The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li

  Nini thought about the brown hen, which liked to peck around Nini when she washed the family laundry in the yard, in the warmer season. It did not surprise Nini that her mother would choose to kill the brown hen over the white one. Nini had never tasted chicken before, and she wished the brown hen was not the first she would be eating.

  Nini's father downed another cup of liquor. Despite his heavy drinking, he was gentle with Nini's mother and never beat her as other drinkers in the neighborhood did their wives. Except for the eight-year-old, most of the time he ignored the rest of his daughters. He sighed often, and sometimes wept while drinking alone at night, when he believed that the girls had fallen asleep. Nini stole glances at him on those nights from her corner of the bed. Her mother, leaving him alone as if his tears did not exist, folded matchboxes quietly.

  “Let me tell all of you,” Nini's mother said. “Always be kind to others. Heaven has an eye for mean people. They never escape their punishments.”

  Nini's sisters nodded eagerly. Their mother lovingly slapped the biggest piece of fried bread onto their father's plate. “That whore of Gu's is your example,” she said. “Learn the lesson.”

  “Who's the whore?” asked the eight-year-old.

  Nini's mother poured another cup of liquor for her husband, and a cup for herself. Nini had never seen her mother touch alcohol, but she now sipped the liquor with relish. “Nini, don't think your parents are unfair to you and make you work like a slave. Everybody has to be useful in some way. Your sisters will marry when they are old enough, and their husbands will take care of them for the rest of their lives.”

  The eight-year-old grinned at Nini in a haughty way that made Nini wish she could slap the girl.

  “You, however, won't find someone willing to marry you,” Nini's mother continued. “You have to make yourself useful to your father and me, do you understand?”

  Nini nodded and squeezed her bad hand beneath her leg. She liked to sit on her bad hand until it fell asleep. In those moments the hand was like someone else's, and she had to touch each finger to know it was there.

  “Someone has put a curse on us through you, Nini, and that's why we never get to have a boy in our family. But today, the one who has done this to us gets to see her final day. The spell is over now, and your father and I will have a son soon,” their mother said, and their father held out a hand to stroke her belly. She smiled at him before turning to the girls. “You've all heard of the denunciation ceremony today, haven't you?” she said.

  The ten-year-old and the eight-year-old replied that they were going with their school, and Nini's mother seemed satisfied with the answer. “You too, Nini, take Little Fourth, Little Fifth, and Little Sixth to the East Wind Stadium.”

  Nini thought about the young man Bashi in the street, and the willow tree past the birch woods by the river. “Why, Mama?” asked the eight-year-old.

  “Why? Because I want all my daughters to see what happens to that whore,” her mother said, and divided her own bread into four pieces, and handed them to all of Nini's sisters but not to Nini or the baby.

  Nini's father put down his cup. His face was flushed, and his eyes seemed unable to focus. “Let me tell you this story, and all of you will have to remember it from now on. Your mother and I, we grew up together in a village in Hebei Province, where your uncles and aunts still live. Your mother and I—we fell in love when we were in the fifth grade.”

  The ten-year-old looked at the eight-year-old, and both giggled, the younger one bolder than the other. Nini's mother blushed. “What are you telling them these old stories for?” she said, and for a moment, Nini thought her mother looked like a different person, bashful as a young girl.

  “Because I want all my children to know what you and I have gone through together,” Nini's father said. He lifted the cup and sniffed the liquor before turning to the girls. “In our village, if you go back there now, people will still tell you our love story. When we were fourteen your mother went to Inner Mongolia to visit her aunt. For the summer, your mother and I wrote to each other, and together we used more stamps than all the village would ever use in a year. The postman said he had never seen such a thing in his career.”

  “Honestly, where did you find the money for the stamps?” Nini's mother said. “I took money from my aunt's drawer and never dared to ask her if she noticed the missing bills.”

  “I stole copper wiring from the electric plant, remember, the one next to the Walnut Village. And I sold them.”

  It must have been the first time Nini's mother had heard the story, for her eyes turned as soft and dreamlike as Nini's father's. “I'm surprised they didn't catch you,” she said. “And you didn't get yourself electrocuted.”

  “Had I been electrocuted, who would give you the sparks now?” Nini's father replied with a chuckle.

  Nini's mother blushed. “Don't tell these jokes in front of your children.”

  He laughed and put a piece of pickled tofu into her mouth. The liquor made both of them daring, with happy oblivion. Nini watched them and then turned her eyes away, half-fascinated and half-disgusted.

  “Your mother's father—your grandfather—was a tofu maker, and my father was the best farmer in the area, and earned enough with his own labor to buy land.”

  “And remember,” Nini's mother said. “My father was an honest tofu maker, and never cheated a single soul in his life.”

  “But this young girl, this Gu Shan, said your grandfathers were capitalists and landlords. She was a leader of the Red Guards, and she led a group of young girls to come and beat up your mother. Your mother was pregnant with Nini, and this young girl kicked your mother in the stomach. That's why Nini was born this way.”

  The ten-year-old and the eight-year-old stole quiet glances at Nini; Little Sixth babbled and grabbed Nini's hand to chew on. Nini picked up Little Sixth and fed her a small bite of fried bread. “Is it why they have this denunciation ceremony for her today?” the eight-year-old asked after a long moment of silence.

  “No,” Nini's mother said. “Who would care about what she did to us? Nobody remembers our misfortune, because we are unimportant people. But that's all right. Justice serves one way or another. One day you are the leader of the Red Guards, the next day you are a counterrevolutionary, waiting for a bullet. Whatever she is sentenced for, I'm just happy to see that she is paying off her debt today.”

  Nini hugged the baby closer, and Little Sixth ran her hand along Nini's cheek until the small fingers got ahold of Nini's ear; she pulled at Nini's ear, a gesture comforting to both of them.

  “I've been thinking,” Nini's mother said after a while, her voice calmer now. “I want to have a perm done tomorrow. Many of my colleagues have had it.”

  “Will it be safe for the baby?” Nini's father asked.

  “I've checked, and they say it's safe,” Nini's mother said. “It's time for me to look more like a woman than a ghost.”

  “You've always been the most beautiful woman to me.”

  “Who believes your drunken nonsense?” Nini's mother smiled, and raised her cup to meet the cup of her husband.

  BASHI WHISTLED and walked home in long and bouncy strides. Every ten or fifteen steps he saw people gather in front of an announcement, and more were walking along the road to join their work units, holding banners and slogans. His mind occupied with Nini, Bashi did not have time to stop and distract himself by talking with these people. He wondered why the idea had never occurred to him before. For several years, he had seen Nini in the street, hauling baskets of coal from the railway station in the early morning; during the day she went to the marketplace and gathered half-withered vegetable leaves the housewives peeled off before they paid. A despicable creature, he had thought of her then. She was still an ugly thing, but she definitely looked more like a girl now. Twelve years old, Bashi said to himself, savoring the pleasure of saying the sweet number out loud. With all the girls growing up healthily and beautifully in the world, who, besides him,
would have thought of Nini as a desirable girl? He whistled, loudly and off-key, a love song from a romantic film in the fifties. Two girls in front of the gate of the middle school pointed at him and snickered, and he smiled back nicely, blowing a kiss to them as he had seen an actor do in a movie that, imported from some eastern European country, was the first foreign film ever shown in Muddy River. Bashi had been impressed with the man's ease and had practiced the gesture many times in front of his grandmother's dressing table. The girls walked faster, their faces flushed with indignity, and he laughed and blew another kiss, one of hundreds of kisses he'd blown, and would be blowing, that landed nowhere.

  Bashi thought about Mrs. Hua, and then let his thoughts wander to the seven girls the old woman no longer had as daughters. They, although deserted by their parents, must have better faces and bodies than Nini. He wondered why it had never occurred to Nini's parents to leave her on the riverbank to die when she had been born with that horrible face, or why her parents had kept Nini's sisters as well, when obviously a son was what they were trying to get, baby after baby. He thought about the daughters that Mrs. Hua had left with other people as child brides. Perhaps that was what he needed, a young girl purchased from someone like the Huas as a future wife. But a thing like that would take some time. Meanwhile, he had Nini to think about, the ugly yet real girl Nini, who would be expecting him soon.

  When Bashi got home he found a bamboo steamer on the table, kept warm by a small square of cotton blanket. Underneath, six white buns nestled together, fresh and inviting. He pinched one and was amused to see his fingers leave dents on the smooth crust. He called out to his grandmother that breakfast was ready; hearing no answer, he walked into the bedroom that he shared with her. Both beds had been made, and the curtain between the beds had been pulled back and tied with a ribbon. The curtain had been installed by Bashi two years earlier, when he had learned the exciting things he could do with himself in bed. Not that his grandmother would ever wake up to spy on him, her senses already dull as a rusty knife unearthed from an ancient tomb, but Bashi insisted on the necessity of a curtain, which added pleasure to his secret games.

  Bashi took a bite of the bun and walked closer to his grandmother, who was dozing in a cushioned armchair on her side of the bedroom. He put a finger under her nostrils and felt her breath. She was alive. “Get up, get up, lazy piglet. The sun is shining and the house is on fire,” Bashi said, squeezing his voice into that of a woman—his grandmother's voice when he had been a young boy— and singing, but she did not open her eyes. “Breakfast is ready, and the ants are waiting for your crumbs,” Bashi chanted again. She opened her eyes, nodded briefly, and went back to dozing. He gave up. She was eighty-one and she had the right to indulge herself in anything she liked: short naps in the mornings, a bite now and then, long moments spent sitting and snoozing on a chamber pot. It was no longer safe for her to go to the public outhouse, where people hopped in and out, through the stinky swamp, on boulders and rocks. Someday, Bashi knew, someday he would have to start to take care of her, cooking for her, making her bed, cleaning the chamber pot, cleaning her. He did not fear it. His grandmother had taken care of him all his life, and he would look after her when she needed him. If he was ever to have a baby girl, he would do the same thing for her. If he could find a baby girl now, Bashi thought, he would name the baby Bashiyi, Eighty-one, after his grandmother, the eighty-one-year-old baby. Bashi himself had been named the same way, as he had been born the year his great-grandfather had turned eighty. “Bashiyi,” Bashi said aloud to the room, and thought that only a genius could have come up with the name—it would make the baby girl his sister, as even a fool could see, but the girl would also belong to him. Eighty-one existed only because eighty did, and where would you find Bashiyi without Bashi? He felt the urge to share this thought with someone, but his grandmother was becoming more forgetful by the day; conversation between them was often interrupted by irrelevant comments about events that had happened years or even decades before. Perhaps he could tell Nini. Would she understand him? She looked like a stupid little thing, but people in town had agreed that he himself was dumb. “You never know,” Bashi said, and nodded in a knowing way, as if someone were standing right next to him. “She may be much smarter than you expected.”

  Bashi squeezed the rest of the bun into his mouth, and left the house when the clock was striking eight. The main street was in a festive mood. Two men with red armbands were locking up the marketplace . Students from a nearby elementary school were marching and singing a Soviet song, the tune familiar to Bashi's ears though he had never learned the lyrics, and he could not make out the words while listening to the children, shouting more than singing, their mouths a string of Os. In a side street, two day care teachers were hurrying twelve small children to join the parade, their hands holding a rope with its two ends in the teachers’ hands. The workers from the candy factory, men and women in blue overalls, chatting and laughing, were waiting for the students to pass and two men whistled at a few older girls from the elementary school who probably had been kept back many times and were old enough to be ogling back.

  “Where's the denunciation ceremony?” Bashi asked a policeman at a crossroad.

  The policeman pulled Bashi back by his arm and said, “Don't block the traffic.”

  “What harm do I do standing here, comrade?” Bashi said. “Do you see that slogan on the wall? It says serve the people . Do you know who wrote that? Chairman Mao. Is that what you do to serve the people, huh, shout at them and almost break their wrists?”

  The policeman turned to look at Bashi. “Who are you?”

  “I'm a member of the people whom you serve.”

  The policeman retrieved a small notebook from his pocket. “What's your name? What's your work unit?”

  Bashi tried to make something up, but before he spoke, the policeman turned away to shout at someone who was trying to push through the children's parade. Bashi shrugged and said under his breath, while he slipped away, “My name is Your Uncle and my work unit is your mother's bed.”

  A few steps later, Bashi asked someone else, and found out that people in this district were all marching toward a high school, one of six sites for the denunciation ceremony before the execution.

  “Do you know who the woman is?” Bashi asked.

  “A counterrevolutionary,” the man replied.

  “I know, but who is she?”

  The man shrugged. “What's that got to do with you?”

  “Where do you get the ticket?” Bashi asked.

  “Ticket? Go with your school.”

  “I'm out of school now.”

  “Go with your work unit.”

  Bashi thought of explaining that he was a free man, but he stopped midsentence when the man seemed not to be listening to him. Bashi stood and watched men and women, students, and retired workers march by. They all looked happy, singing songs, shouting slogans, and waving colorful banners to the sky. Bashi had never considered the importance of being a member of a unit. He thought of tagging along behind the high school students, but without a banner in his hand, he would look suspicious. After a while, he said to himself, “What's so special about the denunciation ceremony? I'm going to the island to see the execution itself.”

  Once the words were said, Bashi's mind was made up. Why should he be one of the marching crowds when he had all the freedom in the world to do what he wanted? “Bye-bye,” he said, smiling, and waved at these people who pushed along in the street like a herd of sheep.

  FOUR

  The East Wind Stadium, built at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, in 1968, and modeled on the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, though with much less seating capacity, was not an unfamiliar stage for Kai. Several times a year she served as the master of ceremonies, celebrating May Day, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, National Day, and achievements of various kinds that the city government decided to honor in mass gatherings. From where she stood, she could not see mo
st of her audience, and she had learned to gauge the attention of fifteen thousand people through her own amplified voice, which, it seemed, could be affected by even the smallest change in the air. Sometimes the echo of her voice came back with a life of its own, vibrant with energy, and Kai knew that she was being watched with admiration and perhaps benign desires, replacing a lover, a wife, or a child in a stranger's heart, no matter how fleetingly. But these moments had occurred less and less in the past year; more often now she felt like a beggar, her voice lost in an intricate maze and bouncing off cold and uninterested walls.

  “Are you nervous?” Han said when they stopped at the side gate. He looked around before touching her face with the back of his hand. Things would be all right, he said. She shook her head without replying. The previous fall, after she had returned to work from her maternity leave, she had lost control of herself onstage at the celebration for National Day. Her choked voice and uncontrollable tears had passed within a minute, and the audience, if baffled by her behavior, had not reacted in any way detrimental to the event. Still, the tears must have been noticed and talked about by the officials sitting closest to the stage as distinguished guests. It must be the hormones, the mayor's wife commented to Kai at the banquet afterward, and Han's mother, in a less generous and forgiving mood, warned Kai in front of the other guests not to let a woman's petty sentiments get in the way of her political duties.