— Why Simone Weil? I asked.
— I like that name. She used to study on her knees.
— On her knees?
— Yes, she studied on her knees, spent hours reading on her knees. She was a philosopher who had been humbled. She was half crazy but totally lucid. What I respect most about her work is that she understood that you don’t stop being humbled after you learn that’s who you are. She never claimed to escape that reality.
— Why me? I asked. Where did you see me, how did you find out about me, why all this effort, this game that you took so seriously?
— I met you through your books, and then I saw you at the university. I’m the only Chinese woman in comparative literature.
— You know you’re not answering the question.
— Of course.
— So?
— It’s impossible, or rather it would be complicated, to give you an answer tonight. The important thing is that we’ve gotten this far, and I really thank you for coming. Aside from that, you can use this opportunity to improve your chess game.
Starbucks was closing, and Li went to the bathroom. A short time later the server brought me a note. “They’re coming to pick me up. If you’d like, you can stop by the restaurant. I get off at 10:30. Don’t obsess about the whys. Over the long run, I know that nothing can stay hidden. Ciao. Li”
As the weeks went by, I would realize the extent to which Li lived in a practically closed world, still untouched by the consumer society or basic liberties, where high status meant having a tiny room of your own to sleep in, with space in a corner for storing your clothes and, in Li’s case, for keeping a few piles of books and papers.
She worked six days a week in the restaurant and had done so from the age of eleven. She was a distant relative of the family that owned a half dozen Chinese food places in San Juan and in a few towns on the island. She had been born in 1969 in a small village on the outskirts of Beijing that was, according to Li, an unhealthy flatland, cold and damp, full during that era of officials forced by the Cultural Revolution to be “reeducated” through agricultural labor. She held onto few memories: the muddy pools that filled the streets, the endless rice fields, the taste of boiled potatoes, her grandmother’s lap, a couple of songs. Her family had to split up because her father, a math teacher, was accused of coming from a family of “intellectuals.” Given the abject human relationships imposed by the Cultural Revolution, this meant that Li’s mother could not maintain any ties to her husband, and she was forced to denounce him and repudiate him formally and publicly. Her father was sent to villages farther and farther away from the capital until he must have succumbed to the cold, the hunger, the sentence he had been given for knowing how to read and write, for owning Soviet geometry textbooks and an old prerevolutionary translation of Madame Bovary, for having a bourgeois taste for jazz. After countless close calls, her mother managed to reach Hong Kong with Li, and from there, of all the places in the world, they traveled to Puerto Rico thanks to the efforts of some distant family members. She was six when she arrived.
Early on she didn’t even live in San Juan; she shared an apartment with other family members on the second story built with unfinished concrete blocks above the Gran Muralla restaurant in Arecibo. From there, she’d moved to one on Avenida Fernández Juncos in Santurce. At school and on the street, she was always la china. For years, hardly anyone outside the restaurant called her by her name. Nobody was interested or could understand her history. The distance, size, and complexity of China made it unfathomably abstract.
She lived with cousins, aunts, uncles, and “relatives” of unknown kinship, in grotesque overcrowding. She was the only one who learned how to speak and read Spanish well, and this was probably why they let her graduate from a public school in Santurce. There she was one of the few students who got to the last pages of books and the only one who spent all her free time in the modest library.
After a long struggle, she managed to persuade her family and, at the age of twenty, she enrolled in the Universidad de Puerto Rico. She somehow found a way to put herself through college, and in particular to pay her full tuition, by working at the restaurant. She submitted to unwritten rules: the restaurant owner’s family had gotten her out of China, and it was her obligation to work for him in exchange for a roof over her head and laughable wages over an indefinite period that might last her whole life. Now, Li said, she was working to purchase her freedom in the family’s best restaurant, the one where you earned the most. Apart from her fellow students, who always kept their distance from her, I was the first non-Chinese man she had taken the initiative to get to know.
After giving me this sparse outline of her life, she said I could now understand why she preferred books to men and why, of all possible men, she had felt curious about a man who was a writer.
— Hardly anybody reads me, I said.
— Hardly anybody sees me, Li replied, or if they see me, they see a Chinese woman. Not many can see anything more.
— We’re alike. Why don’t you write?
— Do you read Chinese?
— You could write in Spanish, you speak it so well.
— I couldn’t do it in Chinese either. I never learned to write in Chinese, and I speak it like an immigrant. I can say, “You rike big prate flied lice.” My problem isn’t the language but the impossibility everyone else has of imagining me. Is it possible to write when no one shares your identity, when the vast majority of people can’t even imagine you?
— Do you think it’s so different for me? Besides, I added, that can be a good literary space. Isn’t a writer already a species apart?
— But being a Chinese woman in Puerto Rico is much more extreme.
— That’s natural. It’s hard anywhere to be a writer, even harder to get yourself read with a minimum of attention. Your position here is extreme, but that’s not enough to convince me. There’s something else.
— You can’t write if you have no words, said Li. If the words have always belonged to others. That’s why I prefer to read, to take the words that others write and transform them. That’s what I’m familiar with. That’s what I’ve always done.
— Then it’s what you should do, I said.
— It’s what I did with you.
I’d go see her at ten, when few diners remained in the restaurant and the employees wrapping up their shifts were straightening the tables and leaving the place ready for the next day. We rarely talked in her room. I’d invite her to a pizza place or a restaurant with Puerto Rican cuisine; either way, she loved the food. I came to see from the way she ate that Li had never taken food for granted. She chewed conscientiously, with perfect concentration, and didn’t leave a bite on her plate.
— Do you remember China, from when you were a child?
— Of course. But my memory has more gaps than anything. I don’t remember the past so much as feel it. Maybe that’s hard to see, but for me, it’s been normal. The past is something I find in silence. I’ve spent my life surrounded by noise, first in China with my family and the neighbors who practically lived with us, then in Hong Kong among the refugees, later on in Arecibo, in San Juan, in the noisy racket of the kitchens and the traffic of the avenues reaching the rooms where I’ve lived day and night, but my life has been coming and going, if I can put it like this, to silence.
— Does it bother you?
— I’ve had no other option. This is the only world I’ve been in. The world of Li Chao; the planet whose total population is made up only of me: one Chinese woman among more than a billion Chinese, one Chinese woman on an island where there are no Chinese except in restaurants, one Chinese woman who doodles and reads.