Beijing-born writer Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants (Random House) begins on a clear morning in 1979 when Gu Shan, a former Chinese Red Guard who has renounced her faith in Communism, is scheduled to be executed in the provincial city of Muddy River, her vocal cords slashed first to prevent any final counter-revolutionary outbursts. The entire town is present for the execution, as factory workers have been given the day off to attend and the local schoolchildren come along on a grim field trip. Starting with Gu Shan’s parents, who stir restlessly as the sun comes up, Li moves briskly through a series of vignettes that introduce the town’s inhabitants. There’s Nini, a young girl whose physical deformities offer constant evidence of the abuse Shan doled out to her mother when she was pregnant; Kai, a radio personality and small-time celebrity who married into a powerful family; and Bashi, a crude son of privilege who leers at every passing woman. Li knits together the lives of these disparate figures with crisp prose and sharp observations, showing the public spectacle from multiple vantage points as it unfolds against the suppression of the dissident Democracy Wall Movement in faraway Beijing. Li depicts the response of Muddy River’s leaders to this threat with particular clarity, showing the irresoluteness of a minor local government on the periphery of Chinese power and culture. But ultimately, events in the metropole and the forces of history are of limited consequence in Muddy River, where the central issues facing residents are not politics and revolutions, but remoteness and alienation.

Li has already established her reputation as an important new American voice with her short stories, tales of lonely people desperately seeking some sort of human connection, however frail or unwieldy. The Vagrants, her debut novel, continues in this vein, weaving a tangle of hollow lives, all struggling to find their place in a rapidly transforming society. Every child described in the book is an orphan of sorts—one is raised by his grandmother, another is unloved by her parents, still another is ridiculed by his parents for his rough manners. Li’s desolate view the fundamental loneliness of life becomes starkly clear by the end of the novel, when one character observes, “Heaven’s door is narrow and allows only one hero at a time, but those going down to hell always travel in pairs, hand in hand.”

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KEYWORDS: books, China, Yiyun Li

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