Free Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li Page A

able to turn a simple narrative into a question that demanded an answer. “I would think, for everybody’s good, it’s wise not to visit,” Moran said, being careful with her words so that she would not open the door to more questioning.
    “But that makes us coldhearted. Imagine someone in her position.”
    It was hard enough for her mother to have an absentee daughter;to add, on top of that, another mother’s pain of losing a daughter who’d been more than half dead the past twenty-one years? “Don’t imagine,” Moran said.
    “But how can one stop thinking about these things? I understand that I’m more fortunate than Shaoai’s mother, but what if you hadn’t got involved in the case in the first place? You would have been living in Beijing, and at least our family would have stayed together. I know you think of me as selfish, but do you see my point?”
    “No, I don’t think of you as selfish.”
    “I hope you understand that a mother has to be selfish.”
    Ever so expectedly, the phone line, cracking just a little, spoke of her mother’s tears and her father’s reticence. They were in separate rooms, she knew, holding two receivers, because it was easier for them not to see each other’s eyes when they were talking to her. “I don’t suppose we should discuss these things now,” Moran said. “See, it upsets you.”
    “Why shouldn’t I be upset? Shaoai’s mother at least knows who killed her daughter, but we’ve never known what took our daughter away from us.”
    “Nobody knows what happened to Shaoai,” Moran said.
    “But it was Ruyu. It had to be her. It could only be her. Am I wrong?”
    Her parents must have often wondered about this between themselves, but they had never once asked Moran. Why ask now, when silence, already in place, should be left untouched; even death does not suffice as a pretext to disturb the past. “Nobody knows what happened,” Moran said again.
    “But you did know. You covered it up for her, didn’t you?”
    Moran’s father coughed. “You understand, Moran, that your mother is asking not because we want to blame you,” he said. “Nobody can go back and change anything, but your mother and I, you see—it’s hard for us when things don’t make sense.”
    Where does one begin, Moran thought, to make sense of anything? The desire for clarity, the desire not to live in blindness—these desires are not far from the desire to deceive: one has to be like a sushi chef, cutting, trimming, slicing, until one’s life—or one’s memory of that life—is transformed into presentable bites. “Let’s change the topic, shall we?” she said. “I was wondering what you’d think of going to Scandinavia for a holiday next summer. I heard it’s beautiful there in June.”
    “We’re tired of playing tourist,” Moran’s mother said. “We’re old now. Shaoai is dead. Someday we will die, too. Is it not time for you to come home and see us?”
    Not wanting to grant her parents even the vaguest hope, Moran said that she was not ready to talk about that. She promised that she would call again in a week, knowing that by then, her father would have convinced her mother to be more strategic and not to pressure her. Moran ended the phone call before her parents could protest. They loved her more than she loved them; for that reason, she would always win an argument at the end of the day.
    Her parents’ only child, Moran had not been back to Beijing since she had left for America sixteen years earlier. For the first six years, when she had been studying for a PhD in chemistry, she had not seen her parents once, citing the hassle for visa application and a shortage of traveling funds as the reasons for her absence. During that period a marriage, which had both distressed and embarrassed her parents, had taken place and then ended, yet that they had not crossed paths with her married life seemed to make it less real to them; at least that was Moran’s hope. To this day,