Die Sterblichen

by Yiyun Li

Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the Tiananmen Square uprising.Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, 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.In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; acrippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction.Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art.

Genres: Fiction, China, Historical Fiction, Asia, Historical, Book Club, Asian Literature

Pocket Book

First published February 3, 2009

About the author

Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough read. Almost impossible to rate. Did I (3) like or (4) really like this novel? No. I endured it. Do I think it (5) amazing? Yes, yes ... that I do.

It is, quite possibly, the most brutal, dispiriting, sad, anger-provoking, depressing novel I've ever read.

I feel as though this novel is trying to teach me so many things, but my lack of knowledge of China's history, specifically China's Cultural Revolution, is hampering me from understanding it fully. That's at the thematic, symbolic level. And possibly even at the plot level - I am still confused about Gu Shan's crime and political position. (But I suspect it almost doesn't matter.)

Where I'm going now, in my head, is to why I read. This novel--or more precisely, trying to review this novel--makes me ask myself why I read. One of the reasons I read is to understand worlds that I will never experience first-hand, or to experience worlds in which I will never live.

That's why speculative and historical fiction are of such interest to me.

The thing about this novel is, there's nothing speculative about it. 1984 was speculative. This is real-world 1984.

When fiction takes one to very dark places, places of horror and brutality--like China circa 1973 or Nazi Germany circa 1940--the depth to which one can experience that world becomes a marker of the quality of the fiction, I think. Do you stick with it - bear it, like the torture that it is (and what the hell does that say about me, anyway?)? How often must you surface to breathe the calming and soul-restoring fresh air of the knowledge that "it's just a book"?

With historical versus speculative fiction, "it's just a book" doesn't usually work, because immediately after that thought comes "but this really happened to real people." And then, empathy floods.

I kept trying "it's just a book" here - and then Yiyun Li dragged me back under with the sharp, stabbing pain of baby girls being thrown out like yesterday's chamber-pot contents; vocal cords being severed and kidneys removed while the political prisoner was alive; the gruesome death of a 6-yr-old's pet dog and his later betrayal of his father (link? yes, of course); children being burned in a house fire, more ... so much more.

I would not last for a split-second in a totalitarian regime. Despite my current contempt for my government, I still have unfettered freedom to rant away about them on facebook and in person to just about whomever will listen.

I would not last in a totalitarian regime not because I'm brave and would stand up for what I believed and protest and then be killed; but because I'm not, and I would do what I needed to do to survive. I would get swept up by a gang thinking there would be safety in numbers, and thinking that what we were doing was protesting in a "safe" way. And it would turn out not to be safe at all. I would underestimate the brutality of my government, and behave as though it wasn't happening, not be fully aware of what was happening - think I/we were higher up on that slippery slope than was the reality. I would be frightened or traumatized into silence.

Or maybe I would just curl up in a ball, I would grow inside myself into a hard stone of patience and isolation and I would wait it out. Hide and obey, repress my true feelings and self. Possibly, I would kill myself - as so many did during the Cultural Revolution. Or even more likely, I would do something stupid, either deliberately out of misguided desperation or misplaced trust, or inadvertently out of sheer ignorance. A betrayal of someone I loved, perhaps; or revealing myself to someone I loved who then betrays me.

All of these things happen in this novel. And more. This is what this novel is about, what happens to people under brutal dictatorships. This is what the reader endures: experiencing first-hand how people disintegrate, how desperate they become, how they live and love and treat each other. What they think is moral, just, right; how they behave, how they learn, how they grow from childhood into adulthood and what kind of adults they become, if they even become them. How the political system self-perpetuates; how it shapes, represses, constructs and destroys individual human beings.

Not to deny that history/culture/other forces don't play a role in how behaviour is expressed. China certainly has a problem with baby girls that pre-dates the Cultural Revolution and has lasted to this day - that is not something you can blame on a specific regime. There is variability even among the masses in how the effects of political repression are expressed, no matter which side you're on. So you get a Gu Shan, and a Wu Kai - flip sides of the same coin. You get a Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu contrasted with Old Hua and Mrs. Hua. You get a Bashi and a Nini and a Tong. You get unextinguishable individualism amidst the collective.

If there is a tiny shred of hope in this novel, it is in the Hua/Nini story line. The Huas return to their earlier, much easier, lives as vagrants, beggars -- the lives they spent rescuing baby girls who had been thrown away to die. Their last rescue is of 12-yr-old Nini (and the baby? what happened to the baby?). Nini: whom we first meet eating the flour wallpaper paste from the notices of Gu Shan's denunciation/execution because she's starving and rejected by her family, deformed and a tight knot of anger and hope and opportunism. She represents survival in this world, and its future, too.

I wanted to start this review (but clearly didn't) with the image presented early in the novel by Teacher Gu. He speaks of a blessing his first wife sends on the eve of his marriage to his second wife (a message that, Yiyun Li makes clear, Teacher Gu does not share with his second wife who cannot read): keep each other alive with your own water. It refers to a fable about love and I think, it speaks to the bleak history and perpetual sadness this novel describes overall:

two fish, husband and wife, were stranded in a puddle; they competed to swallow as much water as they could before the puddle vanished in the scorching sun so that they could keep each other alive in their long suffering before death by giving water to their loved one. p. 54

Futility - the futility of love, of revolutionary acts, of life under totalitarian rule. At the end of the novel, Teacher Gu makes a second important statement, this time a soliloquy prompted by the visit of a neighbour (I was not clear who this was - ?) and the imprisonment of his second wife for her role in protesting their daughter Gu Shan's execution:

Your wife [the neighbour's]...is the same creature I have seen in my own wife. And my daughter too--you may not know her but she was just like your wife, full of ideas and judgments but no idea how to be a respectful human being. They think they are revolutionary, progressive, they think they are doing a great favor to the world by becoming masters of their own lives, but what is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

From keeping each other alive to eating each other alive. That is the essence of this novel's message.

Remarkable.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

i've been trying to get away from writing a review of this book. i've been coming up with scenarios in which such writing is impossible. i have to walk the dog. i have to go to bed. there is too much distraction right now.

this is the story of the aftermath of an execution in a small provincial town (more a community than a town, really) in communist china. the narrator tells us that the historical period is the period that followed the cultural revolution, but since my knowledge of chinese history is nil this means little to me. this post-revolutionary time seems extremely but also fumblingly repressive: lots of thought police everywhere, often in the form of family members or neighbors, often in the form of one's internalized terror; but also the usual by-product of dictatorships, a convoluted, self-righteous, scared, and highly corrupted bureaucracy.

while this is the background, the book is really about a group of connected characters: a little boy and his dog; a disabled girl and her sisters; the titular, elderly vagrants; a strange, much disliked young man; the parents of the executed woman; the town's news announcer (who does her announcing through a PA system, radios being forbidden) and her husband; and a youngish counterrevolutionary who is dying of tb (being counterrevolutionary here means being in favor of liberty and democracy).

yiyun li takes her story effortlessly from one character to the next, discussing their daily lives but also weaving a proper story with a dramatic finale. there is a striking simplicity to the book, even though the themes dealt with are anything but simple, and you are tempted to think that the simplicity is due to the fact that the author is not writing in her native language.

but of course that's not it at all. yiyun li is in perfect control of the language and of the structure of the narrative, and her simple stories plumb some pretty serious depths. these depths consist of a catalog of human sorrows and maybe of human joys too, though, as always, the sorrows strike us as much bigger and more momentous than the joys.

the seven deadly sorrows of the human condition according to the gospel of The Vagrants are:

cold and hunger
the seizure of one's mind by others
the seizure of one's life (literally, through execution or murder) by others
the loss of those we love
inconsolable and inescapable loneliness (even in the company of others)
for children and for the elderly, the abandonment and rejection of parents/children
the scorn and contempt of the society one lives in

in a tone that is partly like a fable and partly like a solzhenitsyn novel, yiyun li nails the reader to the fact that life is sometimes so awful, it is not just impossible to bear it, it's intolerable just to think about its awfulness.

some parts of this book will break your heart.

yet we know that people live like this. more piercingly, we know we do. this is when this book is at its most heartbreaking: when it allows the awareness that a pain just like this has visited, may be visiting, and certainly will again visit our lives to reach the tender flesh of consciousness.

and then, at the end, yiyun li gives us a little reprieve -- because, as i said, it is entirely possible that joys may be just as big as sorrows.

maybe this is the novel's biggest gift: its reminder that, however miserable life may get, individually and collectively, there will always be, mixed with the misery, often too fleeting to be properly noticed, a cooling, gentle, vital, life-giving kindness.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of my Fall 2017 Best Of Chinese Literature project; more here, and a cool list of books here.

Nini's mother was beaten savagely while she was pregnant, and Nini was born badly deformed. Her assailant was Gu Shan, who, political tides having turned against her in 1979, is now set to be executed. Kai, an announcer for the government radio and a minor celebrity, secretly sympathizes with her. She's picked the side opposite her government employee husband. Gu Shan's father did that once too, which is why Mrs. Gu is his second wife. Nini has some sort of boyfriend, Bashi, who lives on the settlement from the government for the death of his father and is some kind of criminally insane. Also whirling around each other in this small city are seven-year-old Tong, who was sent to his grandparents and returned as an unwanted stranger; and the vagrants themselves, Mrs. and Old Hua, a semi-homeless couple who have tried to patch a family together from a series of girls found abandoned on riverbanks.

All of these are stories about parents and children and the pain they can inflict on each other. Everyone hurts everyone as they all react to this execution, martyred Gu Shan, whose body is progressively taken apart.

It's all fairly grim; I would advise bracing yourself. It's serious business. I thought it was brilliant, the way Yiyun Li weaves all these stories together into a perfect tapestry. They all matter; they take turns coming together and pulling apart again. The NY Times called it "a counter-document of sorts, a private, unsanctioned portrait of those interiors (in every sense) that are always left out of the grand official picture." That review is wonderful, but the reviewer seems to have enjoyed it less than I did. I've spent the past few months reading great Chinese novels; this has been the best of them.

[Melani · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very well written book. It was like being given the power to see into the minds of men and women. The pity was that their minds were so wracked and sickened that you found yourself reading faster and faster so that you could escape from them -- escape from the spaces in peoples minds and lives that were so intimate -- escape from a despair that was so cloying you could hardly tolerate it. I did not give this book four stars because some of the incidents in the novel were so graphic that they seemed intended to manipulate my sentiments -- and drew attention to themselves. Some of the private moments were, frankly, too private, too intimate. To leave so many characters stripped bare of their secrets in the fog of their confusion seemed unfair. I do think that the book is an accurate portrayal of the way that a repressive society breeds suspicion and betrays intimacy. The characters were very human -- but all their faces were set in sadness -- and all of their hearts broken. There was not one person in the novel who did not end up disappointed in the way things turned out.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Some people's deaths are heavier than Mount Tai and others' are light as a feather."

This is a well written book set in 1970s China that weighed heavily on me. I appreciated rather than enjoyed it. Life in the fictional town of Muddy River is truly harsh and really doesn't get better throughout the tale.

Even possible whimsical moments become weighed down with sorrow. "He made the paper frog jump and it landed in his wife's unfinished porridge. Neither Mrs. Gu nor Teacher Gu removed the frog and he knew then that they would never laugh together as a family again."

Teacher Gu's nanny, a woman of little education, had interesting explanations for even the most mundane of things. For example, "A misplaced hairpin must be taking a walk with a ghost, so too a lost coin or a missing tin soldier; sometimes the ghosts returned the runaway items but to different locations because ghosts were forgetful which also explained the permanent disappearance of things."

Then, there is the devastating loss of a child. "They wouldn't bury her themselves, they were too old for the task, their hearts easily breakable."

And the cynicism: "It's the same old truth, the one who robs and succeeds will become the king and the one who tries to rob and fails will be called a criminal."

Finally, even after death, people cannot be left to lie in peace. "Only in our culture can a body be dug from its grave and put on display for other people's political ambitions."

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This review was originally published on The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2009/03/no-one-i...)

When I think of Beijing in 1998, I think of a worn-out train bound for a town fifty miles from the capital. Across from me sat a Chinese man in his late twenties who, for a while, would not meet my eyes. Only after the train began moving, the noise of the rails nearly deafening, did he lean forward across the little table that separated us and say, “English?”

I nodded, grateful and relieved to have someone to talk to. When he asked why I was going to this town, which, by his reckoning, was not a good place for foreigners, I told him I was looking for a small hiking trail I’d heard about, hoping to get away from the chaos of the city for a day. He said it would be very hard to find, and offered to accompany me.

A few minutes into our conversation, a uniformed man walked up and began talking to my new companion. From the tone of his voice, it sounded like an interrogation. The uniformed man kept gesturing to me angrily. My acquaintance shrank into himself, speaking quietly to the uniformed man. After the man left, I asked, “What was that about? Is everything okay?”

He shook his head, “I cannot talk.” Then he looked out the window, and for the rest of the trip he did not speak to me or meet my eyes. When the train pulled into the station, he exited quickly, without saying goodbye, and I did not attempt to follow.

I mention this occasion as a single example of the fear and secrecy I encountered during my three months traveling solo in China in 1998. This was the year of President Clinton’s famous visit to Tiananmen Square, a visit which, as a foreigner, I was allowed to witness, but which was so tightly controlled by the government that my Chinese acquaintances told me they dared not go. This was almost ten years after the massacre, almost twenty years after the fictional events described in Yiyun Li’s arresting debut novel, The Vagrants, which should be required reading for anyone interested in political fanaticism and state-sponsored tyranny.

At the time of my visit, the official government line on Chairman Mao, who had decimated the country with his brutal Cultural Revolution decades before, was that he had been 70% right, 30% wrong. The giant portrait of Mao that hung over the entrance to the Forbidden City served as a reminder that his vision of revolution (or at least 70% of that vision) still resonated in the hearts and minds of the Communist government. But the problem with fanatical revolution is that it quarters no dissent. To be a counter-revolutionary in China in the 1970s, the era in which Li’s novel takes place, was to be an enemy of the people.

The Vagrants captures in chilling detail the atmosphere of constant fear, uncertainty, and vigilance that made daily life in post-Mao China a terrifying tightrope walk. The precise date on which the novel begins is March 21, 1979. The place is Muddy River, a village beset by poverty, a place where, down every alley, one finds despair. If every story must have a reason for being told, a moment or necessity that sets it in motion, the catalyst for The Vagrants is a murder—specifically, the pending execution of 28-year-old Gu Shan, who has spent the past decade imprisoned for writing a letter to her boyfriend which questioned the government.

Gu Shan’s great crime is that she has not reformed. Instead of recanting her opinions and using her time in prison to see the error of her counter-revolutionary ways, she kept a journal in which she was critical of the government. In the extravagantly censorial atmosphere of post-Mao China, a doubt uttered in private is fair grounds for execution.

Her denunciation ceremony takes place amidst an atmosphere of excitement on the one hand, resignation on the other. Schoolchildren, public officials, and workers’ units take part in the spectacle, while those who disagree with the policy, for the most part, keep their silence. In this atmosphere, small acts take on hyper-significance. The condemned girl’s mother burns her daughter’s clothes in the street, an attempt to send her child off in the proper manner, only to be dragged away by authorities. Her actions bewilder Gu Shan’s father, a teacher who has come to lament his daughter’s education, an education which he believes led her astray. He regrets that the women in his life cannot be quiet and obedient; why must they insist on making waves?

Forced to calculate, from one minute to the next, where their loyalties should lie, the people of Muddy River are trapped in a collective and endless Catch-22. The famous radio personality Kai, a former classmate of Gu Shan, who aims to protest the execution may end up a heroine or a prisoner, depending on the shifting political winds, while those who support the execution may yet end up losing jobs, homes, or political clout because of their choice. The people who stream into the city square to sign a petition questioning the execution may be signing away their lives. The source of The Vagrants’ great tension, and its power, is that at any moment any character may run into trouble of a fatal variety. No one is safe.

In a description of a group of schoolboys playing on the river as the winter ice begins to thaw, Li eloquently captures the essential problem of the time and place about which she writes:

“Sometimes one of them lost his balance and plunged into the river… The soaked boy dodged the ice drifts, scrambled onto the bank, and ran home, laughing too because this kind of failure did not bother him. The same thing could happen to anyone; the next day, he would be one of the winning boys, laughing at another boy falling in. It was a game.”

Perhaps one of the most arresting features of this book is that there are very few characters for whom the reader is allowed to feel a lingering sympathy. Just as we begin to cast our lot in with the martyr, Gu Shan, whose prolonged and extraordinarily painful death is portrayed in all its savage butchery, we learn that she is not innocent. At the age of 15, flush with the zeal of Communism, Gu Shan turned against her own parents and the elders of her village, whom she publicly beat and humiliated. One of the women she beat was eight months pregnant; her child, Nini, was born with terrible deformities.

If Gu Shan is a ghost on the page, condemned to death from the moment we know her name, twelve-year-old Nini is very alive. Despised and abused by her own parents, Nini finds some hope when she is befriended by Bashi, a young man considered by many to be the town idiot, whose driving desire is to see a woman’s unclothed body. Because women his own age will not have him, and even young girls mock him, he turns to the prepubescent, physically deformed Nini as an answer to his loneliness. It is testament to the unbearable misery of Nini’s life that one finds oneself rooting for the underhanded and selfish Bashi, hoping that Nini will go live with him—loss of sexual innocence seems a small price to pay for a full stomach, a warm bed, and protection from the cruelties of her own parents. Bashi offers Nini something that until then has been almost entirely lacking in her life: acceptance and affection. But even Nini cannot be entirely trusted to hold our sympathies; the one couple who has been kind to her all her life eventually becomes the subject of her resentment, and we hold our breath, wondering how she might punish them.
Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li

The vagrants of the novel’s title turn out to be Mr. and Mrs. Hua, an elderly, childless couple who spent their earlier years taking in abandoned girls, only to be forced, ultimately, to give up all of their adoptive daughters. Late in the book, Mrs. Hua considers “giving up their home and going back to the vagrant life. They could visit their daughters, the married ones and the ones who’d been taken away from them, before they took their final exit from the world.”

In a world where one prospers or fails, lives or dies, according rules over which one has absolutely no control, this “final exit” is the only sure end of suffering. At one point, the radio announcer, Kai, remembers something her father once told her: “Life is a war, and one rests only when death comes to fetch him.” These words ring true throughout The Vagrants, which offers a terrifying glimpse into the reality of a deeply censored society, a place where one’s neighbors cannot be trusted, and where the most dangerous thing a person can do is speak his or her mind.

I read this book with a sense of horror, in part because I know that, though the characters are fictional, the world it portrays is a real one. The man who hired me to go to China in 1998 had, as a child, lost his own parents to the Cultural Revolution. He had seen his mother murdered, her beloved personal library burned. He had survived in part because of the kindness of an older woman who saved a few books for him, which he read and reread in hiding. We spent a lot of time together, and, on a couple of occasions, he opened up to me about his childhood, his mother. But for the most part, he kept his silence. “Is not good to talk about these things,” he said. “Too much sadness.”

Sadness suffuses every page of Yiyun Li’s novel. It is this relentless sadness, the refusal to buy into the contemporary literary religion of redemption, that makes The Vagrants a brave and important book.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the characters are fictional, the world it portrays was once real (1979 China, two years after Mao's death). The book is loosely based upon a true story. However, the name of the city and names of characters are all fictional (except for the distant city of Beijing and the former leader, Mao). I have heard of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution under Mao, and was under the impression that things started getting better after Mao's death. They may have, but it was a long slow process, and not very visible in this story. Keep in mind that this story takes place after Nixon's visit, so the USA and China had diplomatic ties at this time. I mention this not because USA-China relations play any role in this story, but rather to show that China was not an international pariah when these things happened.

The author was born and grew up in a China that portrayed their heroes as being perfect. Therefore, that must be why she goes out of her way to portray her characters as being less than virtuous and a bit short of perfection. The novel introduces us to a broad cast of characters who are mostly poor common people from a small City of minimal political importance.

A combination of sadness and attention to minutiae of daily life and nature permeates the novel. Glue for a poster announcing a denunciation provides nourishment for a hungry girl. Dreams of a missing granddaughter are compared to the "... blossom in the mirror or a full moon in the river." The meadows where female babies are abandoned to freeze in winter is a place where "...white nameless flowers bloom all summer." The glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow is weighted down by the foreboding of violence that may strike at any moment. Most readers will know enough about recent Chinese history to know that the ending cannot be too happy. Suspense builds as the reader nears the end of the book because the reader is now familiar with the cast of characters and cares about their future. All I can say without being a spoiler is that there are winners and losers. The following quote from the book (from a letter of reflection to an ex-wife) summarizes the lives being portrayed:

... what marks our era is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever."

Then, starting over after quoting some Buddhist scriptures.

... "We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world."

This novel describes some grisly medical and surgical practices. Did (or do) those practices actually exist in China?

I've often wondered how a society can recover from the craziness of the "Cultural Revolution" that China experienced in the 60s. How do neighbors relate to their former persecutors? The answer in this story is with slow deliberation. An irony of Chinese history is that the truly lasting Cultural Revolution didn't occur under Mao, but rather occurred after his death when their economy transformed from strict communism into a controlled capitalism.

I wonder if this novel can do for China what Kite Runner did for Afghanistan? Both books were written by gifted first time novelists. (Liyun did write a previously published book of short stories.) Kite Runner slowly became a best seller several years after being published. Perhaps the same can happen to The Vagrants.

Our country is blessed to have the best and brightest young people, who have fled repression in their native countries, come here, learn our language, and then write terrific novels about the conditions they left. We are truly blessed.

I found the following link to an audio interview with the author Yiyun Li:
http://lewisfrumkes.com/radioshow/yiy...

In addition, the following link is to a 55-minute video of Yiyun Li reading an excerpt from the book, being interviewed, and answering questions from the audience.
http://www.asiasociety.org/video/arts...
It is from this video that I learned that the book is based on a true story. (Warning: the video link contains what may be a spoiler for some readers.)

I wanted to give the book five stars because it is a book that should be read. It provides a unique look into the recent history of China. However, I ended up giving it only four stars because of the generally sad mood conveyed to the reader.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book, but a thoroughly unpleasant read. It’s bleak and tragic and also grotesque and horrifying; it starts out miserable and then gets worse, with most of the characters ending the book worse off than they began (and the couple of exceptions wind up not in a better position so much as a differently awful one).

The positive side is that the author was there, in China in 1979, and you can tell. There’s a level of striking detail to the setting, how people lived their lives in a material sense and in terms of day-to-day life and familial relations, in terms of power and how people relate to the government, in the lack of history in this newly-constructed city populated by migrants from the countryside, that makes the book feel very authentic. The characters feel authentic too, with some complexity; although set in a dark time in China’s history (just after the end of the Cultural Revolution), it doesn’t feel like one of those facile book-club-bait tearjerkers.

Actually it’s all the way to the other end of the spectrum. It’s an ensemble cast populated by marginalized, difficult people—understandably so, but I never got fully invested or even that interested in any of them. There’s the aging Teacher Gu, whose daughter is being executed for political crimes, and whose silent opposition to the new regime largely seems to manifest as misogyny. There’s Kai, the government radio announcer married into a powerful family, now seeking in opposition a new purpose to her life, for reasons that are never quite clear, perhaps not even to her. There’s Nini, a 12-year-old disfigured girl used as an unpaid servant by her family, who can be equally quick to be unpleasant toward others. There’s Bashi, a 19-year-old boy a few eggs short of a basket: in another book he’d be a source of sentimentality, but here, although he displays a level of friendly naivete and caring, we have someone who sees no problem trying to lure away young girls to show him their genitals, and who is also responsible for most of the book’s animal cruelty.

Some other characters are more sympathetic—the 6-year-old boy newly arrived from the village with his dog; the older couple who have lived most of their lives as beggars, raising girls abandoned by their families—but none of them ever fully pulled me in. Perhaps I was just too disgusted by so much of the content: the execution, for instance, which just keeps getting more and more horrifying the more we learn about what happened to the condemned woman beforehand and to her body afterward. I’ll read some pretty dark stuff, but this one just kept making me not want to be in its pages.

At any rate, not a novel I’d recommend, but if you really like to wallow in horror for some reason, it’s decently well-written and may work better for you.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Very bleak story set in 1970's Communist China. The book follows the lives of several people living in the town of Muddy River in the aftermath of an execution. The person executed was a young woman who had been a counterrevolutionary and had spent ten years in prison. The book got a bit long for me but I was completely invested in the characters.

[Schlimme Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beeindruckend gutes Buch, das in der chinesischen Provinz in den 70ern spielt.

[shubiektywnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Co to była za powieść! Ostatnie strony podsumowują losy każdego z bohaterów w taki sposób, że mam w głowie mętlik a na plecach ciarki. W tej historii nic nie jest czarno-białe, każda decyzja ma swoje konsekwencje, a większość wydarzeń poznajemy z wielu perspektyw. Aktualnie analizuję jedno, rozkładam je na czynniki pierwsze i jestem pełna podziwu. Li Yiyun stworzyła w swoje książce zawiłą siatkę powiązań pomiędzy kilkorgiem bohaterów, których łączy miejsce zamieszkania i pewne sytuacje. Autorka nie popadła w prostackie, niesmaczne skrajności, nie uciekła się do udziwnień, napisała „Włóczęgów” tak, jakby chciała powiedzieć, że każdego z nas mogłoby spotkać taki los jak jej bohaterów. Oczywiście czas i miejsce akcji (Chiny w trakcie i po rewolucji) mają ogromy wpływa na eskalację tych wydarzeń, ale te elementy powieści mają znaczenie drugorzędne, bo najważniejszy jest jej uniwersalizm. „Włóczędzy” to wielowymiarowa historia o tym, że każdy nasz wybór i każdy nasz krok odciska się piętnem na życiach innych ludzi.

Bohaterowie, których zapamiętam na zawsze: Bashi i Nini. Nie umiem jednoznacznie ocenić ich relacji. Nigdy nie powiem, że była wyłącznie zła lub wyłącznie dobra. Jeszcze długo będzie mi siedziała w głowie i chyba nigdy nie znajdę słów, aby ją opisać. Li Yiyun zmusiła mnie do wielu refleksji, między innymi do zadania sobie pytania, czy gdybym wiedziała, jak moje wybory wpływają na innych, to bym je zmieniła? Na to pytanie chyba też nigdy nie będę w stanie znaleźć jednoznacznej odpowiedzi.

[✨ jami ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read some of Yiyun Li’s short stories (the whole collection of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and some selected stories from “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl”) but never one of her novels. I’ve owned this one for quite a while so it was nice to finally pick it up.

One thing about this book - it’s not really what the jacket says. The premise is that a woman named Gu Shan is executed after the cultural revolution for being a counterrevolutionary which sparks a protest in the town of Muddy River. While this event does happen, it isn’t until part 2 of the novel.

This is more of a character study about how these characters lives are informed and impacted by the cultural revolution. It is a study of the time period itself, narrowing in on the death of Mao Zedong and democratic protests in Beijing impact this small, rural town in China.

It’s very well written but it’s also very bleak. It’s sort of a book you have to stay with - don’t expect to rush through it. Sometimes it really was a “30 pages and I’m done for tonight” kind of book. That said, I like the way the author lingers on the details, sits in the characters heads to where it’s actually uncomfortable. It really felt placed in this exact moment in time with these exact characters. I really like that instead of her, observing them, it’s like she lets us see how they observe the world, think and feel.

Yiyun Li is a great writer and I would really like to read her entire catalog.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exquisite telling of an absolutely brutal story. The book begins on the day of the grisly execution of an allegedly counterrevolutionary woman in a small town in China two years after the death of Mao. It continues with the story of how several memorable townspeople are affected by the aftermath of this wrongful death. Do they protest, turn away, submit, betray? It doesn't seem to make a difference as they iron fist of tyranny seems to gradually tighten around each of them in turn, squeezing out from their lives even the smallest remaining glimmers of hope. I felt like I was slowly going crazy with dispair as the story progressed, like reading a historical (although fictional) 1984.

So how can a book like this still be beautiful and compassionate? It is to the great, great credit of Yiyun Li that somehow we are able to continue reading and caring, that the humanity still shimmers somewhere under the opressing veil of misery.

[Sonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Heaven’s door is narrow and allows only one hero at a time, but those going down to hell, always travel in pairs, hand in hand.”

The year is 1979 in a rural province of China named Muddy River. It’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly poor, unhappy, and terrified of saying something that will lead to them being charged as a counterrevolutionary. The novel begins with the story of Shan Gu, the 28 year old daughter of two prominent teachers in the city. Shan has been less than discreet about her distaste for the state and is about to be denounced and executed in the centre of town. Circling around this event, we meet a variety of people living in the village from all walks of life. The young, the elderly, the affluent, the achingly poor, the revolutionaries, the cowards, and all manner of people in between. The execution of Shan forces all them to examine who they are and what it is they stand for.
This is my first work of fiction (and her debut effort) from the ridiculously talented Yiyun Li after reading her outstanding memoir about depression titled “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Yours”. This book is beautifully written with characters you come to admire despite their flaws and others who will sicken you with their cravenness (the mother who disappointed that she hasn’t had a male child in six tries gives her daughters the names “little first, little second, little third…etc in particular comes to mind). Yet, some of them do find small portions of dignity be it through standing up for their principles in the face of tyranny or through love between two young villagers who nobody else wants anything to do with. Nominally about Communist China and repression, it’s more about human beings who are presented with an opportunity to do something meaningful with their squalid lives or simply continue to keep their heads down and live out their lives unnoticed and miserable.
These are not always black and white choices and there are often dire repercussions regardless of what path they choose, yet this book through it all presents a startling depiction of their lives, for better or worse.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly paints a dismal picture of China in the 1970s. There were several wonderfully drawn characters: the intelligent yet impotent Teacher Gu; the morally bankrupt young scoundrel Bashi; the crippled Nini, prenatally defeated. Yet, so many other characters were just black silhouettes on the background. I liked this book and I will read whatever Yiyun Li writes next. But, I didn't love it. I guess I didn't need to be convinced that the Chinese version of Communism is not a rational existence; that government by threat and aphorism is bleak. I wasn't wowed.

[Christopher Febles · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the town of Muddy River in Communist China, 1979, a young woman who was once a party superstar is slated for execution for becoming a counterrevolutionary. It affects everyone in the little hamlet, since it calls into question what it means to comply with the government while just finding enough to eat. Soon, a radio announcer and the woman’s mother organize a protest, a very dangerous maneuver that could land them all in prison – or worse. Also, a twelve-year-old seeks to escape the slavery of parents who hate her, and a boy just seeking attention and praise get involved with some of the players. Pervading as well is Bashi, a ne’er-do-well with an inheritance and a need for companionship.

Big point to be made here, and I might get it wrong, but: poverty sucks. Especially in a communist regime. Doesn’t seem like party loyalty gets you much, and unless you’re lucky enough to be on the inside, life is hard. And always looming is someone more than willing to turn you into the secret police. So, make sure you don’t say one little friggin’ thing wrong about you-know-who and you-know-what, or you’re gonna get strung up by your you-know-where. Or worse.



But seriously, living in this place in this time in history was rough. People just want to live, to get what they need, but the circumstances made that such a huge struggle. I’ve always been curious about life in communist countries during the waning days of the Cold War, and this gives us a firsthand, real-life look at everyday life there.

The summary says, “luminous prose,” and they’re right. Normally, this is a turnoff for a slug like me, and sure, at times I gotta skim or go back and digest what I read. But I slowed it down, tried to imagine it all, and it turned out pretty good. There are some wonderful passages here with some great turns of phrase. The second half seems to flow better.

The plot is loose, but stick with it. Everything centers on Gu Shan, the woman being executed. The protest also sets things in motion, as does a brutal crackdown. The last thirty pages or so move things along, though it’s a rather depressing scenario. Again, the point is the sadness, brutality, and struggle. It’s how people react to both poor and oppressed.

It’s not uplifting, but it is beautiful. It is real life, and it’s described with skill and poetry.

[Laura Walin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kiinalaisesta yhteiskunnasta kertovat kirjat ovat aina hämmentäviä ja aina myös avartavia. Kirjallisuutta parhaimmillaan jo siksi, että vievät paikkoihin joihin ei muuten pääsisi. Tässä kirjassa ollaan vuonna 1979 kiinalaisessa maaseutukaupungissa, jota hetken aikaa sykähdyttää ajatus siitä, että ehkä mielipiteensä voisikin sanoa ja maailmaa muuttaa.

Yiyun Lillä on taito tehdä (melko moninaisista) henkilöistään uskottavia ja kertoa samalla heidän kauttaan isompaa, yhteiskunnallista tarinaa. Kiinan maaseudulla elämä on 70-luvulla kovaa, etenkin jos on nainen tai kehitysvammainen tai jopa molempia näistä. Ihmisten halu elää ja tulla onnelliseksi on kuitenkin jääräpäistä, ja heidän sinnikkyyttään toivottomilta näyttävissä olosuhteissa voi vain ihailla.

Länsimaisesta näkökulmasta yhteiskunta on tietysti melko käsittämätön. Oikeat mielipiteet tulevat Beijingistä ja ne voivat muuttua yhdessä yössä. Samat tuulet voivat kääntää yksilöiden elämän päälaelleen ja tehdä sankareista halveksittuja vastavallankumouksellisia, mikä rapauttaa myös henkilökohtaiset. Lopulta vain yksinkertaisimmat ovat aitoja ihmisiä, muista on tullut laskelmoivia koneiston osia, jossa puolison kuolemakin on vain hinta, joka omasta olemassaolosta on maksettava.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "The Vagrants" for a class on women's issues as seen through literature and film. Had I not needed to read it in order to participate in class discussion, I probably would have stopped reading it at some point. "The Vagrants" while beautifully well written, is a very difficult read. The story takes place in China right after the end of the Cultural Revolution and shows the interactions among an array of characters as they witness and react to a Denunciation Hearing just before a young woman is being hung for counterrevolutionary activities. The people in the town for the most part, are desperately poor, and every day is a fight for survival. Several characters in the story are privileged members of the Communist Party showing that Orwell was correct in predicting that some pigs would be more equal. After getting to know all the characters, the story takes on a chilling affect and is hard to put down. This book is not for the weak of heart. Read it at your own risk.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my reading of almost nothing but Japanese novels for the last 5 years, I learned that the world's most depressing fiction comes from that island country. But with this novel -- written by a young Chinese-American who grew up in Beijing -- as well as Lao She's Rickshaw Boy, my view must be adjusted a bit. I seem to be drawn to depressing works of art, and "The Vagrants" takes the fucking cake. It took me a relatively long while to finish it because it is so relentlessly bleak and grim that I frequently found myself suffocated. Yet, with its shockingly beautiful prose, which no debut novel has the right to aspire to, it would be difficult not to recommend it highly to those who don't mind heavy gloom in their reading. Breathtaking, poetic, and filled with despair, "The Vagrants" will remain with me for a long, long time.

[Narsames Maiky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book, It really makes you feel as though you're there living with the characters, feeling their pain, their joy and their longings. The only problem I had with it was that everyone was so depressing and so opressed, I wish It had a strong character able to face everything and everyone, something antagonic to the usual atmosphere of the book.

[Nezabravka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Много хубаво написана книга! Тематиката определено е тежка. Много грозни и страшни неща се случват на персонажите,но едновременно с това има и много човешки и красиви моменти. Определено си заслужаваше да я прочета!

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to get a vivid sense of the societal dynamics and daily life that ensued from the Maoist China - or more generally, what it is like to live under an extreme authoritarian regime, where brainwashing are fear-mongering tactics are the cornerstone of stability - this is your book. Li shows the immense poverty, violence, and destruction of cultural and artistic knowledge that happened under this regime. Perhaps the most striking thing to see during the reading experience is this: Li strikingly shows how love, even between family members, is rendered virtually impossible under this regime. Policies incentivize individuals to prove their utmost love and loyalty to the communist party, rather than to family members or friends; children will beat up their parents, and neighbors will turn in one another.

I wouldn't have read through the entirety of this novel if I didn't have this particular interest in this time period. It is just so depressing, one miserable event or atrocity after another. It is depressing in a way that doesn't leave one with a sense of awe or humility before the complexities of being a human, as certain classic books that are depressing do (e.g., Of Mice and Men). That is perhaps a deliberate choice on the author's part; she does not romanticize any parts of this time period, or try to inch towards the effect of showing how suffering that happened under the Maoist regime is necessary or important in the larger scheme of an individual's or nation's life. The author shows just how unjustifiable the suffering and desperation of the time was.

[☕Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't connect with this book as much as I had hoped.

Ratings:

Writing 4
Story line 3
Characters 3
Impact 3

Overall rating 3.25

[Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the subject matter of this book is important. I really wanted to like this book. I liked the subject matter, and I found her to be more honest than most other Chinese writers, which is saying something. It's probably because she no longer lives in China, and doesn't have to worry about the whole censorship idea. Certainly wouldn't have been able to read or buy this book in China.

However, that being said, I think she had too many characters in this book. It is hard to really know which ones she should have cut out, but I think if she had chosen a smaller group of characters to focus on, the story would have flowed a bit better.

The story itself I'd say is a pretty accurate portrayal of China, and having spent 20 months living in China myself, her approach was reasonable, I just can't put my finger on why I didn't really love this book.

She approaches the subject of a visionary who has been imprisoned for the last 12 years I think it was for her revolutionary thoughts. She had originally been a supporter of Mao, but then changed her beliefs. She was kept in prison because of what she had written in letters and diaries when her time came up for parole. We meet all the characters on the morning of what would be the day she is supposed to be executed due to her beliefs. The story progresses from there.

I found Li's characters to be believable. They are true to the time period, as the time frame comes up to prior the cultural revolution. I felt that the characters were appropriate for the time period and they added interest to the story, and you genuinely wanted to learn more about them. However, I felt that for the length of the book, there were too many that she chose to focus on. At the same time it is hard to really know which character she should omit from the storyline.

I haven't read any other work by Li, however, it seems like her strong suit may be in shorter stories. I think the book may have been better divided up into sections, rather than Chapters or been a collection of short stories that comprised a book.

[Sonali V · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Yiyun Li book I have read. I am not very clear about the chronology of all the events described but that did not detract anything from the story. It captivated me right from the beginning and I have kept thinking of the characters and what befell them constantly. The descriptions of the houses where the poor live, and the shacks where those even poorer do, the stadium, the statue of Chairman Mao - it is detailed enough to place them in our minds. The most important characters are the misfits of society, looked down upon for various reasons, because of infirmity or old age or considered to be deviant. But there is also the teacher and the announcer who conform to societal norms but are actually different in a more subtle way. Li shows how ordinary good people are changed into the worst forms of themselves for political reasons, to save themselves & their families. Dictators and their propaganda machine do not leave even children and the old untouched. Small touches make everything so very real - women did not dress their hair or wear any make-up because that was the order of the day, but when times changed a little they enjoyed dressing up or the antics of the dog Ear who had been brought from the countryside and had to learn to adapt to city ways like his master and the terrible fate which overtook him, and right at the end, a moment of hope for the differently a led Nini, rejected by her parents accompanying the Huas on their begging travels and planning to return after seventeen years when Bashi , the deviant the only one who had treated her with respect and love, would be released from prison. I think I was so impressed by this book because I see the same thing happening all around me right now, not only in my country but across the world. Our right to live freely, think freely is being jeopardised. I am certainly going to read more of her works.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story takes place back in the seventies. A time when China was dealing with the Tiananmen Square uprising.

The Gu family was like any other family. They lived good quiet lives in the town of Muddy River. That all changed ten years ago. The Gu’s daughter, Gu Shan, a free spirit was raised like anyone else in the beliefs of Communism and China’s leader, Chairman Mao. Shan started thinking for herself and renounced her beliefs in communism. Shan was taken away. That was ten years ago. During that time Shan sat in a cell never backing down from what she believed in. Shan’s arrest tore Mr. and Mrs. Gu apart. Mrs. Gu loved her daughter and never gave up hope that she would see here again some day. This was the complete opposite for Mr. Gu. He had already committed himself in coming to the reality that he no longer had a daughter.

Having never read anything by Mrs. Li, I didn’t know what to expect when I sat down to read The Vagrants. Let me tell you if you thought the cover was gorgeous then you are in for a great surprise. Yiyun Li incorporates her life experiences with enduring, heart-felt characters to end up with a finished product that is so spectacular that it is almost had to describe. I was honestly and truly spellbound by the simplicity of what we take for granted…our freedom. Shan fights for the same thing, only she is prosecuted for her efforts but was willing to die for them if the need arised. The Vagrants is one of the best books I have read thus far in 2009.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dreamscape novel written by a master of short story prose. There is a misty glow to her art, a literary fog out of which the characters form to stand on the stage and tell the stories of their lives. I loved Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and didn't realize until just now that Yiyun Li wrote that marvel of a book. The Vagrants unfolds visually rich and personal. One street in Muddy River. Nearby the Eastwind Stadium where counterrevolutionaries are denounced in public ceremony. Mr. Hua and Mrs. Hua, living still but ghosts who dream the story to life. Tong, Bashi, Nini, Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu. Gu Shan. Jialin. Kai and Han, married but on oppositional journeys. Ear, the dog. The sinister Kwen. Beautiful writing. Around the storytelling of the primary characters' lives, there are marvelous glimpses of the neighborhood and the people living alongside/within the story. "At the moment Dafu wept into his pillow, parental worries plagued many more hearts outside the hospital." A mother remembering her own mother, a daughter worried about her skill as a mother, a man reminding his wife to admonish their two daughters how to dress properly, another mother worried over her son's sedition. A novel to savor.

[Maja - BibliophiliaDK ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was completely enthralled by this book. It follows many different people in a town called Muddy River in China after the death of Chairman Mao. It all starts with the execution of a young woman and one way or another all of the persons in the book know of her or know her personally. The persons have a wide range in ages and social status and I found it very fascinating to see how the Cultural Revolution had affected the different people. The most interesting person, to me, was the enigma Bashi. He's a young man of only 19, but he fancies himself both important and meaningful, though he is neither. With Bashi there's no knowing what he'll do next and it's both interesting and scary. But all in all there wasn't a single person that didn't draw me in one way or another. A very enticing story.

[Kkraemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luminous prose, almost too clear and picturesque for the scenes that it reveals. This is an amazing book. The main character in the book, the one that controls all of the others, is the context in which these people live. This is a study in how people try to make sense of utter and demoralizing chaos. These characters will stay with me forever.