Kinder Than Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ruyu noticed, fixed his eyes on her face as she moved toward the exit. Even though there were quite a few people between them, Ruyu felt her face burn.
    On the sidewalk, Shaoai asked Ruyu if she was too dumb to protect herself. Rarely did Ruyu face an angry person at a close distance; both her grandaunts had equable temperaments, believing any kind of emotional excitability a hurdle to one’s personal improvement. She sighed and turned her eyes away so as not to embarrass Shaoai.
    For a split second, Shaoai regretted her eruption—after all, Ruyu was a young girl, a provincial, an orphan raised by eccentric old ladies. Shaoai would have willingly softened, and even apologized, if Ruyu had understood the source of her anger, but the younger girl did not make a gesture either to mollify Shaoai or to defend herself. In Ruyu’s silence, Shaoai sensed a contemptuous extrication. “Haven’t your grandaunts taught you anything useful?” Shaoai said, angrier now, both at Ruyu’s unresponsiveness and at her own temper.
    Nothing separated Ruyu more thoroughly from the world than its malignance toward her grandaunts. To ward off people’s criticism of her grandaunts was more than to justify how they had raised her: to defend them was to defend God, who had chosen her to be left at their door. “My grandaunts have taught me more than you could imagine,” Ruyu said. “If you don’t like my coming to stay with your family, I understand. I’m not here for you to like, and my grandaunts are not for you to approve or disapprove of.”
    Shaoai had stared at Ruyu for a long moment, and then shrugged as though she no longer was in the mood to argue with Ruyu. Whenthey had reached Shaoai’s home the episode seemed to have been put behind them.
    Please—Ruyu folded her hands on her chest—please show me that a big city is nothing compared to you. The bamboo mattress under her was no longer cooling her off, but she refrained from moving to a new spot and stayed on the edge of the bed Shaoai had pointed to as her side. The only window in the room, a small rectangular one high on the wall, admitted little night air, and inside the mosquito netting Ruyu felt her pajamas sticking to her body. A television set, its volume low, was blinking in the living room, though Ruyu doubted that Uncle and Aunt were watching it. For a while they had been talking in whispers, and Ruyu wondered if they had been talking about her or her grandaunts. Please, she said again in her mind, please give me the wisdom to live among strangers until I leave them behind.
    Ruyu’s grandaunts had not taught her to pray. Her upbringing had not been a strictly religious one, though her grandaunts had done what they could to give her an education that they had deemed necessary to prepare her for her future reunion with the Church. They themselves had not attended any services since 1957, when the Church was reformed by the Communist Party into the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association; nor did they keep any concrete evidence of their previous spiritual lives. Still, from a young age, Ruyu had understood that what set her apart from other children was not the absence of her parents but the presence of God in her life, which made parents and siblings and playmates and even her grandaunts extraneous. She had begun to talk to him before she entered elementary school. “Our Father in Heaven,” she’d heard her grandaunts say when she had been a small girl, and it was with a conversation with him that Ruyu would end each day, talking to him as a child would talk to an imaginary friend or to herself, a presence at once abstract and solidly comforting. But he was neither a friend nor a part of herself;he belonged to her as much as he belonged to her grandaunts. None of the people she had met so far in Beijing, Ruyu knew, shared with her the secret of his presence: not Uncle and Aunt, who had told her that she was one of the family now and had asked her not to feel shy about