Read Online A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories by Yiyun Li - Free Book Online

universe in our nation. Illiterate housewives who have used old newspapers as wallpaper and who have, accidentally, reversed the titles with the dictator’s name in them are executed. Parents of little first-graders who have misspelled the dictator’s name are sent to labor camps. With the boy living among us, we are constantly walking on a thin layer of ice above deep water. We worry about not paying enough respect to the face, an indication of our hidden hatred of the dictator. We worry about respecting that face too much, which could be interpreted as our inability to tell the false from the true, worshipping the wrong idol. In our school the teachers never speak one harsh word to him. Whatever games the students play, the side without him is willing to lose. When he graduates from the high school, the Revolution Committee has meetings for weeks to discuss what is an appropriate job for a young man with a face like his. None of the jobs we have in town is safe enough to be given to him. Finally we think we have come up with the best solution to the problem—we elect him as the director of the advisory board to the Revolution Committee.
    The young man prospers. Having nothing to do, and not liking to kill his time over cups of tea with the old board members, he walks around town every day, talking to people who are flattered by his greetings, and watching the female sales assistants in the department store blush at his sight. His mother is in much better shape now, with more color in her face. The only inconvenience is that no girl will date the young man. We have warned our daughters that marrying him would either be the greatest fortune or the greatest misfortune. Born into a town where gambling is genuinely disapproved of, none of us wants to marry a daughter off to a man like him.
    THE DAY THE dictator dies, we gather at the town center and cry like orphans. On the only television set our town owns, we watch the whole nation howling with us. For three months we wear black mourning armbands to work and to sleep. All entertainments are banned for six months. Even a year or two after his death, we still look sideways at those women who are growing bellies, knowing that they have been insincere in their mourning. Fathers of those children never receive respect from us again.
    It is a difficult time for the young man. Upon seeing his face, some of us break into uncontrollable wails, and he himself has to spend hours crying with us. It must have tired him. For a year he stays in his own room, and the next time we see him, walking toward the town center with a small suitcase, he looks much older than his age of twenty-eight.
    “Is there anything wrong?” we greet him with concern. “Don’t let too much grief drag you down.”
    “Thank you, but I am in a fine state,” the young man replies.
    “Are you leaving for somewhere?”
    “Yes, I am leaving.”
    “Where to?” We feel a pang of panic. Losing him at this time seems as unbearable as losing the dictator one year ago.
    “It’s a political assignment,” the young man says with a mysterious smile. “Classified.”
    Only after he is driven away in a well-curtained luxury car (the only car most of us have ever seen in our lives) do we catch the news that he is going to the capital for an audition as the dictator’s impersonator. It takes us days of discussion among ourselves to figure out what words like “audition” and “impersonator” mean. In the end the only agreement we come to is that he is going to become a great man.
    Now that he has disappeared from our sights, his mother becomes the only source for stories of him. A proud mother as she is, every time we inquire of her regarding his whereabouts, she repeats the story of how she gazed at the late dictator’s face day and night when her son was growing inside her. “You know, it’s like he is the son of our great leader,” she says.
    “Yes, all of us are sons of our great leader,” we nod and