The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed. It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

Sunlight through the window traveling across the floor. Moonlight from the same window, grazing the framed watercolor of the Spanish cathedral. Can we say that sunlight moves with wings, and moonlight as if on the back of a snail? The wings of the rooks spread and folded, spread and folded, before blending into the dusk, when the girls, coming out of prep, yawned their elegant yawns—it was in these gestures that their bodies moved away from girlhood, waiting for real life to begin.

She did, though, have hands that could hear things just as well as her ears. She knew that on a warm day, the dirt buzzed, and on a cold day, the dirt shivered, heaving tiny sighing sounds. A healthy root could sing a song, a dead root cracked at the first note and could never find the right pitch again. Buds and petals and new leaves all had their own ways of talking, screaming, laughing, or groaning.

(By half—that expression, which I had learned from listening to the girls, has become one of my favorite phrases. By half, by half of that half—even now, I like to repeat it to myself when I am in a dividing mood. Halve life’s pain, and we are not pain-free. Halve life’s joy, there is still joy enough to be halved. Truly life can be a funny business, too prodigal by half, also too stingy by half. I have a habit of speaking to my geese as though to myself: You’re too silly by half. You’re too proud by half.)

I was not the first trespasser in paradise, but unlike other violators, my punishment was not banishment. Rather, my sentence was to testify to its marvels. It soon became my belief that my only hope for escape was to write the book that everybody wanted.

A hard life, unlike what we were taught at school, did not make us virtuous; the hardest life was the most boring, the most unrewarding. How else could we overcome this boredom but to bring ourselves up in our own make-believe, which, as we grew older, had become more elaborate, more exhilarating, and, most of all, closer to the truth? What was wrong with the muddy muck underneath our feet if we could give it the power to track unseen beings wandering around in the dark? What was a cold tombstone but a door that opened to our own secret, warm chamber? We were not liars, but we made our own truths, extravagant as we needed them to be, fantastic as our moods required.

True blind rage is like true blind courage—if you have ever seen a squirrel trapped in a cage or a bird fly into a room by accident, you will understand this. It does not matter that the squirrel’s claws cannot shake open the cage, or the windowpane will not give way to the bird’s thumping. For some—animals, children—despair and doom galvanize.