The Vagrants

by Yiyun Li

  Han signed his name, his spirit crushed and his heart filled with a pain and sadness that he had not known could exist in life. His mother poured a cup of tea and left it by his side, and then retreated with his father to their bedroom to sleep before daybreak. Han sank into his parents’ sofa; a new television set, on its beautifully crafted stand, watched him like a dark, unblinking eye. Han had imagined years of happiness with three children, the youngest one a daughter as beautiful as Kai and spoiled by her big brothers. If he closed his eyes he could see them in ten years, a loving family sitting at the dinner table on a New Year's Eve, the steam from the fish and chicken and pork making their mouths wet with appetite; when the firecrackers began to pop outside their window, announcing the approach of midnight, he would walk his wife and children, all bundled up in brand-new down coats, to the city square, where his sons would launch their fireworks with boyish bravado and his daughter would scream with joy, her upturned face cupped in her mother's hands.

  WHAT ON EARTH did she want? Han asked Kai later, in her mother's flat. His parents had forbidden him to see his wife, but he had threatened to withdraw his divorce application, and in the end, they had agreed that he could talk to her once. When Kai's mother had opened the door for him at dawn, he saw that she too had had a sleepless night, her eyes red and puffy.

  “Please save her,” Kai's mother had said before she showed him to Kai's room. “Kai is a headstrong person. If something ever happens to her, you'll be the only one she can rely on.”

  Han dared not meet the old woman's eyes.

  “You have to help her,” she said. “Tell your parents that I will crawl to their door and beg for their mercy if that is what they want me to do.”

  Han tried to comfort Kai's mother, but half a sentence later he choked on his own tears. The old woman handed him a handkerchief, and then turned away to wipe her eyes. They had been close ever since Han had come to her six years earlier, asking her to teach him to cook Kai's favorite dishes; together they had kept this secret from Han's parents.

  Kai was in her sister's bedroom, where an extra bed had always been kept for Kai, even though she had already married Han when he arranged for the family to move into the new flat. When Kai and her mother had returned earlier that evening, they had found a note left by Lin, Kai's little sister. She was to spend a few days at her best friend's home, Lin wrote, and in the note she called Kai the last person she wanted to see now. Lin, at twenty-one, had just begun to enjoy being courted by the most suitable young men in town. Earlier in her life, she had taken up, from her mother, the shame of living in the alley, and made it a source of her own unhappiness. She was sixteen when Kai married Han, and at the time, Kai could see that the move made Lin blossom with confidence and joy.

  Kai did not seem surprised when Han came in. She asked if he had seen Ming-Ming in his parents’ house.

  “Ming-Ming is well,” Han said. He moved the only chair in the room next to where Kai was sitting, an arm's length between them. “He has grown a lot since I last saw him.”

  “That's a child's job,” Kai said. “Growing. Isn't it?”

  “He's a good baby,” Han said, and before he knew it, tears fell onto his lap and darkened his gray trousers.

  When Han told her about the crackdown in Beijing, the news came more as a disappointment than a shock; Kai wondered if Jialin had heard similar reports on his transistor radio. She wished they were with each other tonight. She smiled when Han asked her what it was she had wanted that they didn't have. She had done what her conscience demanded, Kai said.

  “What about Ming-Ming?” Han asked. “Has he ever been on your conscience?”

  Not all women were meant to be good mothers, Kai said, and she apologized for the first time that day.

  When Han sobbed, it was as though he were a small child again. He was, before anything else, his mother's son; despite her lack of feminine gentleness, his mother had always considered him the center of her life and had never failed to let him know that all she had achieved in her career had been done for him. Han had not known that a mother could discard her son so easily; such cruelty, beyond his understanding, crushed his universe. He thought of begging Kai, for the sake of his son and himself, but even before he opened his mouth he could see through his tears that, before she stood up and left, she was looking at him with pity and disgust. He cried, for his son and for himself, until his head dropped in exhaustion. In a half dream he remembered a spring day not long ago when he had become the first person in Muddy River to own a camera imported from Germany. He had been dating Kai for two months then, and he remembered looking through the viewfinder at her before he clicked the shutter.

  A while later, Kai's mother entered with a look of panic and despair, and Han quickly wiped the corner of his mouth, his head aching dully. The police had just come and taken Kai away, she told Han. Please, could he help Kai, because he was the only one, now, who could save her.

  RUMORS AND SPECULATION, born out of insufficient information and vivid imaginations, took hold in Muddy River on the morning after Ching Ming. People woke up to the seven o'clock news, read not by Kai but by a male colleague of hers. Two retired engineers, who took morning walks together, contemplated what could have happened. It might come down to a political earthquake now, they said to each other. Those who won the game would become kings, they said, citing the old saying, but neither ventured a guess about who would be the winners. The men had both escaped unscathed the various revolutions in their lifetimes. They had known each other for three years now, since meeting in the hospital morgue, two new widowers; in the twilight of their lives they found one another irreplaceable. They had discussed the situation on their daily walks in the past two weeks, each trusting the other as the only one with whom such sensitive matters could be voiced. Neither of them had any expectations, nor did they take a stand—at their age they considered the only role left for them to be theater spectators, and they took their seats and coolly watched from a distance. For every poor soul who was dragged down by this, the two wise men contemplated, there would be another one up for a promotion. A balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you'd have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.

  Elsewhere, a woman commented to her husband at the breakfast table that the female announcer was in trouble. One could not tell merely from a changed schedule of her broadcast shifts, the husband argued, but the wife insisted that she herself had been the farsighted one; if not for her, he would have let himself be summoned by the woman's speech to the city square like a fool. The husband ate his dinner in silence, but this gesture was not enough to placate his wife, who, along with several of her close friends, despised the woman reading the news in her beautiful voice to their husbands, making them deaf to their wives’ domestic nagging. “I tell you,” she said now, her voice drowning out the announcer's report on the recordhigh revenue of the city of Muddy River for the first quarter. “I tell you, that woman is a nightmare for any man.”

  In the emergency room of the city hospital, where no one was dying or being rushed in to die, a boy lay in the recovery room and his mother dozed by the bedside. The boy had taken part in a gang fight the night before and had his scalp cracked open by a brick. The doctor who had given him twenty-five stitches was off duty now, and her colleagues, two women who had both been at the rally the day before, stood by the window of the recovery room without talking. If it came to a crackdown, the one who had signed the petition thought to herself, she would divorce her husband so his promotion to head of hematology would not be affected; the other woman, more positive due to her optimistic nature in general as well as her decision not to sign the petition, believed that nothing serious
would happen, because the law never punished the masses for going astray. No discussion occurred between the two colleagues, yet when they parted for their morning duties, one comforted the other with a pat on the shoulder, and all was understood.

  Jialin leaned on his pillow. When his mother entered the shack with a late breakfast he did not move. She had forgotten the kettle of boiled water for the heater, but he did not ask. The night before, his three brothers had come home with blood on their hands and shirts. They had, in a gang fight, smashed a boy's head and, for the first time in their lives, understood the taste of fear. All night they couldn't sleep, taking turns looking out the gate for possible enemies coming with bats and bricks, or worse, policemen with handcuffs. Jialin's youngest brother, who had never talked much to him, came into the shack before daybreak, asking Jialin to take care of their parents if it reached a point where the three of them had to flee for a few years.

  Jialin had thought the boy's dramatic behavior laughable but had not said so. Before the boy had entered, Jialin, with his transistor radio tuned to the Hong Kong station, had heard the news that in Beijing the secret police had started to carry out arrests.

  “I heard people talk about yesterday's event in the marketplace,” Jialin's mother said, and put the food on the makeshift table made of an old tree stump.

  “What did they say?”

  “They said the government wouldn't let anyone get off so easily.”

  Jialin did not move. “What else did they say?”

  “They said the woman announcer is married to an important figure so there's no need for her to worry,” Jialin's mother said, and then glanced at him. “You were with them, weren't you?”

  Jialin had always told his family that his friends came to read books with him, but he knew that his mother could easily have guessed the connection. “Other things? What else did people say?”

  “They said she must be using the rally to become famous,” Jialin's mother said. “But I don't understand. She's already famous. Why did she need to become more famous?”

  “Don't listen to rumors,” said Jialin. “People think they know more than they do.”

  “So were you one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  Jialin's mother did not speak, and after a while, he looked at her and saw her quietly wiping her eyes.

  “Mama, don't worry,” he said. “Nothing has happened, and people are just indulging their imaginations.”

  “There must not be a heaven above us,” Jialin's mother said, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her blouse. “Or else, why were you given a brain only to get sick, while your brothers are healthy and strong but empty-headed?”

  “They'll learn their lesson.”

  “How about you? I can't afford to lose you,” Jialin's mother said, and tears dampened the front of her blouse.

  Jialin smiled. It was no secret that he would die soon. What mattered to him was how he left this world. His mother wanted him to die in her arms; she wanted him to belong to her, and her only.

  “Do you think there'll be trouble? People say different things and I don't know whom I should believe.”

  “Listen to nothing and believe no one,” Jialin said.

  “What will happen to you?”

  Jialin shook his head. Perhaps it was only a matter of days, or hours, before someone would come into his shack and break his mother's heart, but he did not want to share this knowledge with her. “Think about it, Mama, I wasn't meant to live forever.”

  Jialin's mother turned her head away.

  “There's nothing to be sad about,” Jialin said. “Thirty years from now—no, let's hope it's not that long. Ten years, or five years, from now, they will come to your door and say to you that your son Jialin was a hero, a pioneer, a man of foresight and courage.”

  “I would rather you were as unambitious as your brothers.”

  “They'll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?”

  “I would rather you had never touched a book in your life. I wish I had never stolen a book for you.”

  “That's a stupid way of thinking, Mama,” Jialin said, shocked by his own vehemence. After a bout of coughing, he said in a gentle voice, “What else can I leave for you, Mama? I can't give you grandchildren.”

  Jialin's mother left the shack without answering; on the way out she bumped into the door frame. He listened to her broken sobs disappear into the depths of the house and had to force his heart to remain hard, untouched by his mother's tears.

  THE TEACHER'S HEART WAS restless on the Monday after Ching Ming. She gave the class an assignment of copying the textbook, and sat for a while at her desk, then went to the hallway to talk to another teacher. The children, still excited, could not keep quiet. Boys exchanged tales of ghosts and wild animals they had spotted on the mountain; girls showed off souvenirs offered by nature-bookmarks made by pressing new leaves and wildflowers between the pages of a book, feathers of bright colors, bracelets made from linked dry berries. Only when the classroom became boisterous did the teacher come in and bang on the wooden blackboard with a ruler. They were to copy every lesson in the textbook three times instead of one, the teacher announced, and they would not be allowed to go home for lunch before finishing the work.

  The children, terrified by the prospect of being kept behind for the midday break, stopped wiggling on their benches and started to write, their pencils scratching on the paper like a thousand munching silkworms. Tong counted the few blank pages in his exercise book—he did not have enough pages for the assignment, but even if he had the space to copy all the words in the world, his heart was not in it today. Ear had not come home for another night, and Tong's hopes were dimming.

  Dogs got stolen and eaten all the time, his father had said the night before, and there was no reason to cry over it; the world would become a crowded place if dogs, or, for that matter, little children, did not disappear. Tong's mother had held his hand while his father ran on with his drunken philosophy about stolen children and butchered dogs. However, when Tong's father fell into a stupor, she herself repeated the same message. Once the mating season started, she said, they could find him a new puppy; she suggested that he name the new puppy Ear, too, if that would make him feel better.

  The idea of replacement puzzled and disappointed Tong, but it seemed natural for the grown-ups to think that way. Even Old Hua had said the same thing, as if there were endless duplicates or substitutes for anything, a jacket, a dog, or a boy.

  Tong's eyes stung. It would be a shame to cry in class, and he sniffled and tried to hold back his tears. After a while, his chest hurt. He had cried the night before, quietly, for a long time, and then had felt embarrassed by his tears; he had wondered what the people back in his grandparents’ village would think of him if they knew he was softhearted. Perhaps losing Ear, like taming Kwen's black dog and uncovering nature's secrets from the weather forecast, was another test for him to prove himself, but even this thought could not relieve the weight on his chest.

  At the break, Tong rushed to the hallway and squatted in a corner. It did not make him feel any better when the long-held-back tears fell onto the cement floor. When an upper-grade teacher discovered Tong and asked him what was wrong, he could not say a word, his body shaking with the effort not to wail. It must be some sort of stomachache, the teacher wondered aloud; she asked Tong if he could walk home all by himself, or if he needed a ride to the hospital. He nodded and then shook his head, confusing the teacher, so she decided to find the school janitor to send the boy to a clinic. It took her a while to locate the janitor, who was dozing behind a pile of firewood in the school basement. He seemed upset when he was shaken awake, and when he followed the teacher to the hallway, the sick boy had disappeared, leaving behind a small puddle of tears on the floor. The janitor grumbled and wiped the tears with the soles of his shoes, eliminating the only proof that the teacher had not told a lie t
o disturb his morning nap.

  Tong wandered around town. There was no use combing through the streets and alleys yet again, as he understood his parents’ and Old Hua's conclusion that if Ear had not come home by now, he had very possibly landed on someone's dinner table. Still, walking under the clear morning sky, away from the classroom with its low ceiling and small, soot-covered windows, he felt a tiny hope rise again. He went from block to block, trying not to make eye contact with the grown-ups, who, like his teacher, seemed in no mood to catch him playing truant. Housewives and workers leaving the night shift talked in twos and threes in the street; a few shop-owners came from behind their high counters and stood in front of the doors, exchanging talk and looking at every passerby for possible business.

  “Why are you not in school now?” yelled an old man as Tong entered an alley. The man was wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and a cotton-lined hat, even though spring was in full bloom. He propped himself up with one hand on a wooden cane, and the other hand, holding an envelope, was on a wooden fence for extra support. “I'm asking you. It's ten o'clock on Monday morning and what are you doing here in the alley?”

  Tong inched back. If he started to run, he could easily leave the growling man behind, but growing up in the countryside, where old people were respected as kings, he did not have it in his nature to ignore questions put to him by an old man.

  “Which school do you go to?”

  “Red Star,” Tong replied, the truth slipping out before he could think of a lie.

  “Then what is the reason for you to be in my alley and not in school?”

  “I don't know,” replied Tong.

  “Is that the answer you give to your teacher? Listen, I'm a schoolteacher. Two weeks ago I had boys like you in my class, and I know all your tricks. Now, one more time, what makes you think you can play truant today?”

  “Our teacher said we had to copy the whole textbook before lunch,” Tong said in a low voice. “I don't have enough pages left in my exercise book.”