The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li and James D. Horan

Book Overview

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.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400063132
• ISBN13: 9781400063130
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 337 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

the best book about modern China

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.

Raw and powerful

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.

Unremittingly Bleak

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.

Grim, bleak -- and a masterful novel

"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 cont

A Captivating Ensemble Tale of the Cultural Revolution

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. Politica