The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li

  Kwen looked at Bashi for a long moment and said, “The lesson is this: A pretty face is nothing; for a real man, what matters is the meat part, and in that part all women are the same.”

  “Which part is that?”

  Kwen shook his head. “I thought you were a smart boy.”

  “Then tell me,” Bashi said, slightly agitated.

  “I've told you enough. The rest you have to figure out for yourself,” Kwen said, and went back to work on the sacks. When he had secured them together, he grabbed one end of the body and tested the weight.

  “If you don't explain, I won't help you with the body anymore,” Bashi said.

  “That suits me fine.”

  “I'll die if you don't tell me.”

  “Nobody dies from curiosity,” Kwen said with a smile.

  “I'll stop being your friend then.”

  “I had no idea we were friends,” Kwen said. “Now, why don't you go your way? I'll go mine.”

  Bashi sighed, not ready to leave Kwen. “I was only kidding,” Bashi said, and when Kwen grabbed one end of the body, Bashi took the other end, and together they heaved the body onto their shoulders. It was heavier than Bashi thought, and a few steps later, he was panting and had to put the body down. Kwen let go of his end and the body hit the ground with a heavy thump. “What a straw boy,” Kwen said. “What would you do with a woman even if you had one?”

  Bashi breathed hard and bent down to hurl the body onto his shoulder. Before Kwen caught up with him, he started to walk fast, and then stumbled across a tree stump and fell down with the body pressing on top of him.

  Kwen roared with laughter. Bashi pushed the body hard to get free. “I thought she looked very tiny,” he said, and he massaged his chest, hit hard by the corpse. “But she must have weighed tons.”

  “Don't you know that once dead, the body weighs a hundred times more?”

  “How come?” Bashi asked.

  Kwen shrugged. “Death's trick, I suppose.”

  THE BANQUET ROOM on the second floor of Three Joy was known to some as the place where the fates of many in Muddy River were determined , but for most people in town it was a room with double doors that were kept closed all the time; what was behind the heavy doors was beyond their meager salaries and imaginations. The ground floor, with ten wooden tables painted dark red and benches in matching color, was no more than a dingy diner. Food was ordered and paid for at a window where a moody female cashier would accept the cash and throw out the change along with a bamboo stick, which, oily to the touch, had an almost illegible number engraved on one side. Later the number would be called from an equally narrow window, where the platters were to be picked up by the customers right away, before they were chided for their tardiness. The dishes were greasy, heavily spiced, and overpriced, as was expected for restaurant food. Apart from salespeople on business trips whose meals would be reimbursed, around town only those who needed to put on an extravagant show—a wedding to impress the townspeople or a meal to dazzle some village relatives—would dine at Three Joy.

  Kai arrived at the restaurant a little past twelve. The ground floor was empty but for two men with traveling cases set next to them on the floor. The men looked up at her from their cloud of cigarette smoke when she came in, one of them nodding as if he had recognized Kai. She stared at them, and only when the men exchanged a look between themselves did Kai realize that she had fixed her eyes on them for a moment too long. She turned toward the stairs and walked up to the banquet room. Would those men, when they arrived home, entertain their wives with the tale of an execution, Kai wondered; or, buried by other pointless memories accumulated on their trips, would the incident surface only when a cautionary tale was needed for a disobedient child? A death that happened to a stranger could be used for all sorts of purposes. Time and space would add and subtract until the death was turned into something else. A martyr's blood, Kai had once sung onstage, would nurture the azaleas blooming in the spring, their petals red as the color of the revolution; the lyrics and the music had filled her heart with a vast passion that made the earthly world she occupied seem small and temporary, but what could a fourteen-year-old have seen in death but an illusory exterior of grand beauty? Kai had envisioned a different scene at the ceremony her last encounter with Shan: A speech from Kai would only be a prelude to what Shan would have to say; together their words would awaken the audience and change the course of the day. But what was left of Shan after the murder of her spirit and before the execution of her body—soiled prison uniform and severed vocal cords, half-opened mouth and empty eyes, and a weightless body in a policeman's grip—had filled Kai with a sickness. The drafted speech, with its empty words, had been killed easily by the slogans that had overtaken the stadium.

  A young man wearing the armband of a security guard pushed the double doors open for Kai when she approached the banquet room. The air, warm with the smells of fried food, hard liquor, and cigarette smoke, rushed at Kai's face. The mayor's wife and another official's wife greeted Kai and congratulated her on her excellent performance at the denunciation ceremony, and Kai had to demur, as modesty was expected under these circumstances, speaking of her inability to complete her task as well as she had hoped for. The conversation soon drifted to different topics. The mayor's wife, whose daughter-in-law was going into labor any day now, asked Kai about the injection she had gotten after the labor to stop her milk from coming. Han's parents, like all people of their social status, believed that breast-feeding was a backward way to raise a baby; Kai, unaware of the arrangement, had received the injection that later made her weep into Ming-Ming's bundle. No, Kai replied now, she found nothing uncomfortable in the treatment.

  “Young women in your generation are so privileged,” said a middle-aged woman, joining the conversation. “We had never heard of dried-milk powder in our time.”

  “Nor fresh cow milk,” Han's mother said. “I tell you—that suckling pig Han was enough to make me decide not to have another child after him.”

  The women laughed, and one of them congratulated Kai on her good fortune of marrying the only son of Han's parents before another woman would have a chance. Kai listened with a trained smile, nodding and replying when it was expected. At the other end of the room, Han smiled at her before turning to crane his neck in a reverent manner at the mayor, who was speaking and gesturing to a small group of men next to him. The mayor's wife continued the discussion on childbirth, and Han's mother prompted Kai to visit the mayor's daughter-in-law. “Not that Kai has any better knowledge about childbirth than you and I, but she is of Susu's age, so they may have more to say to each other,” Han's mother said. She looked at Kai for a moment and then turned to the mayor's wife. “Besides, these young women are probably eager to be spared our old women's wisdom for a moment.”

  Gu Shan could have easily been a daughter-in-law of these women, Kai thought, and tried her best to stay with the conversation. Perhaps some strangers’ painless decision had contributed as much to Kai's misplacement in life as had her own decision to marry into Han's family. If the judges had chosen Gu Shan instead of Kai as the winner in the singing and dancing contest in second grade, Shan might have been the one sent to the theater school in the provincial capital. It would have been different then, Shan growing into the leading actress's role while Kai herself remained an ordinary girl in Muddy River. Would she have met Jialin earlier then, before his illness even? The thought made Kai dizzy, and she tried to maintain a calm voice as she told the mayor's wife about the dish, three-cup chicken, that Han's mother had taught her to make. It was Han's favorite, his mother said to the mayor's wife, and Kai added that when she made it herself, it was far less successful, her comment winning approving smiles from the older women in the circle.

  Before that day, Kai had not seen Gu Shan for years. They had been classmates in the first grade, but Kai could not recall how Shan looked at that age; rather, she remembered Shan's parents from around the time—Teacher Gu, who had been
their teacher that year, and Mrs. Gu, whom Kai had seen only once at a school festival, when Mrs. Gu stood out among the many mothers. Kai remembered, even as a first grader, that she felt jealous of Shan not only because her father was their teacher but also because her mother was beautiful-she had worn a silk blouse on the day of the school festival, under her plain gray Mao jacket, the pomegranate red fabric escaping at the cuffs and the neckline. A plastic barrette, in a matching color, adorned her smooth black hair, grown a few centimeters longer than the allowed style for a married woman. It was Mrs. Gu's posture that Kai had tried to mimic when, at fourteen, she had played a young mother who had given up her newborn baby to save the child of a top Communist Party official; straight-backed, she had clutched the plastic doll to her breast while another doll, wrapped up in a blue print cloth, was thrown into the river onstage. The ballad that followed the drowning was Kai's favorite song from her acting career, a mother's lullaby to a child who would never wake up to all the sunrises of the world.

  The last time Kai and Shan had seen each other was in the autumn of 1966. Shan was the leader of a local faction of Red Guards, and when Kai returned from the provincial capital to Muddy River with her touring Red Guard troupe, the two groups faced each other in a singing and dancing duel in the city square. The competition to become the most loyal followers of Chairman Mao, and the animosity stemming from that rivalry, seemed pointless now; but Kai remembered that autumn as the beginning of her adult life, and sometimes she imagined that Shan would share with her the same recollections, of the September sun shining into their eyes on the makeshift stage, the workers from a road crew hitting the ground with their shovels to accompany the beats of their singing, the old people and small children gathering to watch them with great interest, and a lanky boy, who looked not much older than Kai or Shan, standing apart from the crowd with half a smile, as if he alone remained unimpressed by the performances of both groups.

  The boy, with a grandfather and two uncles serving in the Nationalist army and fighting against Communism in the civil war, was an outcast from all the Red Guards’ factions in town. Two years after that, news came from Muddy River that Shan was imprisoned as an anti-Cultural Revolution criminal. The lanky young man, Shan's boyfriend then, had turned her letters in to the government in exchange for the opportunity to enlist. Had she remained in Muddy River, Kai thought now, would she have fallen for that deceitful smile? The mayor called for the guests to sit down now at the two tables, where bowls of soup and platters of food were waiting, steaming hot. A show of humbleness and reverence began, as people gently pushed each other around the table, declining the most privileged seats close to the mayor and his wife; only once the act was fully played out did the mayor announce that he would take the liberty of assigning seats for the sake of everyone's grumbling stomach. The guests sat down and began to enjoy the midday banquet.

  NINI DID NOT GO HOME after visiting the marketplace in the afternoon. Instead, she limped across the town, her basket, half-filled with withered vegetable leaves, on her shoulder, until she reached the riverbank. The sun had left the heaviest clouds behind and was now midway in the western sky, a pale and cold disk. She had not spotted Bashi on the way back from the stadium, nor in the marketplace, where she remembered sometimes seeing him. She wondered if he was still waiting for her by the willow tree—Bashi seemed to be the kind of person who would stand there and wait—and she decided to go and look for him. Her sisters would certainly wake up from their naps by the time she made it back home, but she had padlocked the door from the outside. The only window was double-sealed. They could cry as much as they wanted; she did not mind as long as she didn't hear them.

  Walking upstream along the river, Nini thought about her future. Her mother referred to all her daughters as debt collectors. She couldn't wait to marry every one of them off, she often said. They'd better learn to behave so that when they went off to their husbands’ houses, their mothers-in-law wouldn't whip the rascal souls out of their bodies. Her mother made it clear that if the girls offended their in-laws, they'd better brace themselves for their punishment and never expect their parents to help them. But these warnings were never meant for Nini. It was accepted that Nini, the meanest debt collector of the six girls, would remain a burden for her parents; no one would ever come to Nini with a marriage offer. If only they could have a son, and a daughter-in-law to see them off to the next world, Nini's mother said, and Nini understood that her mother was more interested in having one daughter-in-law than six daughters. Without a son, Nini, the unmarriageable daughter, would have to tend to her parents for as long as they lived.

  Until that very morning, Nini had wished to become the Gus’ daughter. She had loved Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu, their voices gentle when they said her name, their quiet household abundant with hot meals. The wish had become a dream that sometimes lasted for hours or days, in which Nini pictured herself living with the Gus. Misunderstandings would occur between her and her new parents— a smashed china bowl that had slipped from her bad hand, a misplaced wallet Teacher Gu could not find, or an overcooked dinner that Nini had forgotten to tend to. But they would never speak a harsh word or cast a look of suspicion at her; they knew she was innocent, they knew she always tried her best, but the mere thought of disappointing Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu drove Nini to tears. She would pinch herself or bite herself on the useless part of her body when they were not looking at her, but sooner or later they would discover the marks and bruises on her body, and this would hurt their hearts more than it had hurt her body. Mrs. Gu would beg Nini not to do it again. Teacher Gu would sigh and rub his hands in helplessness. Nini would push them away and pinch and bite herself harder because she was not worthy of their love. Didn't they know that she was so ugly she would rather die, she would scream at them; then she would hurt herself more, because she deserved such punishment for screaming at the two dearest people in her life.

  The moment would come when, in gentle yet firm words, Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu would forbid her to hurt herself again. She was not ugly at all, they would tell her, embracing her when she did not resist. They loved her, they would say, and in their eyes she was as precious as a jewel. She would not believe their words, but they would tell her again and again, until she softened and cried. Nini had learned to make her stories longer each time until she could not stand the wait for the final moment when her loneliness and hunger were soothed by the two people who cherished her as dearly as their own lives. When the moment came—it could arrive anytime, on the way to the marketplace or the train station, or when she was patting the baby to sleep or cooking supper—Nini held her breath until she was on the edge of suffocation. Her heart would pump hard afterward, and her limbs would remain weak with a pleasant numbness.

  Then, inevitably, a guard in a red armband shouting into her face, a slap on her shoulder from her mother, or a curse from one of her sisters awoke Nini from her dream. It was then that Nini would dream other dreams, conjuring other worlds that would make her the Gus’ daughter. Sometimes her parents had died, and she was on the verge of being sent to an orphanage with her sisters, when Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu ran to her rescue. Other times Nini's parents kicked her out of the house, and the Gus, hearing a knock at their door, would come and pull her from the dark and cold street into their warm house; they had been waiting for the moment as long as she had, they told her, saying that all would be well. In one dream Nini's mother beat her to unconsciousness and she woke up to find herself in Mrs. Gu's arms, the woman's eyes full of thankful tears because Nini had not died.

  What would she live for, now that she knew Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu had never been the gentle parents she dreamed about? In her dreams they would never turn their backs on her.

  “Now, now. Why are you so sad? Are you missing me already?”

  Nini looked up and saw Bashi, spinning a sheepskin hat in his hand like a magician, his forehead shining with sweat. She took a deep breath and looked around. She was halfway to the birch wood
s; the snow was dirty on the frozen river. She licked the inside of her mouth and tasted blood from having bitten herself so hard. “Why are you here?” she asked, sniffling.

  “I've been waiting for you, remember? Since this morning.” Bashi made an exaggerated gesture of pointing twice to his wrist, though he did not wear a watch. “But you didn't come.”

  “My mother sent me to the denunciation ceremony.”

  “Did you see the woman?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not, because you don't belong to any work unit,” Bashi said. He walked closer and put his hat on Nini's head. It was too big for her. He adjusted the hat but it still sat low on her eyebrows. “You look like a girl soldier in a movie,” said Bashi.

  “Which movie?”

  “I don't know. Every movie has a girl soldier. The Guerillas, The Tale of a Red Heart, The Pioneers. Have you seen them?”

  Nini shook her head.

  Bashi clicked his tongue and made a sound of being surprised. “One of these days I'll take you to a movie.”

  Nini had never been to a movie theater. Once in a while, her parents would go to see a film with their work units; her two sisters went with their school too. In the summer, a white screen would be set up in an open field by the Muddy River, and every other week a film would be shown, but Nini was always the one left with the baby at home. They would stay in the yard as long as they could, listening to the faint music coming from the river, until swarms of mosquitoes came and buzzed around them.

  Bashi watched Nini closely. “Why, you don't want to see a movie with me?”

  “But you'll still give me the coal even if you take me to a movie?” Nini asked.

  “Coal? Yes, anytime,” Bashi said, and circled an arm around Nini's shoulder. Taken aback, she struggled slightly, and Bashi let her go with a chortle. “Why don't we find a log and sit down,” Bashi said, directing Nini upstream. She tried to catch up with his long stride; when Bashi realized this, he slowed down.