A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories by Yiyun Li

With no brothers to send his money to, he saved every coin and retired as the richest man in the region. He hired men to dig out his poor mother’s coffin and gave her a second funeral, the most extravagant one ever to take place in our town. It was in the ninth month of 1904, and to this day our old people haven’t stopped talking about every detail of the funeral: the huge coffin carved out of a sandalwood tree, stacks of gold bricks, trunks of silk clothes, and cases of jade bowls for her to use in the next life. Even more impressive were the four young girls the son had purchased from the poor peasants on the mountain, all of them twelve years old. They were put into satin dresses they would have never dreamed of wearing and were each fed a cup of mercury. The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin. With burning incense planted in their curled fingers, the four girls accompanied the mother to the other world as her loyal handmaids.
    This Great Papa’s story was the brightest page in our history, like that one most splendid firework streaking the sky before darkness floods in. Soon the last dynasty was overthrown by republics. The emperor was driven out of the Forbidden City; so were his most loyal servants, the last generation of our Great Papas. By the 1930s most of them lived in poverty in the temples around the Forbidden City. Only the smartest ones earned a fair living by showing their bodies to Western reporters and tourists, charging extra for answering questions, even more for having their pictures taken.
    THEN WE HAVE a short decade of republic, the warlords, two world wars, in both of which we fought on the winning side yet winning nothing, the civil war, and finally we see the dawn of communism. The day the dictator claims the communist victory in our country, a young carpenter in our town comes home to his newly wedded wife.
    “It says we are going to have a new life from now on,” the young wife tells the husband, pointing to a loudspeaker on their roof.
    “New or old, life is the same,” the husband replies. He gets his wife into bed and makes love to her, his eyes half closed in ecstasy while the loudspeaker is broadcasting a new song, with men and women repeating the same lyrics over and over.
    This is how the son is conceived, in a chorus of
Communism is so great, so great, and so great.
The same song is broadcast day after day, and the young mother hums along, touching her growing belly, and cutting carefully the dictator’s pictures from newspapers. Of course we never call him the dictator. We call him Our Father, Our Savior, the North Star of Our Lives, the Never Falling Sun of Our Era. Like most women of her generation, the mother is illiterate. Yet unlike others, she likes to look at newspapers, and she saves the pictures of the dictator in a thick notebook. Isn’t she the woman with the greatest wisdom in our town? No other woman would ever think of watching the dictator’s face while pregnant with a son. Of course there has always been the saying that the more a pregnant woman studies a face, the greater the possibility of the baby owning that face. Years ago, young mothers in the cities liked to watch one kind of imported doll, all of them having a foreign name, Shirley Temple. Decades later, movie stars will be the most studied faces among the pregnant mothers. But at this time the dictator is the only superstar in the media, so the mother has been gazing at the dictator’s face for ten months before the baby’s birth.
    The son is born with the dictator’s face, a miracle unnoticed by us at first. For the next ten years we will avoid looking at him, for fear we will see his dead father in his face. The father was a hardworking man, nice to his neighbors, good to his wife. We would have never imagined that he would be an enemy of our newborn communist nation. Yet there are witnesses, not one, but