短篇小说｜A Flawless Silence
A few times a year, around major Chinese holidays, Min received an e-mail from a man whom she had met twice in her life. Every November—after the celebration of another birthday, on November 3rd, he never failed to remind her—he also attached a picture of himself, and begged for a picture of her. In the past twelve years, the number of his grandchildren had quadrupled. His oldest grandson had graduated from college and taken a good job in New York City. The next two grandchildren were in college. There were a few more, mostly on the West Coast. The youngest, a boy born with a noble look, the man had nicknamed J.C., for Julius Caesar. In 2012, his wife had died, but he was healthy in general, minus some common conditions that plagued old people—high blood pressure and faulty short-term memory. There were other details in his e-mails: a week of vacation in Hawaii, a couple new to the farmers’ market who worked as elementary-school teachers but sold blueberries on weekends, a favorite restaurant closing because of a rent hike. Most people would have written long ago with a stern reply, telling the sender to stop e-mailing; most people would have blocked him had he persisted.
“I turned eighty-four last week,” the most recent message began. “I was born in the Year of the Monkey. I’m attaching a family picture taken on the day of my birthday. If my memory is still good, you were born in the Year of the Rat, so you’re forty-four. Can you send me a picture of you so I can see what you look like now?”
It had been 3 A.M. when the man, who lived in a suburb of Seattle, in a retirement facility five minutes from his eldest son’s family, wrote Min, who lived just south of San Francisco. Min had chronic insomnia, and checking her phone when she couldn’t sleep exacerbated the condition. It was bad enough that the man had filled the void of his night calculating Min’s age. It was much worse that the message had ambushed her during her own wakefulness. She thought of telling the man to leave her alone. You’re a nuisance, she rehearsed, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
But in the morning, as Min drove the twins to school, she was glad she had not responded. Perhaps the man would die between this month and the next, or between this year and the next. Min looked forward to the day his e-mails stopped coming: for once, she would win a battle through silence.
“Mommy, tell Emmie she’s wrong,” Deanna said.
“Mommy, tell Deanna she’s wrong.”
The previous day, the girls had reported the addition of two new chicks in the school garden, Pancake and Waffle, thus named because the gardening teacher could not tell them apart. Emmie was insisting that after cleaning the coop she could tell the difference between the two. Deanna was sensibly pointing out that the chick Emmie called Pancake might have been Waffle in the first place.
Min said that they were both right, adding “in a way”—a phrase she used often when the girls were in disagreement. They refuted her at once in a joint effort.
“Shall we change the subject?” Min said.
“Amelia said she used to think pepper spray was a condiment,” Deanna said.
“Amelia’s middle name is some pasta’s name,” Emmie said.
“No, a cheese’s name,” Deanna said.
“It may be both,” Min said. In a way, she thought, everything can be something else.
“Kevin is Republican,” Emmie said.
Min must have missed something. “How do you know?”
“He wrote a letter to Trump,” Emmie said.
“And said, ‘Dear Mr. Trump, I’m your supporter, but could you be a better person so more people will like you?’ ” Deanna said. “Everyone else wrote to Hillary.”
Min looked at the twins in the rearview mirror. They nodded back convincingly. It turned out, when she questioned further, that the day before, during an activity called “Understanding the Election Results,” the third graders had all written a letter to either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump.
Sandra, Kevin’s mother, was in tears when Min ran into her in the school parking lot. Had she heard this talk about Kevin’s being Republican, Sandra asked, and Min admitted that she had. “I told the teacher to take his letter down from the display,” Sandra said. “She should have checked with me first. He has no idea what it means to be Republican.”
“There’s no real harm done,” Min said.
“All the kids will tell their parents, if they haven’t already,” Sandra said, and then, before a group of parents reached them, “Let’s go get coffee.”
Sandra and Min had served on the school’s hospitality committee for the past two years, and, before that, on the lice-buster team. They got along because Sandra could make the smallest encounter in a grocery store into a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, and Min liked to listen. Sandra reminded Min of her mother, who, though widowed young, had never lost her fondness for storytelling, and had always been quick to laugh.
Min had not inherited her mother’s storytelling abilities. When the twins were in kindergarten, their teacher had chastised Min. “They’re strong readers,” the teacher had said, “but in this country we have a tradition of reading to our children even if they can read by themselves. It’s a bonding experience.”
“In this country” did not sound like something that someone in a progressive school in California would say, and Min decided not to heed the teacher’s comment. When the girls read together, they acted out each page with more liveliness than Min could offer. If the teacher talked to her again, she’d say she was hoping to foster her daughters’ creativity, “creativity” being a versatile password.
Now, over coffee, Sandra recounted Election Night. “Even before they started counting, I had this pit in my stomach. I went upstairs and worked on Kevin’s Halloween costume. Something was wrong with it, I thought. One of Pikachu’s ears looked crooked. Kevin said, Mommy, it’s already past Halloween, and I said I wanted to make the thing right so that we could donate it. But the more I worked on it the worse it looked. Then Chuck came in, and I heard him yelling. He’s winning! he said. He’s winning! Why isn’t the TV on? Kevin went downstairs while Chuck kept on and on: Didn’t I tell you he’d win? Didn’t I say that? You didn’t believe me, did you? I knew if I didn’t go downstairs he would go on yelling like that all night, so I went down and told Kevin it was his bedtime. He said it was early and he wanted to watch TV with his dad. And Chuck said, For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you? Let him stay up and celebrate with me.”
“We grow all our own bad-tasting ugly things.”
There had been no raised voices in Min’s house. Neither she nor Rich, her husband, had discussed the election results; neither had lost a moment of composure. Min had never revealed to Sandra that Rich was a Trump supporter. Chuck owned a company that dealt in cleaning supplies, a business that had been in the family for three generations. Rich, who had grown up in a poor neighborhood in Beijing and who had long ago given up his Chinese name, worked at a tech startup. Each man would think that the other deserved little respect. Was there any good in sharing with Sandra that both their husbands had been among the twenty per cent in their county who had voted for Trump? Humiliation would not bring people closer.
offer them religion
Sandra said that she had called Chuck a bigot to his face, and he had called her an equally bad name. Min had not called Rich anything denigrating. He had married her because she was not the kind of woman who would use strong words. They had talked about the election only once—these days, their conversation rarely ventured out of the safety zone of children and grocery lists and holiday plans. Rich had made a long, fervid speech in favor of Trump, and when Min had simply said she was going to vote for Clinton he had called her brainwashed. “The longer a woman’s hair is, the shorter her sight is,” he said, quoting his favorite Chinese saying, which had also been his father’s favorite and, before that, his grandfather’s.
“Don’t you sometimes want someone’s death so much that you almost believe the person could die just because of your wish?” Min said now.
“I’m sure you’re not the only one who feels that way.”
“Oh . . . ” Min said. She wasn’t thinking about Trump, she admitted.
“Who are you talking about? Not Rich, I hope.”
“Oh, no.”
“Then who?”
It was unkind of her to wish an old man a speedy death. Min quickly said something about a novel she was reading and how she wished she could strangle a character in it. That was a poor lie. Sandra would have pressed more if not for her own trouble. Too bad no other children would pronounce themselves Kevin’s allies. Min had warned the twins never to mention that their father was a Trump supporter, and they had replied that of course they wouldn’t be so stupid.
The man who would not stop writing to Min had, in a way, been responsible for her marriage, but whenever this thought occurred to her she would remind herself that nobody had forced her into marrying Rich.
Min was nineteen when she first met the man, who had been introduced to her as a potential father-in-law. He was a linguistics professor at a prominent university in Beijing, and he had three sons in America. The eldest, according to the matchmaker, worked for Microsoft, and he was the one the family had in mind for Min, but if that didn’t work out there were two other sons.
Min hadn’t shown much academic promise. She had attended a vocational school that trained girls to become secretaries. After graduation, she had worked in a department store. Why would any of those boys need to find a wife in China when they’re already in America? she asked her mother. You’re asking the blind for directions, her mother said, but I would say that they can’t possibly find someone as good as you in America.
America, Min could see, was alluring to her mother. Min’s father had died during her second year of middle school, in an accident at the steel plant where he had worked since he was eighteen. After his death, Min and her mother had lived frugally on the money her mother made running a newsstand. The compensation for her father’s accident had been saved by her mother as Min’s dowry.
Min had once had a brief schoolgirl crush, but she had never dated. She was good-looking—not in a striking way, but she had a classic look, like a figure in a Ming-dynasty painting or a period movie, her shoulders narrowing compliantly, her neck long, her complexion clear, her eyes and nose and mouth arranged in a pleasing manner.
Min had grown up thinking she was born into a role as a flawless daughter, and someday she would become a flawless daughter-in-law, wife, and mother. It turned out that she was none of these, yet she couldn’t see where she had fallen short. No one was perfect, she knew, but women in books and films often seemed flawed in a meaningful or attractive way. The other mothers at the school, when they were unhappy, had a sensible reason: a husband’s affair, a child’s diagnosis, a power shift on the school-auction committee.
Perhaps they all lived in giant doll houses. Some, like the dolls that belonged to Emmie and Deanna, had complicated life stories, with many plots and dramas and excitements. Others were like the only doll Min had had when she was young—a little creature made of hard plastic, with unbending arms and legs connected to a torso through ball sockets. Min had carried the doll around dutifully, but she had never made up a story for it. The only catastrophe that had befallen the doll had occurred on a winter night. Min had left it on a windowsill, and a power outage caused the temperature in the apartment to drop. For reasons that neither she nor her parents understood, one of the doll’s legs had disconnected from its socket and could not be put back.
The one-legged doll remained in her possession. Min did not remember ever feeling sad about the severed limb. A doll was a doll. She had not been a sentimental child.
Min had agreed with her mother that it wouldn’t hurt to meet the professor. At nineteen, she was the kind of girl some parents wanted for their sons: pretty, meek, experienced enough with hardship not to be dreamily naïve, yet not broody, either, even after losing her father.
Min and her mother met the man at the matchmaker’s apartment on a Sunday. They had tea together until the matchmaker suggested that she and Min’s mother take a walk in a nearby park. Left alone with the man, Min did not know what she was expected to do to earn his approval. He looked like a professor from a film, with his wire-rimmed glasses and impeccably parted silver hair. When he asked her questions, he used words her father would never have used. What’s your outlook on the world? What do you do to maximize your potential? When she did not know what to say, he said that the process of enlightening and perfecting oneself was like rowing a boat up a river. He then brought out a set of textbooks, called “New Concept English,” and asked which level Min thought she was. She had never heard of the textbooks, and the man, looking at her over his glasses, told her that if she wanted to go to America she should start studying English right away.
Min thought she had failed the interview. She didn’t much care.
The man moved next to her on the sofa and opened the second book in the series. He asked her to repeat after him the first lesson, titled “A Private Conversation.” Her body tensed at the closeness of their shoulders and thighs as they bent over the book.
Perhaps he had been acting only out of fatherliness, she tried to convince herself afterward. He had left the books with her and insisted that she call him the following weekend. He would arrange his schedule so that he could tutor her, he said, a plan he didn’t bring up with the matchmaker or Min’s mother. Instead, he told them that his son would come home for a summer visit, and then the two young people could properly meet.
Min never made the call. They did not have a telephone at home, and she hated to use public phones. Even when the professor expressed an urgent wish to talk with her through the matchmaker, she remained silent. The books he’d loaned to her she buried under old newspapers. After a few weeks, she was able to pretend that she had never met the man, whose fingers had lingered on her arm for a moment too long when he had said goodbye.
One day, Min’s mother told her that the professor had decided that she wasn’t a good choice. Not diligent or smart enough for his intellectual family. This verdict had been conveyed to her mother by the matchmaker.
“Did you see the photo he showed us?” Min’s mother said. “His son is not yet thirty and already going bald. If this professor worried that you would not give him intellectual grandchildren, I’d be equally concerned that his Microsoft son would give me ugly grandchildren.”
Known as “the orphan and the widow” to friends and neighbors, Min and her mother had maintained the solemnness required by their titles, but when nobody was around they had had many things to laugh about together.
At dinner a few days later, Emmie brought up Kevin’s reputation as a Republican, already cemented, it seemed, among their classmates. “Everyone feels bad for him,” Emmie said.
“I don’t,” Deanna said. “You feel bad for him because you have a crush on him.”
“I don’t think you are old enough to talk about boys or politics,” Rich said.
“You’re so ageist,” Emmie said.
Min could sense Rich’s impatience, but he only gave Emmie a cold look before turning to Deanna and asking her about her day. He had mellowed over the years. Their eldest child, Max, had grown up with a more unforgiving and volatile father, and right after college Max had moved to Singapore. Min did not feel his absence keenly, though she thought that as a mother she should have done better at missing him. She had had Max at twenty-one, and the motherhood that had come too early had turned into a blur over the years. She had loved her son, still loved him—of this much she was certain, though she didn’t know if she liked him. Can you love a person without liking him? Max and Rich had a fraught relationship, but they viewed the world similarly. For both, failing to calculate the price of every move in life was a character flaw; not taking advantage of someone else was a sin.
Sometimes Min pitied her future daughter-in-law, whoever she was, and wished that the girl could have chosen more wisely.
Conceiving another child had been Rich’s solution to a marriage on the cusp of dissolution ten years ago. Divorce would be a disaster for everyone, he’d argued coolly: Max, who would experience adolescence with unnecessary turmoil; Rich, who would face a financial setback; and Min, too—most definitely, as he would do anything to minimize his loss and maximize hers. Min knew that Rich meant everything he said. Assets would be transferred back to China, to avoid alimony; custody of Max would be fought for. But Rich didn’t know that she wanted neither his money nor his son—for a short period, she had found a strange relief in this thought. She could manage a simple life on the part-time salary she earned as a bookkeeper at Max’s former preschool.
But what kind of mother would so readily give up a child? If she didn’t love her husband enough, at least she should try to love her child better. Perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea to have another baby. Motherhood was like one of those contracts that were automatically renewed. As long as you did nothing, a charge would show up on your credit card. What’s wrong, though, with letting the automatic take over one’s life?
“Explain to me some of the dangers if Clinton had been elected,” Rich said to the girls now. Min wouldn’t mind a silent meal, but Rich believed in dinner conversations. A preparation for the children to excel in the real world. “If you can’t imagine that, you don’t have a right to talk about politics at this table.”
Emmie stuck her tongue out. Deanna, Rich’s favorite—a fact she knew, as he had told her she was smarter than her sister and her mother combined—folded her hands under her chin. “What are the dangers, Daddy?”
“For instance, any boy could have used the girls’ bathroom at school if he wanted,” Rich said. “How would you have liked that?”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about politics,” Min said.
“Except when I need to instruct my children,” Rich said.
Abruptly Min stood up and went to the kitchen, where she rummaged through the refrigerator as though she had forgotten something. On the counter there was a bottle of wine that Rich had brought home earlier, reading the label to her and telling her the price; he wanted something special, he said, when a couple of friends came over on Saturday to celebrate the election. She thought of nudging the bottle off the counter. He would tell the girls to go to their bedroom if he wanted to yell at her. She would say it was an accident, and he would say no one believed that, and, even if it had been an accident, it was unforgivable. It’s only a bottle of wine, she would say, and she didn’t need his forgiveness for such trifles. He would say something else, but they would be cut short by Emmie, who was not as good as Deanna at waiting out a storm. Why are you guys arguing? Emmie would say, and Rich would try to soften his voice and say that they were having a grownup discussion. About what? Emmie would say. About the fundamental difference between us, Min would answer. Are you going to divorce? Emmie would ask. No, of course not, they would say together.
Yet this scenario, which Min had seen in films, would never happen in her family. She and Rich had both come into the marriage without any fantasy about the other. Could love find a place in a marriage if it had not started with some degree of fantasy? They were realistic people, and marriage was weather. They lived in it without any desire to control it or change it. They knew each other well enough to know the forecast.
A few weeks after Min had met the professor, her mother had told her that a young man, who was working in America and was home for a visit, was interested in meeting her. “And this time,” her mother said, “I’ve asked about his parents. They’re just like us, not intellectuals.”
A mail-order bride, Min thought of herself much later, even though she and Rich had dated long-distance through letters and phone calls for eight months. She did not dislike him, though she’d never reread his letters, which often included lists of instructions. “You are what you wear,” he wrote in one letter, going on to explain the importance of dressing in brand-name clothes and shoes “to boost your status and confidence.” “Anyone who does not set his heart on getting rich should be ashamed of himself,” he wrote in another. “Especially in America.” On the phone, he prompted Min to study English and refresh her math skills, as his plan was to enroll her in an accounting program at a community college. From there, she could either find a stable government job with a good pension or, if she was ambitious and smart, join a company or a firm that would pay better.
Rich came from a background similar to Min’s. His father worked in the boiler room of a municipal bathhouse, and his mother in a high-school cafeteria. Rich could have turned out like many of his childhood friends, apprenticing at a factory after middle school. What had stopped him from going down that path was his fifth-grade teacher. Rich first told Min the story during one of their long-distance phone calls, and had since enjoyed repeating it to her and their children.
In the story, Rich and some friends had played truant one afternoon. The next day, the teacher, instead of giving them the usual punishment of extra work, made the boys stand in front of the class, and then asked the other pupils to imagine what the boys would look like in twenty or thirty years.
When no one spoke, the teacher turned to the boys. “All of you will end up like those men sitting out in the alleyways on a summer evening,” she said, “shirtless, stomachs folded over your belts, a beer or a cigarette in your hands, having nothing better to do than yell at your wives and children so that you can feel good about yourselves. If your parents aren’t ashamed of you, I assure you, your children will be.”
Rich always ended his story by quoting the teacher, but Min knew there was more to it. His father had been one of those men. Her own father would have been described similarly. She might have married a man like that had she stayed in Beijing. Perhaps it was wrong to say there had not been any fantasy. Rich had offered her a change of scenery. She had offered him the possibility of offspring, who would admire and worship him.
When Min and Rich agreed, in a phone call, to get married, her mother asked her if she was sure.
Min lied and said yes. What made her decision clear, even before Rich had brought up the subject of marriage, was a visit from the professor. Her mother had been at her newsstand, and when Min opened the door the professor came into the apartment as though she had been expecting him. He studied the old furniture and the twelve-inch black-and-white television before turning to her. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” he said. “You didn’t keep your promise.”
All of a sudden, it felt childish to pretend she had never met the man. Childish, too, to think he would forget that she still had his books. Min pulled them out from under the newspapers and tried to come up with a sensible apology, but he cut her off. “I’ve come to set up a regular time to meet so you can study English with me.”
Min thanked him and said that there was no need.
“We’ll offer them religion in exchange for food. If that doesn’t work, we’ll kill them and take their food in the name of religion.”
“Why not? You can’t lower your standards because of the way you were brought up.”
“I thought you decided I wasn’t a good match for your son,” Min said.
“But I’ve had a change of heart. You’re like jadeite. Less sympathetic people would think of you as a common rock, but you are not. Someone like me, someone who understands your value, has to make you into a polished masterpiece.”
Min stepped back, but the professor moved closer, his hand resting on her shoulder, his thumb touching her collarbone. “Do you understand?” he said. “I can do a lot for you.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t need your help.”
“Why? Even my graduate students don’t get this kind of attention from me.”
Min shook her head. His fingers clutched her shoulder more tightly. “But I’m dating someone now,” she said.
“What do you mean you’re dating someone? Only two months ago you agreed to marry my son.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why else did you meet me? Who is this man you’re dating? Remember, I can help you go to America.”
“I’m dating someone in America,” Min said. “I’ll marry him.”
The anger in the man’s eyes was not the anger of a concerned father—even at nineteen, Min could tell that. The resentment was that of a betrayed lover. “So you were only using me, but now you found someone better you can use,” he said. “I should’ve known that girls like you have no honor to speak of.”
Another girl would have laughed in his face and called him a lunatic. Another girl would have shaken off his hand and shown him the door. “I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you,” Min said. “I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can. I can still teach you English. You don’t have to marry my son. Just come and visit me. Say yes.”
It was the helplessness of his plea that made Min cringe with pity. She did not want the power he’d handed her. It was not really power but an obligation or, worse, a debt. The moment he’d laid his eyes on her she owed him something. Still, she could not help feeling bad for him. You’re making a fool of yourself, she wanted to say. I’m only a girl, without any status or importance. Why are you embarrassing yourself like this?
Over the years, Min had tried hard not to think about that moment. But when the man’s e-mails came she often had an urge to tell her younger self, It’s not he who made a fool of himself but you. It’s you who hastened into a marriage because you thought it was better to marry a man who would not act with such folly. You thought that a man without a crazed look in his eyes would be the right husband, but perhaps a marriage should be more like an illness that the couple agrees to submit to so that they can recover together. Some succeed, others fail, yet two people can’t remain in their separate afflictions and hope for the best.
“Listen, I don’t want you to discuss politics with the girls,” Rich said to Min after the twins went to bed that night.
Min did not reply.
“I don’t want my children to be exposed to this left-wing crap.”
The same conversation would take place in Sandra’s house, though it would be a more heated fight, with words of passion being thrown back and forth like grenades. Yet Sandra would stay married to Chuck, just as Min would stay married to Rich.
“And, for the record,” Rich continued, “if they ask you how you voted, you should either say you voted for Trump or, if you don’t want to say that, tell them you didn’t vote.”
For a moment, Min felt a vindictive joy that the girls already knew to keep the truth about him from the world. In a few years, they would be teen-agers. Emmie would be high-strung, unable to mask her moods. Deanna would be coyer, but when she was ready to sabotage her father’s authority she would do so with more tact, and with more devastation, too. Perhaps Min could just be patient and wait for the twins to grow up. Her mother might have felt the same way after the death of Min’s father: children grow up, and they will solve the problems we can’t solve for them.
They would find new problems, too, those they could not solve. You could wait for a harmless man to die, but he would not let loose his grasp, as if you were part of his life.
Max had been in elementary school when the professor first sent Min an e-mail, “to reconnect,” as he put it. The previous summer, he said, he had visited Beijing for the first time since moving to America more than a decade earlier, and on a whim had stopped at Min’s old apartment building. Surprisingly, he wrote, the complex had not been demolished, and her mother still lived there. “All these signs convinced me that I should get in touch with you again,” the professor wrote. “As a lost friend.”
He had written out of loneliness or nostalgia, Min had told herself, trying to be kind in her dismissal. All she had to do was to remain silent. But a silence stoically maintained, she now understood, did not give her any dignity. The next month, the month after next, he would send another e-mail, reminding her that she was never far from the girl he remembered. In his imagination she would still be young, pretty, and malleable. Her silence would do nothing to stop his boundless imagination.
That night, when Min failed to fall asleep, she opened the man’s e-mail from the night before. In a large font that she hoped would be easy for him to read, she typed, “Please stop writing me.”
Then, on second thought, she erased that, and wrote, “Go to hell.”
作者：Li Yiyun
来源：纽约客（2018.04.23）
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