Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li Page A

Back Sea, the Front Sea, and the Northern Sea, to which Boyang and Moran had taken Ruyu the day before, as it was one of the essential places for a tourist to visit. In the past week they had taken Ruyu to temples and palaces, as they would have shown the city to a cousin from out of town.
    “Why are they called seas, then?” Ruyu asked. She was not interested in the answer, yet she knew that each question granted her some power over the people she questioned. She liked to watch others feeling obliged, and sometimes more foolishly, elated, to answer her: people do not know that the moment they respond they put themselves on a stand for their interrogators to judge.
    “Maybe because Beijing is not next to the ocean?” Moran said, though without any certainty.
    Ruyu nodded, feeling lenient enough not to point out that Moran’s words made little sense. Within days of her arrival, Ruyu knew that Moran had been placed in her new life because of the convenience such a person would provide, though that did not stop her from wishing that Moran could be kept at a distance, or did not exist at all.
    “Have you ever been to the seaside?” Moran asked.
    “No.”
    “Neither have I,” Moran said. “I would like to see the ocean someday. Boyang and his family go every summer.”
    This was so like Moran, Ruyu thought, offering information when no one asked her to. The flowers every family kept on windowsills, Moran had explained to Ruyu when she’d caught Ruyu looking at the blossoms the morning after her arrival, were geraniums, and they were known to expel bugs. The two magnolia trees at the center of the courtyard were at least fifty years old, planted as “husband and wife” trees for good fortune. In late summer everyone would watch out for wasps because the grapevines Teacher Pang cultivated at the end of the courtyard were known for their juicy grapes. The pomegranate tree by the fence, which was now dropping heavy-petaled, fire-colored blossoms, did not bear edible fruit, though a tree in the next quadrangle, which was not blooming quite as well, produced the sweetest pomegranates. She’d explained each family’s background: Teacher Pang and his wife, Teacher Li, were both elementary school teachers, and they had agreed not to work in the same school or district because it would have been boring to be around the same people all the time; only the youngest of their three children was still in school, the older two having jobs at factories, but all three lived at home. Old Shu, a widower whose children had all married, lived with his mother, who would turn a hundred next summer. Watermelon Wen, a loud and happy bus driver, had earned his nickname because he had a round belly; he and his wife, an equally loud and round trolley conductor, had a pair of twin boys not yet in school. Sometimes their mother would not differentiate them and called them both Little Watermelon. Moran’s own parents worked in the Ministry of Mines, her father a researcher and her mother a clerk.
    Only stupid people, in the opinion of Ruyu’s grandaunts, would freely dispense what little knowledge they possessed; at times even teachers were not exempted from that category. Ruyu had always found the world a predictable place, as it was filled with people who would, with words and actions, confirm her grandaunts’ convictions of the smallness of any mortal mind.
    Ruyu watched Moran weave a few willow leaves into a sailboatand release it into the water. Foolishly occupied, she could hear her grandaunts comment. “Why don’t you go with Boyang to the seaside?” she asked.
    Moran laughed. “I’m not part of his family.”
    Ruyu gazed at Moran, as though she was waiting for the latter to defend her shoddy logic with more sensible words, and Moran realized that perhaps family meant something different for Ruyu. Before her arrival, Moran and Boyang had talked between themselves, but neither knew what it was like to be an orphan. Years ago, when