Free A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories by Yiyun Li Page A

to walk with his face completely bare to the world, but the memory of being surrounded by hundreds of people asking for autographs stops him from taking the risk.
    One day he walks across the capital, in search of something he is eager to have but unable to name. When he enters an alley, someone calls to him from behind a cart of newspapers and magazines.
    “Want some books, friend?”
    He stops and looks at the vendor from behind his dark glasses. “What kind of books?”
    “What kind do you want?”
    “What kind do you have?”
    The vendor moves some magazines and uncovers the plastic sheet beneath the magazines. “Yellows, reds, whatever you want. Fifty yuan a book.”
    He bends over and looks from above his dark glasses. Underneath the plastic sheet are books with colorful covers. He picks one up and looks at a man and a woman, both naked, copulating in a strange position on the cover. His heart starts to beat in his chest, loud and urgent.
    “That’s a good yellow one,” the vendor says, “as yellow as you want.”
    He clasps the book with his fingers. “What else do you have?”
    “How about this red one?” The vendor hands him another book, the dictator’s face on the cover. “Everybody loves this book.”
    He has heard of the book, a memoir written by the dictator’s physician of thirty years, banned when it was published abroad, and smuggled into the country from Hong Kong and America.
    He pays for the two books and walks back to his room. He studies the dictator’s portrait and compares it with his own face in the mirror, still perfect from every angle. He sighs and plunges into the yellow book, devouring it like a starved man. When his erection becomes too painful, he forces himself to drop the book and pick up the red one.
    He feels an emptiness that he has never felt before, switching between the books when one becomes too unbearable. In the yellow book he sees a world he has missed all his life, in which a man has an endless supply of women, all of them eager to please him. Yet for all he knows, the only man who could have as many women as he wants is the dictator. He leafs through the red book one more time, looking at the pictures of the dictator in the company of young attractive
nurses,
and realizes that he has misunderstood his role all these years. To be a great man means to have whatever he wants from the world. Blaming himself for this belated understanding, he stands up and goes out into the night.
    He has no difficulty locating a prostitute in the dimly lit karaoke-and-dance bar. As a precaution he keeps his dark glasses and heavy coat on the whole time they are bargaining. Then he goes away with the young woman to a nearby hotel, sneaking through a side door into a room the woman has reserved, while she deals with the receptionist.
    What comes next is perplexing to us. All we can figure out from the rumors is that when he is asked to undress, he refuses to take off either his dark glasses or his heavy coat. To be a great man means to have a woman in whatever way he wants, our young man must be thinking. But how is a man like him able to resist the skillful fingers of a professional like the woman he has hired? In a confusing moment, he is as naked as the woman, his face bare and easy to recognize. Before he realizes it, the woman’s pimp, dressed up in police uniform, rushes in with a pair of handcuffs and a camera. Lights flash and snapshots are taken, his hands cuffed and clothes confiscated. Only then does the couple recognize his face, and we can imagine how overjoyed they must be by such a discovery. Instead of the usual amount, they ask for ten times what others pay, because our young man is a celebrity and should pay a celebrity price for the pictures.
    To this day we still disagree on how our young man should have reacted. Some of us think he should have paid and let himself go free, money being no problem for him. Others think he did nothing wrong by refusing to cooperate, but