long the quarrel had been going on. She stayed as still as she could and kept her breathing even, and soon it became clear that the two girls were arguing about a boy.

“Let him go off to be a monk,” Shaoai said, “if he doesn’t have the courage to stand up for himself.”

“It’s not a question of courage. The question is, what’s better for him?”

“Or should we ask what’s better for you? Certainly it’d be harder for you to seduce him if he shaves his head and lives in a temple.”

“That’s distasteful, Shaoai.”

“I don’t think truth ever tastes good to anyone’s palate.”

“But you’re unfairly harsh toward him because you’re jealous of him.”

“Jealous is the wrong word,” Shaoai said. “He’s not worthy of my jealousy.”

“Of course not,” Yening said. “Any boy I lay my eyes on is a low creature for you. All you want is for me to love no one, and to be stuck with you.”

“If it feels that way, you are welcome to get yourself unstuck any time.”

“Certainly you’d say so, now that you have a cute and dumb girl sharing your bed.”

Both girls were quiet for a moment, and then Ruyu felt a slight breeze on her cheek as Yening lifted the mosquito netting. “Where are you going?” Shaoai asked. Yening did not answer, and a moment later Ruyu heard her tattered slippers going off toward the living room. She waited for the bell on top of the door to jingle, but it did not.

“Have you eavesdropped enough?” Shaoai said, her voice low but not whispering.

Ruyu stayed still.

“I know you’re awake,” Shaoai said. “Just so you don’t misunderstand the situation: the boy we were talking about used to be a friend of mine, too, but now he’s worried about disciplinary action against him for what he did in the protest. His parents arranged for him to leave the university and go to a temple for a while. Imagine that. To be exempt from secular matters.”

Please make her stop. Please make her vanish, because she doesn’t matter to you, and so she doesn’t matter to me.

“I guess all you need to know is that Yening and I disagreed about his decision,” Shaoai said. “She thinks it’s a good idea. She thinks any idea that saves his ass is a good idea. But then she feels miserable about letting him go into a world where she has no right to be. Wouldn’t it be nicer if she could be his personal temple?”

The bitterness in Shaoai’s words was too much. “I didn’t ask you to tell me,” Ruyu said.

“I’m telling you to spare you the extra time you’d spend dwelling on it,” Shaoai said. “Now you know the whole story; you’d better forget it tomorrow.”

Yet there was more to it, Ruyu knew, but that mattered little to her because it was not her position to discern the true from the untrue: secrets of any kind breed ugliness. Ruyu felt an uncleanness clinging to her the way she had read in books a leech attached itself to a body.

“Though, to think about it, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing for you to know a little more about how the world works,” Shaoai said. “Who knows what your grandaunts have done to taint you?”

“You don’t even know them,” Ruyu said.

“Do I want to know them?” Shaoai retorted. “From how they’ve brought you up, I would advise that a young person should run the moment she sees them.”

Back home when Ruyu had seen people exchange mocking looks behind her grandaunts’ backs, she had learned not to feel bothered: none of those people understood her grandaunts, and, more important, her grandaunts did not need the understanding of others. She wished she could now treat Shaoai’s chatter as one of those irrelevant voices, but Shaoai seemed to have made up her mind not to be dismissed. “Now let me explain to you what I mean,” Shaoai said. “What do you think of Yening? Is she a good person in your eyes? Would she be a good person in your grandaunts’ opinion?”

“She’s your friend,” Ruyu said. “Why do you need my opinion?”

“See, your answer proves my exact point. Before she’s my friend, she is a being out there, a fact; anyone should be able to form an opinion of her. My mother thinks her eccentric. My father probably thinks of her as a spoiled child, as I am. Our very cowardly friend — the would-be monk — thinks she is wickedly attractive and wants her to wait for him to finish his stint in the temple so he can marry her. But you, what’s your opinion? All you do is look at her coldly and say to yourself: she has nothing to do with me. And then she becomes nothing to you. Do you see that? There is a human being there, whom you, with whatever absurd logic your grandaunts have given you, turn into a non-being.”

Ruyu felt as though she were being swept into an abyss by Shaoai’s words, which were ludicrous yet had the irresistible force of insanity. “But it’s true that Yening and I have nothing to do with each other,” she said, but realized her error right away. To give up a position of silence, to allow oneself to be engaged — already she was allowing Shaoai what she did not deserve.

“You missed my point,” Shaoai said. “I am only using her as an example. Or maybe she is the wrong example. But those people shot dead in Tiananmen Square? Have you found yourself thinking, for even a moment, about them or their families? Have you asked Moran or Boyang about what they have seen or heard? No, and no, because those dead people have nothing to do with you; hence, they are nothing to you. Rest assured, you are not the only one who maintains that stance. More and more people will choose that attitude now that a revolution has been crushed, but that does not exempt you. In fact, I have to say, you must have been born a heartless person, or else you must have been thoroughly brainwashed by your grandaunts. Either way, I find your lack of interest in anything but your own little faith to be more than horrifying. Of course you can shrug your dainty shoulders and say, what does your opinion have to do with me?”

Ruyu did not speak when Shaoai finished her monologue. Her silence seemed to infuriate Shaoai even more. “Well?” she said. “Have you made up your mind not to condescend to answer me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Ruyu said.

“It’s not what I want you to say. It’s what you want to say for yourself. Come on, defend yourself. Defend your grandaunts. Let’s at least have some fair play.”

“My grandaunts don’t need me to defend them.”

“And you yourself?”

“I’m fine with your thinking of me as anything, or nothing,” Ruyu said, and was relieved to hear Yening’s shuffling steps nearing the bedroom. Before Shaoai could find more words, Yening entered the room. “Why the silence all of a sudden?” she said to the dark room, laughing lightly. “I thought you two were having a good time.”

The next day, Shaoai helped Yening move back into her dorm, and when she did not return for dinner, Aunt wondered aloud if she had missed Shaoai saying that she was going to move back into the dorm that day, too. “You’d think I wouldn’t miss something so important,” Aunt said to Uncle, who comforted her, and said he himself had missed it too, if that indeed was Shaoai’s plan.

When Aunt asked Ruyu, she said she didn’t know of any such plan, either. Perhaps in Shaoai’s eyes, Ruyu was like one of those birds that occupied another bird’s nest; but the thought did not bring Ruyu any remorse, nor did it diminish her relief that soon Shaoai would move out of the house, and she would have a bedroom to herself.

Just as the dinner was ending, Shaoai returned and with a stern face announced that she had decided to commute for the new semester. Uncle and Aunt exchanged a nervous look. “Did any school official talk to you?” Aunt asked.

“No.”

“Does that mean everything will be all right?”

“Nothing is ever all right, if you ask me,” Shaoai said.

“But the school — will they … will you …” Aunt tried in vain to find the right words.

“You’re worried that I’ll be expelled? And I won’t graduate and won’t have a job and will remain a burden to you forever?” Shaoai said. “Let me say this: there are worse things in the world than not graduating with a useless degree in international trade and relations.”

Aunt and Uncle watched as Shaoai stormed back to her bedroom. Had there been a door, Ruyu thought, Shaoai would have banged it shut as befitting her drama, and, as though the same thought had occurred to Shaoai, she came out of the bedroom and said that it was stuffy in the house and she was going for a walk. Aunt glanced at the clock on the wall and was about to say something, but Uncle shook his head discreetly at her. A moment later, the door was slammed shut; the bell on top, unconstrained, swung back and forth furiously.

No one said anything, but when Aunt looked up and caught Ruyu’s eyes, she sighed and said she wished that they could offer her a more peaceful stay, and that Shaoai were a better companion. “Had your grandaunts known what kind of failures we are as parents, they might not have sent you to us,” Aunt said, looking dejected.

“Every family has a book of challenging fate written out for them,” Uncle said, solicitously looking up at Ruyu, pleading for her to agree with the cliché, so she did, saying that Aunt should not think too much, and that everything would turn out all right in the end. Eager to believe someone — preferably someone other than her husband — Aunt seemed to have found comfort in Ruyu’s words, and repeated the saying herself as though to further console the other two in the room. When Grandpa made the noises demanding his supper, Aunt sprang into action. With a tender sadness, Uncle watched Aunt fill a bowl of gruel, adding soft, fermented tofu on top. At least they had each other, Ruyu thought, just as her grandaunts had each other.

When Aunt was out of the room, Uncle said to the half-empty platters on the table, “It’s kind of you to be understanding.”

For a moment Ruyu wondered if Uncle, who so rarely initiated a conversation, was in fact talking to her. She looked at him, but he only smiled at the unfinished dishes, the same way he smiled when the neighbors teased someone in the yard, or when Aunt complained about the weather. Ruyu did not know if he expected an answer from her.

“Shaoai has been headstrong from the very beginning,” Uncle continued. “A difficult baby, you would say. We talked about having another child after her — Aunt wanted another one — but I was so frightened that I could not imagine having to go through everything a second time.”

“But you might have had a different child,” Ruyu said. “I’ve heard people say that siblings from the same parents can have opposite temperaments.”

Uncle sighed. “Many told us that, too, but I didn’t believe them. To be honest, I now regret my stubbornness. If we had had a second child, he or she might have made it easier for us now, don’t you think? At least Shaoai would have learned how to be nice to someone younger than she. We’re sorry that she doesn’t really consider you part of the family.”

Ruyu shook her head as though to say that these things did not matter. Had Uncle and Aunt had another child — a boy, for instance — her grandaunts might have thought the household unfit for Ruyu. She would then have been sent to another place to live, with a different set of people … but it was useless to pursue such thoughts. She stood up and said she would put the leftovers away if Uncle had finished his meal.

The last days of summer were always sunny. The August heat, already abating, was still intense enough to create an illusion of never-endedness — of a moment, a day, a season. Cicadas, stubborn creatures, having spent long years underground, would not forsake their posts in the trees; yet their days were numbered: dusk muted their singing and brought, along with the first breeze of the evening, the autumnal song of the crickets.

One leaf drops and you know autumn is here; on the morning of the last day of August, Ruyu heard Boyang’s grandmother exchange the cliché with a neighbor in the courtyard. The season’s end seemed to have brought out the sentimental side of people, as though everyone was preparing for a small part of himself to die with the summer lives. Watermelon Wen, upon hearing the old woman’s words, chanted in a drawn-out falsetto an opera passage about an old general’s grief over a tree that had aged during his fifty-year war career; Wen’s twin boys imitated their father from behind the screen door and then fell to giggling, cutting the performance short and diluting the sadness.

Wait until you fall in love with the autumn in Beijing, neighbors kept telling Ruyu, or else they would say, wait until you fall in love with Beijing this autumn. The notion that someone would fall in love with a place or a time was new to Ruyu; she might have tolerated it better were it not for the certainty of everyone about how she should feel. A season was a season for her — no more, no less, because that was the way time was for her grandaunts, each day a replica of the previous day; a place, any place, was merely a spot for resting during one’s migration from beginning to end. Only in a drama would an old man lay his hand on the coarse bark of a tree and mourn in advance his own death; in real life, a man’s grief for himself was as wordless as the dim light in Grandpa’s eyes, the passing days pooling into a stale puddle around his dying body.

On the morning of August 31, Boyang roped Ruyu’s accordion onto the back of his bicycle, and Moran sat astride her bicycle, balancing it with both legs and waiting for Aunt to finish talking with Ruyu so that she could hop onto the rear rack. It was the day the entering class was to register at the high school. In addition to a general admissions letter, Aunt handed Ruyu a note directing her to meet the music teacher after registration.

The school, No. 135, occupied an old temple. Its spacious, park-like yard was dotted with ancient elms and mulberry bushes, the well-designed garden in its center long since taken over by wildflowers and ivy. Several rows of rudely constructed, single-story brick buildings had been added as classrooms and dorms, giving the campus the look of a hastily planned people’s commune. The temple itself, which was occupied by the administrators and the teachers, had been split into two levels and divided into offices with thin walls, though signs of the original architecture — the high ceiling, the round wooden pillars, and the long narrow windows — remained visible. Inside, it was perennially dark: the walls and the ceilings retained their wooden panels painted a deep brown; the floor was the original brick one, gray and uneven and in places repaired with a patch of cement. Fluorescent tubes buzzed in the hallway and inside the offices. There was nothing to love, Ruyu reflected, about this new school.

Moran and Boyang seemed elated that all three of them were assigned to the same homeroom. After registering, they took her to meet Teacher Shu, the music instructor. The music room was in a cottage at the far end of campus, which Boyang said once served as sleeping quarters for the monks’ visiting family members. Ruyu imagined Shaoai’s friend Yening in a similar cottage at another temple, the boy she was in love with wearing a long, drab robe and counting his beads silently while she poured her heart out. How odd, Ruyu thought, finding oneself in a place that had no relevance to one’s life but was necessary for the time being: her grandaunts would not have any idea that she would be schooled in a former Buddhist temple.

Teacher Shu was one of the ugliest men Ruyu had ever met. Short, bald, with an unevenly shaven face and a pair of round eyes that were so wide open they seemed never in need of blinking, he reminded her of an owl with ruffled feathers, more clueless than menacing. When he smiled, he did so with unadorned glee, showing teeth that had been yellowed by smoking. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said when Ruyu presented herself, and waved a dismissive hand at Boyang and Moran, who dutifully left the music room but lingered on the porch, leaving the door ajar.

Ruyu played “The Song of Spanish Bullfighters” and “The Blue Danube”; when asked to keep on, she played a couple of polkas. She had not practiced for a month, and her fingers, though not uncertain, stumbled a few times at places they had not before. Teacher Shu nodded with a pensive look, and when she stopped, he asked to take a look at her accordion.

The instrument, a 120-bass model made by Parrot Accordion — the most coveted model of the best brand name, for which Ruyu’s grandaunts had paid a black market price when she had turned nine — seemed to impress him more than either Ruyu’s performance or her grade 8 certificate, which she had brought to show him. He touched the head of the golden parrot with a finger, and then wiped his fingerprint away with his sleeve. Could he have a try, he asked. Yes, Ruyu said, and refrained from looking at his cigarette-stained, stubby fingers as he buckled the instrument and loosened the straps.

“How long have you played?”

“Six years.”

Teacher Shu said that six years was not bad for a girl her age. “Do your parents play any instruments?” he asked, but before Ruyu could think of a proper reply, he launched into “The Song of Mongolian Herdsmen,” his unsightly right hand moving up and down the keyboard like a showy dancer, his left hand pulling and pressing the bellows with an effortless rhythm. In the middle of his performance, a tall, sinewy woman approached the entrance. Moran and Boyang, who had been leaning against the door frame, quickly straightened and made way for the woman. She took a seat in a nearby chair and watched Teacher Shu, her face softening without showing a definite smile. When he finished the song, she introduced herself as Headmistress Liu. Later, when Ruyu got to know Teacher Shu better, he would tell her stories about Headmistress Liu when nobody was around, how she had remained unmarried to fulfill her ambition of becoming a top educator, how underneath her stern and intimidating appearance, she was a kind woman without many people close to her.

“See, that’s how you play the accordion. It’s a one-man band, and you have to be a bit of everything yourself. You have to know how to sing and whisper and bellow and talk and croon and even weep,” Teacher Shu said, unstrapping the accordion and handing it carefully to Ruyu. “Imagine yourself as one of those bullfighters, and a giant bull is charging at you. What feeling does it give you when you launch into the song?”

Ruyu stared at him. She did not know if it was a question requiring an answer from her.

Teacher Shu scratched his head. “Well, that may be asking too much of you. All right, you can’t be a bullfighter. But picture yourself in a long, sweeping dress being waltzed around a ballroom in Vienna,” Teacher Shu said, and hummed a few measures of the “Blue Danube” and swirled himself around, his arms held up properly, his chin lifted. Boyang laughed, but was right away stopped by Moran.

“Now, how does your body move in a dance like that?” Teacher Shu said when he circled back and stopped in front of Ruyu.

“I don’t know how to dance.”

“You don’t have to know. Just imagine. Think of yourself as Princess Sissi. Think of yourself as Romy Schneider in Sissi’s shoes,” Teacher Shu said. “Do you know the movie I’m talking about?”

“No.”

Teacher Shu paused, and then made a gesture of resignation.

Ruyu wondered if she had failed her interview. Apart from Teacher Shu and her former accordion teacher, an older man her grandaunts had paid to teach her twice a week, she had not met another musician and had not given much thought to music or to those who played it. She neither liked nor disliked music, as liking or disliking anything in life was beside the point. She could just as easily have become a chess master or a painter or a ballet dancer — anything that would have differentiated her from her peers in the provincial city. That music had been chosen for her, that the accordion had been the instrument — these things Ruyu had accepted because they were part of the necessities of her life. She did not see the point of imagining herself into a princess’s body.

Teacher Shu nodded to Headmistress Liu, and they withdrew to a small office adjacent to the music room. Moran beckoned to Ruyu, and she hesitated and then moved closer to the door, carrying the accordion case with her. “Isn’t Teacher Shu the most fun person?” Moran said.

“Is he?” Ruyu said.

Moran blushed. “Oh, he may look off-putting at first, but trust me, he’s really one of the best teachers.”

“Just so you know,” Boyang whispered to Ruyu, “Moran has had a crush on Teacher Shu for three years now.”

“Hey,” Moran said. “Hey!”

“And Teacher Shu is not married,” Boyang said, still addressing Ruyu but grinning at Moran, who was about to say something when Teacher Shu and Headmistress Liu came out. He handed a folder of music sheets to Ruyu and told her that he would teach her every Tuesday at four, starting the following week. She was welcome to leave the instrument there, too, he said, and handed her two keys, a small one for the security room where all the instruments were kept, and a big copper one for the cottage door.

Ruyu’s grandaunts had not said anything about accordion lessons, and she wondered if she would have to explain to Teacher Shu that she did not have money to pay him. Would that affect her status at school? Later she voiced her doubt to Moran and Boyang. “Why would you pay him if you’re a student at the school?” Boyang said.

“Why else should he teach me?” Ruyu said, and explained that at home her teacher was paid ten yuan every time he taught her, plus round-trip fare for the bus.

“Doesn’t Teacher Shu get a salary from the school?” Moran said.

“But is the school going to pay him extra to teach me?” Ruyu said. “I could’ve not come here. He would’ve earned the same salary without the bother of teaching me, no?”

Moran turned to look closely at Ruyu, but her face was inscrutable as always. Ruyu’s concern sounded sensible, but Moran could not help but think something was wrong with Ruyu’s logic. There was more to life than money, Moran wanted to explain to Ruyu, and in her mind she could do it well, patiently, as when she had had to resolve a conflict between two neighborhood kids. Like the other families in the quadrangle, Moran’s family was not well-off, but their struggles were the same ones experienced by most people they knew, of having to calculate well to make ends meet, of spreading the ration of eggs, meat, and other food wisely throughout the month. Even so, Moran’s parents never failed to make extra dumplings to give to neighbors or to share the fresh fruit her father sometimes got free from working with those in the quadrangle. This kindness was returned by others, too, and the life Moran knew, which took place as much within her family as outside it with neighbors and friends, was not one in which wealth, or the lack of wealth, was much thought of as an important factor. But even as Moran went over this argument in her mind, she knew it was not merely Ruyu’s monetary concern that unsettled her. To envision Teacher Shu’s life without her seemed natural for Ruyu; it must be equally easy for her to imagine a life without Teacher Shu, or, for that matter, without Boyang and Moran herself. Moran, who did not know what was out of her reach, unconsciously moved closer to Ruyu, as though looking for reassurance.

“If you ask me …” Boyang said.

“But nobody is asking you,” Moran snapped, taking both of them by surprise.

“All right, even if you’re not asking me, I say let’s not worry ourselves about this,” Boyang said. Things, he added, would work out one way or another, and instead of standing in front of the school gate like three idiotic new students, how about going to the Back Sea, renting a boat for the rest of the afternoon, and enjoying the last day of summer before going back to the cage?

“The cage?” Moran said. “If your parents heard you talk about school like that, they would take you into their charge.”

“Then I’d be in trouble for real,” Boyang said, pantomiming a caged monkey and emitting bitter screams.

Ruyu watched his performance, and when she did not smile as Moran did, Boyang asked Ruyu if she was still worrying about her accordion lesson. She shook her head. “How do you know you’re not in a cage here and now?” she asked.

“Ha ha, you’ve got me,” Boyang said. “The best jokes are always told by people like you, who don’t even smile when they say funny things.”

Moran glanced at Boyang, and brought up the boating proposal again. The day, with its bright sun still high in the cloudless sky, had taken on an unreal quality. The glimpses Ruyu had seen of their coming school life, when Boyang and Moran had shown her the campus, seemed strangely distant from what they were used to in the summer. Classrooms, newly painted, with chairs still resting on top of the desks, their legs pointing upward and forming a small metal forest, had looked familiar yet unwelcoming; the science annex, where in one room Bunsen burners clustered on a bench next to the door, and in another a few new posters covered up old ones, the insides of frogs and human beings vividly portrayed, had felt cold and lifeless; next to the track field, a gym teacher had been hosing down a few cement Ping-Pong tables; at the far end of campus, the students who boarded at the dorms had already moved in, and a few colorful blankets were airing out on the clotheslines; two girls had been standing at the entrance to a dorm, looking perplexed: one of them had placed her thermos a little too close to the edge of the steps, and it had fallen, almost soundlessly, hot water pouring down the steps, steaming along the way.

All excitements were pointing to tomorrow, when actions and interactions would decide who each of them would be in a new grade, among a new group of people; today thus became a vacuum, having turned into nothing before its time.

Listlessly, Moran looked at Ruyu, hoping she’d agree to the impromptu outing, dreading that she would say no. Spending the day alone, at least for Moran, seemed unimaginable: rarely was a day in her life passed without Boyang; yet with or without their companionship, Ruyu seemed undisturbed all the same.

“Another day by the lake?” Ruyu asked, though her tone was as vague as her face, and Moran could not detect any preference.

Moran and Boyang could easily cycle to their favorite spot by the lake, hop into a rowboat, and spend the rest of the afternoon afloat, listening to the cicadas in the trees, watching the peddlers in the alleyways, and talking about trifles, but this prospect, which a month ago would have been the perfect picture of a summer day, with its familiar mindlessness, now felt incomplete, as though by entering their world, Ruyu had made it smaller. Already the three of them felt, at least to Moran, more of a unit than just Boyang and herself. “Do come along,” Moran said, and the begging note in her own voice made her shiver slightly in the shade of the trees.