My Account | RSS
| ||
|
||
The Vagrants
by Yiyun Li
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
Beijing-born Yiyun Li's career biography reads like a wishlist for aspiring authors. The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories have published her work. Her masterful first collection of short stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the PEN/Hemmingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Part of the brilliance of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is Li's mastery of her characters. Now with her debut novel The Vagrants, she has length to let them fully breath.
The novel begins on the Spring Equinox of 1979, a day "when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned." Shan, a "counter-revolutionary", will be executed on this day for her crimes against the state and the people. After the execution, certain residents of the provincial town of Muddy River, emboldened by the Democracy Wall in Beijing, protest Shan's supposedly unjust execution. The novel follows a few characters in the town as they react to a changing China.
Shan's father, Teacher Gu, hasn't seen his daughter since a prison visit years ago. "She talked fast, about all of the things she planned to do after her release.... he stared at her uniform pants, stained with dark menstrual blood. Death was far from the worst thing that could happen to a human being. Something bigger than fear crept over him; he wished he could finish his daughter's life for her."
Shan, in her Red Guard days, kicked Nini's mother's pregnant stomach, deforming Nini in the womb. Now twelve and reviled by her family for her ugliness, Nini falls in love with Bashi, the quirky teenage son of a revolutionary hero. Bashi rambles about town, bored, talking to villagers who learn, after a while, to ignore him.
There are no heroes in this book, only victims. Kai, the town's radio announcer who decides to protest against the government, is executed. Teacher Gu descends deeper and deeper into misanthropy. Stopped on his way to suicide by government agents, he provokes a beating by telling them that "butchers one day and the next day you will be the meat on the cutting board; your knives that slit open others' throats will one day slit your own." Tong, a six-year-old boy who roams playfully about town desperately searching for people to like him, ends up denouncing both a group of strangers, and damning his father to a terrible beating, seeing nothing but "the blossom of his belief." He spends the rest of his life as a clerk, who "never allowed bedsores to grow on his father's body, or let his mother suffer under the reign of a daughter-in-law."
Kai's execution closes out the novel. The last thought we see her think is about the quote A man with a revolutionary dream is never a lonely soul, for which she wrote an award-winning essay. "When she closed her eyes, she could almost see the essay, posted as the top winner of the provincial contest, her father's perfect words in her less-than-perfect handwriting." Who says people need to think of important things before death? The only thing sublime about Yiyun Li's China is the prose that created it.
--
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
by Yiyun Li
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
Beijing-born Yiyun Li's career biography reads like a wishlist for aspiring authors. The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories have published her work. Her masterful first collection of short stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the PEN/Hemmingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Part of the brilliance of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is Li's mastery of her characters. Now with her debut novel The Vagrants, she has length to let them fully breath.
The novel begins on the Spring Equinox of 1979, a day "when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned." Shan, a "counter-revolutionary", will be executed on this day for her crimes against the state and the people. After the execution, certain residents of the provincial town of Muddy River, emboldened by the Democracy Wall in Beijing, protest Shan's supposedly unjust execution. The novel follows a few characters in the town as they react to a changing China.
Shan's father, Teacher Gu, hasn't seen his daughter since a prison visit years ago. "She talked fast, about all of the things she planned to do after her release.... he stared at her uniform pants, stained with dark menstrual blood. Death was far from the worst thing that could happen to a human being. Something bigger than fear crept over him; he wished he could finish his daughter's life for her."
Shan, in her Red Guard days, kicked Nini's mother's pregnant stomach, deforming Nini in the womb. Now twelve and reviled by her family for her ugliness, Nini falls in love with Bashi, the quirky teenage son of a revolutionary hero. Bashi rambles about town, bored, talking to villagers who learn, after a while, to ignore him.
There are no heroes in this book, only victims. Kai, the town's radio announcer who decides to protest against the government, is executed. Teacher Gu descends deeper and deeper into misanthropy. Stopped on his way to suicide by government agents, he provokes a beating by telling them that "butchers one day and the next day you will be the meat on the cutting board; your knives that slit open others' throats will one day slit your own." Tong, a six-year-old boy who roams playfully about town desperately searching for people to like him, ends up denouncing both a group of strangers, and damning his father to a terrible beating, seeing nothing but "the blossom of his belief." He spends the rest of his life as a clerk, who "never allowed bedsores to grow on his father's body, or let his mother suffer under the reign of a daughter-in-law."
Kai's execution closes out the novel. The last thought we see her think is about the quote A man with a revolutionary dream is never a lonely soul, for which she wrote an award-winning essay. "When she closed her eyes, she could almost see the essay, posted as the top winner of the provincial contest, her father's perfect words in her less-than-perfect handwriting." Who says people need to think of important things before death? The only thing sublime about Yiyun Li's China is the prose that created it.
--
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
Available in Asia from Paddyfield.com
|
