I finished reading The Vagrants by Li Yiyun about two weeks ago. It was one of those excellent storybooks that kept me turning the pages once I get started on it. I remembered staying up late one night just to finish the last few pages even though the end turned out to be more than a few pages.
The novel is written in the third-person and the language style is simple and straightforward. Yet it is this simplicity and third-person narrative that betrays an understated poignancy and suppressed tension that holds the plot tightly.
The story examines the impulses of and psychological effects on people living under communism in the 1970s. Through a singular event - the execution of a young woman who had lost faith in communism - the writer cast light on a host of particular characters and general townfolks: their attitudes under a communist regime; the way they live and perceive their lives and other people; and the forces that shape their private lives. As you read the novel, you feel almost furtively let in into a town hanging on suspense and permeated with unuttered fear.
In particular, I admire the writer's way of telling the story at times through the lenses of other characters or through narrating multiple events simultaneously. Her perceptiveness and adroit craft is demonstrated when she writes about separate but related events that are taking place at the same time, using this to great effect in heightening certain truths or episodes.
I've taken the liberty to extract the following paragraphs which I thought powerfully conveyed a significant episode. This was achieved mainly through the eyes and minds of the seemingly random and important people that appear in her novel.
"Disturbed too were other souls. A female prison guard, off duty for the next two days, claiming she had a minor cold, woke up from a fitful dream and gasped for air; her husband, half-asleep, asked her if she felt unwell. A ridiculous nightmare, she answered, knowing enough not to tell him that she had fainted at work earlier that morning, when the warden had ordered that Gu Shan's vocal cords be severed so that she could not shout counterrevolutionary slogans at the last minute. The woman had been among the four guards assigned to pin the prisoner down for the procedure, but it had not gone as smoothly as promised by the warden and the doctor; the prisoner had struggled with a vehemence that one would not have imagined could come from her skinny body, and the female guard, whose nerve was unusually up to her work, had fallen backward and bumped her head hard on the floor before the doctor finally finished the operation.
Unable to sleep, in another house, was an old orderly for the police station. I tell you, he said to his wife, who answered that she did not want to be reminded for another time about the bucket of blood he had washed off the police jeep that had transferred the prisoner. But it was unusual, he said; I tell you, it was a horrible thing, to clean up so much blood. What did they do to her? Why couldn't they wait until they got her onto the island to finish her off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realised that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.
She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time - so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of the head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite hight school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters - they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.
In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize."
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