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56 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Captivating Ensemble Tale of the Cultural Revolution, February 16, 2009
This review is from: The Vagrants: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the best book about modern China, October 19, 2009
This review is from: The Vagrants: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grim, bleak -- and a masterful novel, February 23, 2009
This review is from: The Vagrants: A Novel (Hardcover)
"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.
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