The Vagrants
Yiyun Li, 2009
Random House
349 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812973341
Summary
In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s.
As morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River, a spirited young woman, Gu Shan, once a devoted follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. While Gu Shan’s distraught mother makes bold decisions, her father begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.
Among the characters affected are Kai, a beautiful radio announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family; Tong, a lonely seven-year-old boy; and Nini, a hungry young girl. Beijing is being rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move the country toward a more enlightened and open society, but the government backlash will be severe.
In this spellbinding novel, the brilliant Yiyun Li gives us a powerful and beautiful portrait of human courage and despair in dramatic times. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Raised—Beijing, China;
• Education—B.S. Peking University; M.F.A., University of
Iowa; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Whiting Writers' Award; Frank O'Connor Int'l. Short
Story Award; PEN/Hemingway Award
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
Yiyun Li is a Chinese American writer. She was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. She is an editor of Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and moved to the United States after she got B.S. from Peking University in 1996. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into films: The Princess of Nebraska and the title story, which Li adapted herself. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Somewhere along the way from a childhood in China...to her present-day life in Oakland, Calif., Ms. Li honed two valuable aspects of her writing talent. She is a keen observer of even the cruelest workaday details...[and] Ms. Li's second gift is for soap-operatic plotting of the sort that has given down-home emotional impetus to ostensibly exotic best sellers like Memoirs of a Geisha. She puts this talent to highly effective use in The Vagrants. Though this novel is at heart a collection of overlapping separate stories, Ms. Li links them with touches of melodrama and well-timed accidents of fate.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
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.
Pico Iyer - New York Times Book Review
a powerful and thoughtful novel…[Li'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.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
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."
The New Yorker
Li's magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim novel centers on the 1979 execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary in the provincial town of Muddy River and spirals outward into a scathing indictment of Communist China. Former Red Guard leader Shan Gu is scheduled to be executed after a denunciation ceremony presided over by Kai, the city's radio announcer. At the ceremony, Shan doesn't speak (her vocal chords have been severed), and before she's shot, her kidneys are extracted-by Kai's favor-currying husband-for transplant to a high regional official. After Shan's execution, Kwen, a local sadist, and Bashi, a 19-year-old with pedophile leanings, bury Shan, but not before further mutilating the body. While Shan's parents are bereft, others celebrate, including the family of 12-year-old Nini, born deformed after militant Shan kicked Nini's mother in her pregnant belly. Nini dreams of falling in love and-in the novel's intricate overlapping of fates-hooks up with Bashi, providing the one relatively positive moment in this panorama of cruelty and betrayal. Li records these events dispassionately and with such a magisterial sense of direction that the reader can't help being drawn into the novel, like a sleeper trapped in an anxiety dream.
Publishers Weekly
Following her short story collection Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li's debut novel interestingly details life in the town of Muddy River, China, in 1979. Assorted characters are gradually introduced as stories unfold and revolve around the denunciation ceremony, execution, and attempted retribution for Shan, the daughter of retired Teacher Gu and his wife. Here, Li's central character, 19-year-old Bashi, intermingles with Old Kwen, a 56-year-old bachelor, as well as that of a young boy named Tong and an outcast 12-year-old girl named Nini. One of six sisters, Nini is plagued with severe birth deformities, but she and Bashi soon develop a friendship and tender bond that eventually leads Bashi to ask Nini to become his child bride. Added to this story are darker moments, like the sexual mutilation of Shan's body by Old Kwen, which Bashi tries to expose. Limited passages detailing particular scenes are not for the squeamish but are likely no worse than those found in gritty crime novels. Like other works set during this period in China, the novel is realistically filled with elements of inequality and despair. Content aside, Li's writing can be likened to that of Ha Jin, as she is a talented storyteller who is able to juggle multiple story lines and lead the reader through numerous highs and lows in this character-driven work. Well written and recommended for larger fiction collections, particularly public and academic libraries strong in Asian literature.
Shirley N. Quan - Library Journal
(Starred review.) In her staggering first novel, [Li] extends her inquiry into China’s particular brand of soul-killing tyranny...the public denunciation ceremonies preceding an execution.... Unflinching and mesmerizing, Li traces the contagion of evil with stunning precision and compassion in this tragic and beautiful novel of conscience. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Gu Shan is a member of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution. How do characters who are part of older generations—such as the Huas and Teacher and Mrs. Gu—act and react toward the revolution and then the later counterrevolution?
2. Among the many characters we meet in Muddy River, there are several distinct family groups, including Nini, her parents, and her five sisters; Bashi and his grandmother; Kai, her husband, baby, and in-laws; and Teacher Gu and his wife and daughter. What do these different family units tell the reader about family life in China since the revolution? What traditions have been upheld?
3. Teacher Gu reminds his wife of an ancient poem: “Seeing is not as good as staying blind” (page 103). What is he trying to tell her? Which characters experience incidents or confront issues of sight versus blindness? How does the message of this line relate to The Vagrants as a whole?
4. What does this novel tell us about being an insider versus being an outsider? How do characters who are clearly outsiders—such as Tong, who was raised in a village, and Bashi, who does not have a work unit—fare in Muddy River? How are they viewed by regular workers and schoolchildren, and how do they interact with such characters?
5. Gu Shan’s denunciation brings together residents from all parts of Muddy River society, yet the reader does not know her as well as many other characters in the book. What can you infer about her character, beliefs, and behavior from theother characters? Is she guilty? Is she innocent?
6. Certain characters, such as Kai, outwardly appear to be agents of the state and disseminate state propaganda. In which instances do characters unwittingly act as agents of the state? What do these examples show us about oppressive governments and societies?
7. Ghosts, such as those of Gu Shan or Bashi’s grandmother, are invoked at different points throughout the novel. What role do ghosts play in the minds of the characters? In the larger story? What does the juxtaposition of modern government propaganda with traditional beliefs such as the belief in ghosts illustrate?
8. When Han fears a reversal of his good fortune, he reminds Kai of the saying that "the one who robs and succeeds will become the king, and the one who tries and fails will be called a criminal" (page 208). He is clearly referring to his own political future, but to which other characters and situations in The Vagrants can this saying be applied? Do some of these situations recur in literature and history? Compare these external examples to the ones in the novel.
9. Though the events in the novel are complex, they represent only one relatively small, provincial city in the vastness of China. Stepping back, do you think that the circumstances in Muddy River were similar to, or differ from, circumstances in other cities in China? Beijing? How do the characters view Beijing?
10. The stark and vivid images in this novel are unique. Can you point out a few effective images that helped the novel come alive for you as a reader?
11. Discuss some of the most universal themes of The Vagrants. What makes them universal? In what ways do Yiyun Li’s distinctive style and use of language contribute to, or reinforce, these themes?
(Questions issued by publisher.)