"The Vagrants"

I just finished reading “The Vagrants” by Yiyun Li. It is an incredibly powerful book that defies easy description. Pico Iyer’s review in the NY Times is much better than anything I could write:

“The Vagrants” begins on March 21, 1979 — the spring equinox — which is this careful writer’s way of telling us that a long winter of privation and darkness may be giving way, at last, to the blossomings of spring. It is set in one of the new nowhere towns of Mao Zedong’s China, 700 miles from Beijing, a bare, rationed place of small factories and overcrowded shacks laid out in anonymous rows. Eighty thousand people live in Muddy River, essentially migrants from the countryside, and, almost in the manner of a documentary filmmaker, shooting in black and white, Li homes in on a few typical souls whose names alone give you something of the settlement’s flavor: Old Hua, Teacher Gu, a dog called Ear, a deformed 12-year-old girl called Nini and a teenage boy as brutish and unassimilated as the name he brandishes, “Bashi.” All are victims of a crippled society that has effectively outlawed humanity and made innocence a crime.

Everyone in this broken world is trying to get by on scraps. Old men forage through trash for bits of paper, a kind elderly couple pick up a series of abandoned baby girls to raise, a child with five sisters goes out every morning to collect the coal deliberately “dropped” by workers. The very foundation of traditional Chinese society — the family — has been torn to shreds: boys steal money from their own mother to buy sunglasses. Nini’s mother says she wishes she had killed the girl at birth (a common wish in Li’s fiction), and twisted boys look for children’s bodies to make perverse use of. Strangers show up on doorsteps, asking to be taken in as children. The Fatherland, even after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when people are streaming back into cities after enforced rustication, is a society of orphans.

The day the novel opens, however, is as festive as Thanksgiving — workers and students are singing songs and waving colorful banners — because it is the day on which a 28-year-old woman is due to be executed; and people are let off school and work so they can attend the execution and one of the six “denunciation ceremonies” that precede it. Gu Shan had been a Red Guard zealot when she was only 14, kicking the belly of a woman eight months pregnant. But then, much like her country, she turned her fury in the opposite direction, only to be betrayed at 18 by a boyfriend eager for a post in the army. Her public killing brings great shame to her parents, of course, a mother who had been sold off at first to a man 40 years her senior — one of his five wives — and a father who once founded the first Western-style high school in the province and now is an expert at lying low: “Seeing is not as good as staying blind,” he quotes from an ancient poem. Shan’s parents are almost relieved at her death, however, because after 10 years in prison, their daughter has gone mad.

Anyone who doubts that the deranged girl stands in part for the country around her has only to read about how her body is cut apart: her vocal cords are severed before the execution so she cannot cut loose with a final counterrevolutionary cry; her kidneys are extracted while she is still alive, for a transplant to an aging army man; and after her death, her private parts and breasts are cut out by a pervert who keeps them in formaldehyde. The government in faraway Beijing remains as faceless and remote on the page as it must have been in life — Deng Xiaoping, the new leader, is never mentioned — as the citizens of Muddy River, many of them illiterate, scheme and steal to stay alive, talking of cooking rats or eating the paste off fliers. “The eastern sky had taken on a hue of bluish white,” Li writes, in a rare moment of lyricism, “like that of an upturned fish belly.”

Li pans across this field of suffering with quiet, undistracted patience, assembling, in effect, an anthology of horror stories. Her interest is not in the system itself, but in the costs and consequences of a society gone mad, one in which capitulation is regarded as the highest virtue and compassion is treated as a vice. Everything in this world is compromised or corrupted by politics, so that no act is without larger implications. Though Li’s fleshing out of the details of life in her home country might sound like “One Season in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’s Chinese Comrades,” the book’s texture is more akin to neorealist films like “The Bicycle Thief” or to unrelieved portraits of daily life in a dictatorship like the recent Romanian movie “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” We see the “red plastic clothesline” and the “aging 10-watt bulb” that are all these people have in their shacks — some use tree stumps for tables — and we feel what it is like for a 7-year-old boy to hear from his father, “If your heart is hard enough to eat your mother and your wife, nothing can beat you in life.”

Either you keep your head down in this world and try to get by, or you stand up to the system and most likely die. The only way to survive is through crime of some kind — a man steals copper wiring from an electrical factory to get money for stamps, a schoolboy learns he can protect his father only by informing on innocents. The twisted logic of the system decrees that each person’s well-being depends on the suffering of someone else: survival essentially means self-protection, and protecting yourself means putting your neighbor down. The result is a world in which mothers hope their children will not be educated, because education means thought and thought means trouble. As the wisest soul in the book writes to his first wife: “What marks our era . . . is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever.”

The central action of “The Vagrants” turns around the spring that follows the execution, when suddenly leaflets begin to circulate, heretically, asking why independent thinkers like Gu Shan should be killed, and word comes from Beijing that a “democratic wall” is allowing regular people to air their grievances for the first time. As Li puts it, always meticulous in her details, “In the period of indecision and uncertainty, old winter-weary snow began to melt.” We read how hedgehogs, if artificially frozen, can be unfrozen again and think they’re emerging from hibernation. More and more brave citizens, mostly mothers, try to galvanize their terrified neighbors — “A thousand grains of sand can make a tower” — and the crowds that had earlier marched past to watch the execution now march along the same road to heed a dissident call to arms. Yet the power of Li’s book is to show us how integrity itself can be a form of cruelty in this upside­-down universe: a brave woman who speaks out against the system only brings misery and humiliation down upon her mother and poisons her younger sister’s prospects. The novel ends, by no coincidence, with the Communist celebration of May Day, 40 days after its beginning.

Though Li was only a child in 1979, you can feel how much she has been formed by the savagery she describes, even if her humanist stories of sorrow and occasional kindness are turned in the opposite direction. In place of the Communist vision of “heroism” and “self-sacrifice,” she offers her own counterrevolutionary models: the attractive young woman who gives up her comfortable life to speak the truth, the tubercular young man who will risk everything because he has not much longer to live. In a way, her brand of social realism is as straightforward and unyielding as that which it despises; one character who grew up forced to sing of how a Communist martyr’s blood would make azaleas bloom in the spring now hears from her disillusioned father, “Life is a war, and one rests only when death comes to fetch him.”

If “The Vagrants” sounds like a grim and lightless book, though heart-rending at every turn, it is. Steadily collecting atrocities and amassing paragraphs with the solidity of bricks, it replaces the tender ease and range of some of Li’s earlier stories with a much more focused, imprisoned rage. It can seem, in fact, less like a novel — since movement and plot are fairly sparing — than a counter-document of sorts, a private, unsanctioned portrait of those interiors (in every sense) that are always left out of the grand official picture. It is an individual’s response to a collectivist madness, and since that individual is a novelist, it goes into precisely those places, psychological and emotional, that five-year plans try to deny or idealize out of existence.

Li’s novel is not easy or enjoyable to read, but what it has to do and say is serious business, not unlike the business of counting the dead and burying the bodies. “The Vagrants” reminds us of all the uncounted, unnamed bodies that lie in the soil only a few feet beneath the latest flood of bright and celebratory billboards (these days done up in neon) proclaiming the achievements of the latest, 21st-­century Chinese revolution, which shrewdly chooses to dress up its predations in Armani and Calvin Klein.