Customer Reviews

The Vagrants: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Yiyun Li's first full-length novel, THE VAGRANTS, is another in a steadily growing line of Chinese tales, in both fictional and memoir forms, from the terrifying, chaotic years of China's Cultural Revolution. That dark period, running roughly from 1966 to Mao's death in 1976, is fast becoming the Chinese literary equivalent of the Holocaust, a source for reflection on China's cultural mores, the power of one man and his misshapen ideas, and the brutal potential of conformity and mass behavior. Interestingly, however, no Chinese author of whom I'm aware has attempted to address the longer term impact of those years on the present-day lives of the young Red Guard participants, people now in their sixties and seventies, nor how they might be regarded by the younger generations who followed them. What must one think to look at one's parents or grandparents in China and wonder about their behavior (and fearful acceptance of others' behavior) during that time?

Regardless, with so many predecessor books, one might well wonder whether there were any more stories left to tell set in those specific years. Yiyun Li answers that proposition in THE VAGRANTS brilliantly, with a resounding "yes." Her story, set in the small town of Muddy River, employs what amounts to an ensemble cast. There's aging Teacher Gu, his wife, and their counterrevolutionary daughter Gu Sha. There's old Mr. and Mrs. Hua, itinerant and childless garbage scavengers who've finally settled in Muddy River after dedicating much of their lives to saving and raising abandoned baby girls. There's the congenitally deformed Nini, at twelve years of age the oldest of six girls in her family and a pariah even to her own parents. There's Bashi, a young man but regarded by the townspeople as an undesirable pervert. There's the young country boy Tong and his gentle dog Ear, and the maniacal old Kwen with his vicious black guard dog. Finally, there's the lovely, mellow-voiced announcer Kai and her husband Han, a government functionary from a politically well-connected family. Each has his or her own story to tell, full of secret hopes and longings and regrets, but they are all connected in unexpected ways.

Gu Shan's rejection of Mao's Communist Party orthodoxy and her horrible execution as a counterrevolutionary in the book's early pages serve as focal point around which the rest of the novel builds. Her "follow the Party line" parents suffer the immediate consequences not just in personal sorrow but in rejection and isolation by their neighbors. Young Ms. Gu's death leads to all sorts of unintended consequences.

For some of Ms. Li's characters, Gu Shan's tragic end holds a mirror to their own lives, giving them newfound strength to express their opposition to the mindless brutality of the Red Guard. Relationships, even marriages, are questioned and re-evaluated, while old relationships are strengthened and new ones formed through obscure coincidences resulting from Gu Shan's execution. Political protest takes nascent shape, inevitably resulting in more punishment and death. An old man retreats into a romanticized past, a criminal is revealed, and another crime is covered up. A young boy makes a mistake, as does a young girl - both have tragic consequences for their families. The weak-willed scurry for cover in the aftermath of the protest, willing to testify against their spouses and family. Despite everything, small acts of courage and kindness, some anonymous, propel lives forward and help retain a sense of sanity and a glimmer of humanity.

The book's title is telling, since it points to Mr. and Mrs. Hua as the anchors not only of her story, but of the other character's lives. Uneducated, poor, childless, living the lowliest of lives, it is the Hua's basic human decency, their love for the abandoned girl orphans they found and raised, that makes them true "heroes of the people."

Yiyun Li's writing often moves swiftly from one character's story to another, almost like cinematic jump cuts. Nevertheless, she manages these multiple plot lines smoothly and crisply, bringing them each forward so that some appear to run in parallel while others neatly intersect. In the end, they all converge to create a new Muddy River, washed over by the courage of Gu Shan's convictions and the blood of her execution and defilement. THE VAGRANTS is an admirable follow-up to Ms. Li's earlier, well-regarded short story collection, A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS. It is also more than praiseworthy in its own right.

I've been an avid fan of Ha Jin until Yiyun Li came along. For writings on modern China, Yiyun is simply the best. After A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, I was afraid that any follow-up act would disappoint. Instead, The Vagrants shone brilliantly.

For anyone interested in modern China, I would say this is a must-read. It's not a political novel, though it's about a political time. Above all, it's a beautifully written human story about a group of characters of no particular importance in a small town; through them, we saw China and its scars and flickers of hope.

For someone who grew up in China during the time in the book, I marveled at Yiyun's capability to create so many characters, in such a short space, who felt real. I could almost hear the chatters and gossips of my relatives and the uncles and the aunties of my work unit though the pages.

Go get the book. It'd be a tough heartbreaking journey, yet it would be all worth it.

"The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime." So muses Teacher Gu as he wakens before dawn on the spring equinox, a day "when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned."

Gu Shan's crime -- she has been judged to be a counterrevolutionary for her writings, the nature of which the author never discloses in detail (deliberately) -- is one that she must pay for with her life, her nameless and faceless judges have concluded. Set in the China of 1979 - in the wake of Mao's death, but before Deng Xiaoping opened the door to free enterprise and prosperity - the novel has at its core the events that follow inexorably from Shan's execution. At the time, no one can anticipate what will follow; Shan, her vocal cords severed so she can't scream out at the crowds, is dragged before a stadium full of workers and schoolchildren who have been given a holiday in order to denounce her. Hauled off for execution, her kidneys are removed for transplant into (presumably) an aging Party official, a service for which local bigwigs receive coveted television sets. Then her body is brutalized by the man paid to bury her.

But Shan's fate, however horrific, is just the starting point for a tale of betrayals large and small that take place in the city of Muddy River after she is gone. Her execution brings together a host of unexpected and vividly drawn characters and sets them on a collision course with each other and with the officialdom that rules the smallest detail of their lives (such as whether a dead grandmother can be buried or cremated.) Wu Kai will prove an unlikely catalyst for the events that follow. Once she knew Gu Shan as a fellow Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution; today, Kai's voice represents the government - it is the voice heard over the loudspeakers at street corners throughout Muddy River, broadcasting the news. But her spirit is elsewhere.

Meanwhile, six-year-old Tong's heart lies in his grandparents' village, but he must find a way to carve out a life for himself in the city and he dreams of becoming a Communist Party hero. Nini, damaged before her birth when Shan assaulted her pregnant mother as an enemy of the people, dreams of nothing more than having enough to eat and being accepted by her family. But she is hungry and illiterate; she can't even read the posters announcing Shan's execution and instead focuses her attention on eating the flour paste that Mrs. Hua has used to fix them to the walls. Hua and Mrs. Hua live on the margins of the city's life, scrounging for scrap paper, cleaning up the streets and lamenting the loss of the six abandoned baby girls they had rescued, taken away from them by the government. Along with Bashi, the well-heeled but disturbed young man who, it seems clear, has all the makings of a pedophile, and Gu's elderly parents, struggling in the aftermath of their daughter's death, these characters will have to confront their essential powerlessness in the face of what appears to be, in contrast, a strangely impersonal and faceless government authority.

This is not a comforting book. It's an honest, unflinching glimpse at a world where human kindness is a luxury and casual brutality the norm. But it is beautifully written and structured, and serves as a reminder of the shadow that the Cultural Revolution continues to cast over today's China, a world in which great societal divisions still exist.

A bleak read, but a very important book. Highly recommended.

This is definitely an author to watch - she writes in a sparse style that is both raw and powerful. Her characters are varied and strong, interacting with one another in constantly interconnecting circles. The build-up of the narrative was excellent, leading us inexorably to the final denouement.

The book is set in 1979, after the death of Mao. It is based around a factual event - the denunciation and execution of 28 year old Gu-Shan, who has been accused of counterrevolutionary activity and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment followed by death. This event affected many people in the town of Muddy River - from Shan's parents through to the radio announcer responsible for whipping up the crowds, to a young, deformed girl who unknowingly watches while the Shan's vocal chords are cut to prevent her from speaking out. As the ripples travel further, other residents of the town become drawn in. A movement to clear Shan's name begins to build momentum and the fall-out from this has far reaching effects.

Recommended.

A novel of abject misery and the horrible things that desperate people do to each other when they're pushed. Is it one of the works of Cormac McCarthy? Perhaps Faulkner?

Nope! It's "The Vagrants" by Yiyun Li. Take nearly enough characters to stack a George RR Martin epic, put them in rural China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, sprinkle liberally with poisoned dogs, tattletale neighbors, guilt, repression, and pure asininity and you get The Vagrants.

I'm sure it paints a realistic picture of how horrible things really were (are?) in that part of the world. But I think I'd rather read it in a history book or perhaps a magazine feature than a 300+ page novel. There really is no gleam of hope for these people. Their pathetic circumstances and the authoritarian government turn them on each other repeatedly. There are only a few redeemable characters and they are mostly sidelined.

What's more, the main thread of the plot winds thinly through a myriad of vignettes and tangents. Many of the characters are poorly developed and serve only to confuse the casual reader. Li has a background as an author of short stories and it shows here.

It certainly was interesting to read about this time and place; the presentation was simply lacking. I give it three stars because even though I found it tedious and not to my taste I am glad that it was written, I learned something from it, and I certainly think others should read it.

Gu Shan, a 28 year old former Red Guard, is executed one spring day in 1979. After her years of fanaticism, including the denunciation of her own parents, her crime is to have confided doubts about Communism to her boy-friend - who promptly turned her in for career reasons.

It's two years after Mao's death and China is taking a deep breath. There's a Democracy Wall in Beijing and a power struggle as to how to respond. In the little provincial town of Muddy River, where Gu Shan meets her end, pent-up frustrations cohere sparking a mini protest movement in response.

Yiyun Li, the author, was born in China in 1972 and grew up in the society she describes. She has created a set of beautifully realised characters to etch out a picture of small-town life, people we get to know well and to care about. Gu Shan's death and the spirit of the times creates a fault line, which is illuminated in the responses of each of her characters in the immediate aftermath.

We know from the blurb that it's all going to end shockingly badly and as opinion hardens in Beijing, the crackdown impacts upon Muddy River like a tsunami, brutally cutting down both real and imagined enemies of the revolution.

I thought at first that not one of the characters at the end of this novel had emerged with any shred of fortune or dignity. But on reflection I except Old Hua and his wife, the beggar couple who had asked little of the world and had experienced all of its tragedies. Perhaps they alone left the scene with their self-respect intact, the product of a properly Taoist survival strategy.

I picked up a copy of The Vagrants at our local library, only to become so engrossed in the story that I felt I had to own it. I started reading knowing nothing about modern China, and finished the novel with some understanding of the political repression that exists there, despite the fact that this is fiction. Yiyun Li's writing is exceptionally fine, her characters are well-drawn, if not always admirable. I am hoping that our reading group will choose this as one of our selections for the coming year, so that I will have the opportunity to read it again, and to discuss it with others.

Dear S. Wang - Ms. Yiyun's novel is a work of fiction. Your review is off-base. But since you brought the subject up, while I did not experience the cultural revolution first hand, I have spent a good deal of time in China and have spoken with many people who did. Their experiences of that upheaval varied widely. For many the cultural revolution spun around them without having much impact on their lives, for others it was disruptive but not lethal, and for some it left deep scars and lasting bitterness. Reviews - especially reviews of fiction - are not an appropriate space for historical revisionism.

This was an amazing read in so many ways. The writing was beautiful, and the pace was perfect. The characters blended into one another's lives in small ways at first, but then the connections became more dramatic and meaningful. The story is so rich with history, which is another thing that I loved about it. However, it is also so brutal and raw. The violence is quite graphic, but it serves to bring an honest quality to the story. The moral choices that each character had to make were heartbreaking. This isn't a book that's going to make you feel good, but it's one that you'll remember. Readers with an interest in the history of China shouldn't miss it.

I ordered this book the day I read that Yiyun Li had won a McArthur Foundation genius grant and found myself immersed in a mind-bending trip back to the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1970s.

Given the place of China in the world today, it is an amazing glimpse into a corrupt and regimented world, a 1984 for the Asian brand of totalitarian rule. It depicts the deracination of culture where people are firmly rooted in tradition and even superstition. The only people truly at home in this world are the rootless vagrants, Old Hua and his wife, who return to their wandering ways after the unfortunate events in Muddy River narrated in the novel.

It is an ensemble cast of characters, though the main narrative thread is the relationship between Nini, a young handicapped woman, and Bashi, a dangerously amoral outsider. It is framed by the executions of two idealistic young women who automatically become counterrevolutionaries when they become disillusioned with Mao's revolution.

These are small characters in a small provincial town and yet they embody the epic sweep of the Cultural Revolution, a hypocritical leap forward that marked the end of any socialist pretenses in China. It shows simple people who have been deprived of their moral compass through the oppression of the Communist regime -- whether the cynical depravity of Old Kwen, entrusted to bury the executed Shan Gu, or the innocent treachery of Tong, a six-year-old whose biggest concern is the disappearance of his dog Ear.

Shan Gu, a model revolutionary during her teens, has her execution for counterrevolutionary activities brought forward so that her kidneys can be harvested for a well-connected official in the provincial capital. It would be hard to find a more horrifying metaphor for the exploitation of a helpless populace by a corrupt regime. Shan Gu's subsequent further posthumous mutilation before her burial completes the picture of moral bankruptcy.

By an odd coincidence, The Vagrants is the second book in a row for me featuring a deformed and crippled young woman in a prominent role. Like Mikkelina in Arnaldur Indridason's Silence of the Grave, Nini lacks the looks and charms of a nubile young woman, but that does not stop her womanly yearnings. But if women in general are helpless and vulnerable in the two societies portrayed in these novels, this is especially true of a crippled woman. In both cases, they are the survivors, however, and a testimony to human resiliency. The portayal of Nini's modest longings is almost unbearably poignant at times and makes her in some ways the true heroine of this story.

Yiyun Li's other published work is a collection of short stories, and the interweaving strands in this novel owe much to her skill in depicting these small self-contained narratives. We come to know Teacher Gu and his wife, Tong and his drunken father and long-suffering mother, the odd Bashi and the sympathetic Nini, the news announcer Kai and her husband Han and platonic lover Jialin. The trajectory set in motion by the execution of Shan Gu is clear in advance and yet told with exquisite care. The naive and foolish hopes of the young and the vain efforts of the mature to remain indifferent all become enmeshed in an oppressive and stifling environment without honor or justice.

Oddly enough, the least visible characters in the novel are the vagrants of the title, the Huas. The childless couple moved around restlessly, taking care of unwanted infant girls, until they settled for a time in Muddy River. It turns out to be a brief respite before they feel compelled to resume their vagrant life.

The novel depicts a life of simplicity and extreme poverty that nonetheless has its own dignity to the extent it can escape the ravages of regime. A hungry Nini scrapes the flour paste off of posters for nourishment and Teacher Gu squirrels away a precious Parker pen for decades.

It is a heartbreaking work and so relevant for our times. Material conditions have improved in China but the fundamental injustice, and presumably corruption, of the system remain intact. The recognition for Li's fiction, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize for imprisoned activist Liu Xiaobo keep us from forgetting that fact.