Endings

Reading Li Yiyun is like dancing a slow two-step, cheek-to-cheek, only to be stabbed in the heart at the end.

On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman.

"The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following." A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders when she stopped being one of them. 

What is there to say about modern China? After death and the birth of money, after the lights and dust refuse to settle, when frenetic energy and escape is exhausted, what is there left of us that is still human?

One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs Fong's blabbering and walks to Beibei's bedroom.  

There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white with a bluish hue. Mrs Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei's hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, grey and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents' garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy. 

Can you feel you lived at least - and acted - even though through its entirety, you suspect, you were a blind mole doing the wrong things in the right context - or was it the right things in the wrong context?

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang's clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity. 

- Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.