Chapter 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 wrongdoing.
“I’m not talking about what we could decide,” she said, raising her voice. “I’m
asking for your conscience. Do you really believe she should die because of what
she has written?”
Conscience is not part of what one needs to live, Teacher Gu thought, but before
he could say anything, someone knocked on the thin wall that separated their
house from their neighbors’, a protest at the noise they were making at such an
early hour perhaps, or, more probably, a warning. Their next-door neighbors were
a young couple who had moved in a year earlier; the wife, a branch leader of the
district Communist Youth League, had come to the Gus’ house twice and questioned
them about their attitudes toward their imprisoned daughter. “The party and the
people have put trusting hands on your shoulders, and it’s up to you to help her
correct her mistake,” the woman had said both times, observing their reactions
with sharp, birdlike eyes. That was before Shan’s retrial; they had hoped then
that she would soon be released, after she had served the ten years from the
first trial. They had not expected that she would be retried for what she had
written in her journals in prison, or that words she had put on paper would be
enough evidence to warrant a death sentence.
Teacher Gu turned off the light, but the knocking continued. In the darkness he
could see the light in his wife’s eyes, more fearful than angry. They were no
more than birds that panicked at the first twang of a bow. In a gentle voice
Teacher Gu urged, “Let me have the bag.”
She hesitated and then passed the bag to him; he hid it behind the hens’ box,
the small noise of their scratching and pecking growing loud in the empty
space. From the dark alley occasional creaks of opening gates could be heard,
and a few crows stirred on the roof of a nearby house, their croaking carrying a
strange conversational tone. Teacher Gu and his wife waited, and when there were
no more knocks on the wall, he told her to take a rest before daybreak.
The city of Muddy River was named after the river that ran eastward on the
southern border of the town. Downstream, the Muddy River joined other rivers to
form the Golden River, the biggest river in the northeastern plain, though the
Golden River did not carry gold but was rubbish-filled and heavily polluted by
industrial cities on both banks. Equally misnamed, the Muddy River came from the
melting snow on White Mountain. In summers, boys swimming in the river could
look up from underwater at the wavering sunshine through the transparent bodies
of busy minnows, while their sisters, pounding laundry on the boulders along the
bank, sometimes sang revolutionary songs in chorus, their voices as clear and
playful as the water.
Built on a slice of land between a mountain in the north and the river in the
south, the city assumed the shape of a spindle. Expansion was limited by both
the mountain and the river, but from its center the town spread to the east and
the west until it tapered off to undeveloped wilderness. It took thirty minutes
to walk from North Mountain to the riverbank on the south, and two hours to
cover the distance between the two tips of the spindle. Yet for a town of its
size, Muddy River was heavily populated and largely self-sufficient. The
twenty-year-old city, a development planned to industrialize the rural area,
relied on its many small factories to provide jobs and commodities for the
residents. The housing was equally planned out, and apart from a few buildings
of four or five stories around the city square, and a main street with a
department store, a cinema, two marketplaces, and many small shops, the rest of
the town was partitioned into twenty big blocks that in turn were divided into
nine smaller blocks, each of which consisted of four rows of eight connected,
one-storied houses. Every house, a square of fifteen feet on its sides, consisted
of a bedroom and a front room, with a small front yard circled by a wooden fence
or, for better-off families, a brick wall taller than a man’s height. The front
alleys between the yards were a few feet wide; the back alleys allowed only one
person to squeeze through. To avoid having people gaze directly into other
people’s beds, the only window in the bedroom was a small square high up on the
back wall. In warmer months it was not uncommon for a child to call out to his
mother, and for another mother, in a different house, to answer; even in the
coldest season, people heard their neighbors’ coughing, and sometimes snoring,
through the closed windows.
It was in these numbered blocks that eighty thousand people lived, parents
sharing, with their children, brick beds that had wood-stoves built underneath
them for heating. Sometimes a grandparent slept there too. It was rare to see
both grandparents in a house, as the city was a new one and its residents,
recent immigrants from villages near and far, would take in their parents only
when they were widowed and no longer able to live on their own.
Except for these lonely old people, the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979
were auspicious for Muddy River as well as for the nation. Two years earlier,
Chairman Mao had passed away and within a month, Madame Mao and her gang in the
central government had been arrested, and together they had been blamed for the
ten years of Cultural Revolution that had derailed the country. News of
national policies to develop technology and the economy was delivered by
rooftop loudspeakers in cities and the countryside alike, and if a man was to
travel from one town to the next, he would find himself, like the blind beggar
mapping this part of the province near Muddy River with his old fiddle and his
aged legs, awakened at sunrise and then lulled to sleep at sundown by the same
news read by different announcers; spring after ten long years of winter, these
beautiful voices sang in chorus, forecasting a new Communist era full of love
and progress.
In a block on the western side where the residential area gradually gave way to
the industrial region, people slept in row houses similar to the Gus’,
oblivious, in their last dreams before daybreak, of the parents who were going
to lose their daughter on this day. It was in one of these houses that Tong woke
up, laughing. The moment he opened his eyes he could no longer remember the
dream, but the laughter was still there, like the aftertaste of his favorite
dish, meat stewed with potatoes. Next to him on the brick bed, his parents were
asleep, his mother’s hair swirled around his father’s finger. Tong tiptoed over
his parents’ feet and reached for his clothes, which his mother always kept warm
above the woodstove. To Tong, a newcomer in his own parents’ house, the brick
bed remained a novelty, with mysterious and complex tunnels and a stove built
underneath.
Tong had grown up in his maternal grandparents’ village, in Hebei Province, and
had moved back to his parents’ home only six months earlier, when it was time
for him to enter elementary school. Tong was not the only child, but the only
one living under his parents’ roof now. His two elder brothers had left home for
the provincial capitals after middle school, just as their parents had left
their home villages twenty years earlier for Muddy River; both boys worked as
apprentices in factories, and their futures-marriages to suitable female workers
in the provincial capital, children born with legal residency in that city filled
with grand Soviet-style buildings-were mapped out by Tong’s parents in their
conversations. Tong’s sister, homely even by their parents’ account, had managed
to marry herself into a bigger town fifty miles down the river.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Vagrants
by Yiyun Li
Copyright © 2009 by Yiyun Li.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2009
Yiyun Li
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6313-0
