Li�s searing d�but begins and ends with an execution, in 1979, in a small city in China, where democratic reform movements are beginning to ripple through the nation. Gu Shan is a former Red Guard leader turned counter-revolutionary, whose execution, at the age of twenty-eight, devastates her parents and entwines their lives with those of a crippled twelve-year-old girl, the feckless nineteen-year-old son of a Communist hero, an elderly street-cleaning couple, and a radio announcer who comes to question her role in the spread of government propaganda. Li offers both a bleak view of a historical moment when �people were the most dangerous animals in the world� and a meditation on the act of martyrdom, which is presented both as a duty and as a �luxury that few could afford.�
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Reviewers were clearly impressed by The Vagrants, especially noteworthy because it is Li's first novel. They valued its memorable and nuanced characters, its simultaneous severity and humor, and the way Li creates moral ambiguity without diminishing the bravery and sacrifice of Chinese dissidents. The only complaint was that Li's portrayal of the misery of Muddy River can be somewhat overwhelming; readers "may grow numbed, or more strangely (and disturbingly), inured under its assault" (San Francisco Chronicle). But even that reviewer compared The Vagrants to some of the great Western works that explore the absurdity of rituals of persecution, suggesting that this novel has a power that easily transcends its particular time and place.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
*Starred Review* In the wake of her first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), Li, who grew up in Beijing, received numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting awards. In her staggering first novel, she extends her inquiry into China’s particular brand of soul-killing tyranny. It’s 1979, and the citizens of the industrial city of Muddy River are feeling festive as they prepare for the public denunciation ceremonies preceding an execution. The condemned is 28-year-old Shan. Once a zealous Red Guard infamous for beating a pregnant woman, who gave birth to a deformed daughter, Nini, Shan began questioning Maoist practices. She is now tortured and killed, her body desecrated. This barbarity ignites a string of crimes and catastrophes. Touched by the conflagration are disabled and much-abused Nini, now 12; two strikingly independent young boys, one scheming, one sweet; Old Hua and his wife, who rescued and raised seven infant girls who had been left outside to die; and Kai, a news announcer who risks all to protest Shan’s wrongful death. Unflinching and mesmerizing, Li traces the contagion of evil with stunning precision and compassion in this tragic and beautiful novel of conscience. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Yiyun Li has written a book that is as important politically as it is artistically. The Vagrants is an enormous achievement.”—Ann Patchett, author of Run
“Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news. Nothing could be a more apt description of Yiyun Li’s extraordinary new novel, The Vagrants. It is a book about a street, but a street that turns the corner into another street, then turns into a town, and soon becomes a whole country. Li finds the music in the smaller lives and makes them symphonic. This is history and memory at its most raw and brilliant, reminiscent of Saramago, Aciman, and Coetzee. The Vagrants is a novel to be savored and discussed.”—Colum McCann, author ofZoli
“Every once in a while a voice and a subject are so perfectly matched that it seems as if this writer must have been born to write this book. The China that Yiyun Li shows us is one most Americans haven’t seen, but her tender and devastating vision of the ways human beings love and betray one another would be recognizable to a citizen of any nation on earth.” —Nell Freudenberger, author of The Dissident
“This is a book of loss and pain and fear that manages to include such unexpected tenderness and grace notes that, just as one can bear it no longer, one cannot put it down. This is not an easy read, only a necessary and deeply moving one.”—Amy Bloom, author of Away
“A starkly moving portrayal of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, this book weaves together the stories of a vivid group of characters all struggling to find a home in their own country. Yiyun Li writes with a quiet, steady force, at once stoic and heartbreaking.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
“There is a magnetic small-town universality toThe Vagrants…but this is small-town universality with a difference. That difference is Communist China. The town isn’t small; it only feels that way, as a provincial city where everyone seems to know his neighbor’s business.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Yiyun Li’s extraordinary debut novel…beautifully paced, exquisitely detailed…an amazing technical achievement….Li’s genius lies in her ability to blend fact with an endlessly imaginative sense of the interplay of forces that powered the massive shift in the social order that led to Tiananmen Square…In this most amazing first novel, Yiyun Li has found a way to combine the jeweled precision of her short-story-writer’s gaze with a spellbinding vision of the power of the human spirit.” —Chicago Tribune
“She bridges our world to the Chinese world with a mind that is incredibly supple and subtle.”—W Magazine
“A Balzacian look at one community’s suppressed loves and betrayals.”—Vogue
“A sweeping novel of struggle, survival, and love in the time of oppression. . . . [an] illuminating, morally complex, and symphonic novel.”—O Magazine
“Magnificent.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[A] rich, expansive novel, which captures the anxieties and brutality of life during the last days of Maoism. . . . Li’s story has an empathetic, uncannily graceful tone.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Li has poured her prodigious talent intoThe Vagrants. . . . Familiarity with Chinese history isn't at all necessary to relate to the grief, pain, confusion, fear, loyalty, suspicion, and love portrayed by the characters in this deeply affecting story. . . .The Vagrants has a confident, democratic style that gives a distinct voice to every character. ‘Growing up in China, you learn you can never trust one person's words,’ Li says. ‘People's stories don't always match.’ But one thing is clear: Li's stories matter.”—Elle
About the Author
Yiyun Li is a winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. She grew up in Beijing and attended Peking University. She came to the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years later. After receiving a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received an MFA. The author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li was selected for a Whiting Writers’ Award and was named by Granta as one of best young American novelists under thirty-five. Li teaches at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Carolyn See Muddy River, a fictional city, is a settlement of about 80,000 people, hastily built by the Chinese government to increase production and make the country more prosperous. It lies about 900 miles from Beijing along the bank of the Muddy River itself, and at the base of some unnamed mountains. It's certainly bigger than a village but far from being a metropolis. "The Vagrants," a powerful and thoughtful novel, is set in 1979. The past 30 years of the country's history have been frenzied. The communists defeated the nationalists and marched into Beijing in 1949. In 1955 an attempt to boost steel production called the Great Leap Forward backfired and became a three-year famine that killed millions. The Cultural Revolution, in which Mao Zedong spoke directly to students, workers, soldiers and peasants, charging them with purging all leftover elements of bourgeois imperialism, began in 1966 and caused untold destruction of priceless antiques, temples, art objects and books, as well as the hideous degradation of anyone tabbed as an intellectual; it lasted, on and off, for about 10 years. Now, in 1979, over in Beijing, something called the Democracy Wall has come into being. Students and activists have taken to posting essays on that wall, speculating on what the concept of democracy might mean for the country. Ten years later, in 1989, this kind of thinking will lead to the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but for now nobody knows what the government thinks about that wall, and here in Muddy River they scarcely have time to notice it. They're still dealing with the results of the Cultural Revolution: students coming home from the countryside where they've been "reeducated," people who have been jailed for years and are just now getting out of prison -- or not. When Mao called on disaffected teenagers to "cleanse" the country, he may have gotten more than he bargained for. What sulky teenager doesn't harbor a grudge against his parents and teachers or the clerk at the general store who once shortchanged him? After the teenagers had done their damage against the counterrevolutionaries, many of them were also jailed as (you guessed it) counterrevolutionaries. This novel is, among other things, a story of two girls who attended the same first-grade class, one going on to become a ferocious Red Guard, the other to have a pleasant career on the regional stage. The actress, Kai, has returned to Muddy River to be a radio announcer; the other, Gu Shan, is to be executed today. Gu Shan's parents, Teacher Gu and Old Mrs. Gu, wake to the worst day of their lives. As a rebellious 14-year-old, Gu Shan had enthusiastically participated in the Cultural Revolution, beating down doors, destroying historical artifacts, and -- in one case, just for the hell of it -- kicking a pregnant woman's stomach, causing her to give birth to a badly deformed child. Gu Shan was imprisoned for about a decade as a counterrevolutionary and, totally insane by then, was given a new trial, only to receive the death sentence. Today will include her execution and a series of festive "Denunciation Ceremonies" all over the city, complete with songs, slogans, field trips from every public school, and people given the day off to attend along with their work units. We are all, in some way, stuck between the old and the new. Teacher Gu, an intellectual aristocrat whose parents met while they were students in Paris, has been demoted to teaching in a public elementary school. But he clings, in his mind at least (all his books have been destroyed), to an idea of civilization, the consolations of philosophy. His second wife, the mother of Gu Shan, comes from a lower class and was illiterate when they met. Her project for today is to burn clothes (in public) so that her daughter will have enough to wear in the next world. The husband and wife turn to their respective pasts; for them, the future is unbearable. The Gu family has many neighbors and acquaintances: ex-peasants, mostly, who are casually brutish to one another and to their children. We see a couple cursed (in the Chinese way of thinking) with six girls, one of them, Nini, deformed by Gu Shan's vicious kick. The parents could never work up the gumption to kill her when she was born, even though the landscape around Muddy River is littered with abandoned infant girls, living and dead. They keep Nini around as an unpaid servant on whom they vent all their displeasure. She is loathed by everyone who looks at her, except for a strange boy who harbors lustful desires he hasn't yet been able to act upon. He actually likes her; she becomes his friend. Other people wander the city. Tong, a 6-year-old, was living happily in a rustic village with his grandparents until he was yanked into town for his education. His father is a buffoonish drunk, and Tong turns for comfort to the only creature who loves him, his dog, Ear, who will come to a sad end. At the other end of the economic spectrum is Kai, the beautiful and kindhearted ex-actress who has returned to Muddy River and made a good marriage to Han, the nicest man in the world but dumb as a plank. Kai herself is in love with a dying man who harbors thoughts of a greater, finer, fairer China. The execution is a hideous spectacle. Gu Shan is brought onstage with her vocal cords slit so she can't shout slogans; her kidneys have been removed while she was still alive. This barbarous act may or may not result in a promotion for Han, but a string of awful and unexpected events occurs. For one thing, Kai is moved to organize a demonstration to object to the brutalities that Gu Shan has undergone. Over in Beijing, the government suddenly decides that the Democracy Wall is a bad thing and cracks down on everything it perceives as subversive. That, in itself, may be part of what sets off the huge debacle in Tiananmen Square 10 years later. The author, raised in China, was considered a math prodigy, but when she came to the United States, she settled in Iowa City and took advantage of the university's writing programs. She's become a terrific writer. She doesn't condemn or condescend to a single soul here, just makes us see how nerve-racking and soul-killing it must be to live in a despotic nation run by a lot of very high-strung people. For readers who love complex novels about worlds we scarcely understand, "The Vagrants" will be a revelation.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
one
The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket. A day of equality it was, or so it had occurred to Teacher Gu many times when he had pondered the date, the spring equinox, and again the thought came to him: Their daughter’s life would end on this day, when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned. A day later the sun would come closer to her and to the others on this side of the world, imperceptible perhaps to dull human eyes at first, but birds and worms and trees and rivers would sense the change in the air, and they would make it their responsibility to manifest the changing of seasons. How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring? But such naming must mean little to the rivers and flowers, when they repeat their rhythms with faithfulness and indifference. The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary; only the unwise would look for significance in a random date. Teacher Gu willed his body to stay still and hoped his wife would soon realize that he was awake.
She continued to cry. After a moment, he got out of bed and turned on the only light in the bedroom, an aging 10-watt bulb. A red plastic clothesline ran from one end of the bedroom to the other; the laundry his wife had hung up the night before was damp and cold, and the clothesline sagged from the weight. The fire had died in the small stove in a corner of the room. Teacher Gu thought of adding coal to the stove himself, and then decided against it. His wife, on any other day, would be the one to revive the fire. He would leave the stove for her to tend.
From the clothesline he retrieved a handkerchief, white, with printed red Chinese characters–a slogan demanding absolute loyalty to the Communist Party from every citizen–and laid it on her pillow. “Everybody dies,” he said.
Mrs. Gu pressed the handkerchief to her eyes. Soon the wet stains expanded, turning the slogan crimson.
“Think of today as the day we pay everything off,” Teacher Gu said. “The whole debt.”
“What debt? What do we owe?” his wife demanded, and he winced at the unfamiliar shrillness in her voice. “What are we owed?”
He had no intention of arguing with her, nor had he answers to her questions. He quietly dressed and moved to the front room, leaving the bedroom door ajar.
The front room, which served as kitchen and dining room, as well as their daughter Shan’s bedroom before her arrest, was half the size of the bedroom and cluttered with decades of accumulations. A few jars, once used annually to make Shan’s favorite pickles, sat empty and dusty on top of one another in a corner. Next to the jars was a cardboard box in which Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu kept their two hens, as much for companionship as for the few eggs they laid. Upon hearing Teacher Gu’s steps, the hens stirred, but he ignored them. He put on his old sheepskin coat, and before leaving the house, he tore a sheet bearing the date of the previous day off the calendar, a habit he had maintained for decades. Even in the unlit room, the date, March 21, 1979, and the small characters underneath, Spring Equinox, stood out. He tore the second sheet off too and squeezed the two thin squares of paper into a ball. He himself was breaking a ritual now, but there was no point in pretending that this was a day like any other.
Teacher Gu walked to the public outhouse at the end of the alley. On normal days his wife would trail behind him. They were a couple of habit, their morning routine unchanged for the past ten years. The alarm went off at six o’clock and they would get up at once. When they returned from the outhouse, they would take turns washing at the sink, she pumping the water out for both of them, neither speaking.
A few steps away from the house, Teacher Gu spotted a white sheet with a huge red check marked across it, pasted on the wall of the row houses, and he knew that it carried the message of his daughter’s death. Apart from the lone streetlamp at the far end of the alley and a few dim morning stars, it was dark. Teacher Gu walked closer, and saw that the characters in the announcement were written in the ancient Li-styled calligraphy, each stroke carrying extra weight, as if the writer had been used to such a task, spelling out someone’s imminent death with unhurried elegance. Teacher Gu imagined the name belonging to a stranger, whose sin was not of the mind, but a physical one. He could then, out of the habit of an intellectual, ignore the grimness of the crime–a rape, a murder, a robbery, or any misdeed against innocent souls–and appreciate the calligraphy for its aesthetic merit, but the name was none other than the one he had chosen for his daughter, Gu Shan.
Teacher Gu had long ago ceased to understand the person bearing that name. He and his wife had been timid, law-abiding citizens all their lives. Since the age of fourteen, Shan had been wild with passions he could not grasp, first a fanatic believer in Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution, and later an adamant nonbeliever and a harsh critic of her generation’s revolutionary zeal. In ancient tales she could have been one of those divine creatures who borrow their mothers’ wombs to enter the mortal world and make a name for themselves, as a heroine or a devil, depending on the intention of the heavenly powers. Teacher Gu and his wife could have been her parents for as long as she needed them to nurture her. But even in those old tales, the parents, bereft when their children left them for some destined calling, ended up heartbroken, flesh-and-blood humans as they were, unable to envision a life larger than their own.
Teacher Gu heard the creak of a gate down the alley, and he hurried to leave before he was caught weeping in front of the announcement. His daughter was a counterrevolutionary, and it was a perilous situation for anyone, her parents included, to be seen shedding tears over her looming death.
When Teacher Gu returned home, he found his wife rummaging in an old trunk. A few young girls’ outfits, the ones that she had been unwilling to sell to secondhand stores when Shan had outgrown them, were laid out on the unmade bed. Soon more were added to the pile, blouses and trousers, a few pairs of nylon socks, some belonging to Shan before her arrest but most of them her mother’s. “We haven’t bought her any new clothes for ten years,” his wife explained to him in a calm voice, folding a woolen Mao jacket and a pair of matching trousers that Mrs. Gu wore only for holidays and special occasions. “We’ll have to make do with mine.”
It was the custom of the region that when a child died, the parents burned her clothes and shoes to keep the child warm and comfortable on the trip to the next world. Teacher Gu had felt for the parents he’d seen burning bags at crossroads, calling out the names of their children, but he could not imagine his wife, or himself, doing this. At twenty-eight–twenty-eight, three months, and eleven days old, which she would always be from now on–Shan was no longer a child. Neither of them could go to a crossroad and call out to her counterrevolutionary ghost.
“I should have remembered to buy a new pair of dress shoes for her,” his wife said. She placed an old pair of Shan’s leather shoes next to her own sandals on top of the pile. “She loves leather shoes.”
Teacher Gu watched his wife pack the outfits and shoes into a cloth bag. He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living–that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead. Be aware not to fall into the futile and childish tradition of uneducated villagers, he thought of reminding his wife, but when he opened his mouth, he could not find words gentle enough for his message. He left her abruptly for the front room.
The small cooking stove was still unlit. The two hens in the cardboard box clucked with hungry expectation. On a normal day his wife would start the fire and cook the leftover rice into porridge while he fed the hens a small handful of millet. Teacher Gu refilled the food tin. The hens looked as attentive in their eating as did his wife in her packing. He pushed a dustpan underneath the stove and noisily opened the ash grate. Yesterday’s ashes fell into the dustpan without a sound.
“Shall we send the clothes to her now?” his wife asked. She was standing by the door, a plump bag in her arms. “I’ll start the fire when we come back,” she said when he did not reply.
“We can’t go out and burn that bag,” Teacher Gu whispered.
His wife stared at him with a questioning look.
“It’s not the right thing to do,” he said. It frustrated him that he had to explain these things to her. “It’s superstitious, reactionary– it’s all wrong.”
“What is the right thing to do? To applaud the murderers of our daughter?” The unfamiliar shrillness had returned to her voice, and her face took on a harsh expression.
“Everybody dies,” he said.
“Shan is being murdered. She is innocent.”
“It’s not up to us to decide such things,” he said. For a second he almost blurted out that their daughter was not as innocent as his wife thought. It was not a surprise that a mother was the first one to forgive and forget her own child’s wron...
