The Scotsman Book Club: The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li

Published on Wednesday 4 February 2009 16:09

A bleak portrayal of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution offers The Scotsman Book Club insight into a period of history that's hard for the West to grasp

Meet this month's panel

JENNI CALDER (JC) is a Scottish literary historian and President of Scottish PEN, the writers' campaigning group.

SOPHY DALE (SD) works for Scottish Book Trust.

ANDREW WILLIAMS (AW) is a documentary director and author of two bestselling non-fiction books: The Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day to Berlin. His first novel, The Interrogator, has just been published to rave reviews.

Dr TOMMY McCLELLAN (TM), of the Confucius Institute for Scotland, is a senior lecturer, specialising in modern Chinese literature, at the University of Edinburgh.

LEE RANDALL (LR) is a columnist, interviewer, reviewer and assistant editor (magazines and arts) for The Scotsman. She is a former editor of Scotland on Sunday's Spectrum magazine.

DAVID ROBINSON (DR) is Books Editor of The Scotsman.

DR: I CHOSE THIS BOOK BECAUSE, like many others, I was bowled over by Yiyun Li's debut short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. I interviewed her after that book won the world's top literary award for short stories, and found her a fascinating writer, not least because, like Conrad, she's writing in a language she's had to learn. Born in China, she came to America to study immunology in Iowa, where she then changed career and became a writer.

Her first novel is set in provincial China in 1979, two and a half years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the small town of Muddy River, built from scratch in 1959, a woman is about to be executed. Gu Shan is a dissident, a former Red Guard who has renounced her faith in communism.

At first it seems that she will go unmourned – apart from by her mother, still determined to follow the old custom of burning her clothes at a crossroads to ease her spirit into the next world. But gradually, mourning flickers into rebellion – small-scale admittedly, but enough to bring the wrath of the state down on a curiously interlinked network of individuals – the vagrants of the title. First question for you, Tommy: do you think The Vagrants fits into China's literary tradition, or is it very much an migr novel?

TM: It actually resembles quite closely a lot of recent fiction by younger writers in China: highlighting the inhumanities – crime, backwardness, ignorance, superstition, moral turpitude and corruption – of small-town life, and offering little in the way of optimism about Chinese society. And all of that is consistent with the main critical realist trend in China's modern literature. Unlike the recent crop of Chinese migr writing, it's a very disciplined, professionally written historical novel, rather than an impassioned autobiographical or semi-autobiographical one. I found it a very satisfying read on many different levels.

SD: One thing I noticed was that it would have been very easy to make this a rant about how terrible the situation was – abandoned baby girls, starvation, repression. But this feels like a rounded, proper novel, a piece of art which has the side-effect of shedding light on a period of history rather than being a piece of propaganda. It's dispassionate in tone: horrific incidents are described here without much authorial comment.

I couldn't say I enjoyed the book, but I was impressed and moved by it. At times it was an effort to carry on as grimness was piled upon grimness …

JC: Yet it's all filtered through people who seem to me to be real, and their reactions vary from philosophical to anguished to accepting. That seems to me to be modulated very skilfully through the novel. Two characters that leapt off the page were Bashi and Nini – two absolute outsiders, a 16-year-old idler and his 12-year-old crippled girlfriend. The older characters were skilfully drawn too, although I was least convinced by the central character, Kai, a former actress who now is the regime's mouthpiece in Muddy River – anchorwoman of the propaganda department's daily loudspeaker broadcasts – but who puts her privileged life at risk by being one of the leaders of the protest after her former classmate's execution.

AW: Yes, that Damascene conversion wasn't really explained. We don't really know enough about what has driven her to a position where she's prepared to abandon her baby as well as her aparatchik husband. We don't get enough of that play between her personal responsibility and her politics. And we lose, dramatically, by not being shown some characters' battles with their consciences.

All of the characters were lost people to some degree, and that's why I found the novel desperately bleak. It's hard to find any of the characters you can engage with – they're all so unremittingly brutalised by their society. As a reader I'm left thinking, was it all like this: babies abandoned by the river, children left in orphanages or given away as child brides, marriages forced to end, wives betraying husbands because of politics, sons betraying fathers, everyone betraying everyone else because staying alive is all that matters?

Was it just like that? All the time, such misery?

JC: I've got to say, on my sole visit to China, in 1986, I heard lots of stories as bleak as we have here. I met an intellectual who'd been denounced by his Red Guard son. He and his wife had been sent to different places in the country. When he was reinstated, the son committed suicide. The daughter turned her back on China and went to the United States. That was fairly typical of the stories I heard. This man wasn't ranting, complaining, criticising: it's just, that was life then ...

AW: I'm sure it was. It's just that here they're all crammed together at the expense of any normal life. Everyone's out for themselves, and the characters who aren't – the roadsweeper and his wife – they are just extras.

JC: I don't know. I thought their story in particular had a positive, redemptive ending – a grain of hope.

LR: I found that the first 80 pages flew by, then it became a real problem to go back to the book. I can accept that she's a fine writer: there's a cinematic quality about her work – you can see this world unfolding. I was impressed by that, but ultimately, I wasn't engaged by the characters.

DR: I'm not sure how much that matters. Because to me the one thing the book shows is what it felt like to live in a totalitarian society of a kind we in the West can hardly imagine.

And we've hardly even mentioned the quality of her writing.

LR: Yes, she's a good writer. It's just that there was no urgency about how the various narratives would play out, and the end was pretty much a foregone conclusion, so there were no surprises…

DR: Personally, I found the ending very moving indeed. But maybe Andrew is right, that there's none of the swithering over conscience and politics that we in the West might expect. There's something else instead, though – if a character decides to support the protest, they face truly frightening knock-on effects: they're also blighting their parents' security in old age, their children's opportunities, their in-laws' pensions. Everything's always in jeopardy: even the Party members can't always be sure which faction to back.

And as for the style, there was this powerful fusion of William Trevor-like stillness and an expansive narrative sweep. I found it very impressive indeed.

SD: I think we all agree that it's an impressive piece of writing. But like Lee, I found it didn't touch me as it might have done.

DR: If what? What was missing? Were there too many characters? What was it?

SD: Maybe paradoxically it was its very restraint that got in the way of the complete emotional engagement you'd find in a truly classic novel.

JC: For me, the engagement with the characters lies in the details of their lives, the context in which they're surviving, the clothes they wear and what they consider important. Yiyun Li is telling us something about the lives of people completely different from ones we're used to, and she really conveys that, actually quite gently – all these tiny details.

TM: I agree with much of that – except about it being totally different from our experience. The characters may be warped by their misfortunes or experience, but there's still some affection in Teacher Gu's marriage even though it is falling apart; the counterrevolutionary Jialin may be forced to live in a shack in the yard because he has TB, but the inhumanity of that is offset by his mother's love; the idler Bashi feels a very real love for his grandmother. These characters are all handled compassionately, and fit into a universal pattern of humanity, not just a totalitarian one.

AW: I don't know. Apart from the deep love of the apparatchik for his radio announcer wife Kai, there didn't seem too much emotion on display here. Maybe there is a cultural element – the freedom, especially in 1979, to express things openly – I don't know – but if it was, I think Yiyun Li should have given us their inner voices. Everything is presented beautifully, described beautifully but with all these horrendous things that are happening you feel "Surely, they must have felt more about it than that."

JC: I just think emotion is expressed in different ways: Mrs Gu's anguish at her daughter's execution, for example – wanting to mourn her properly but obstructed by the state – that's pure Antigone. And her husband, trying quietly not to be angry with her, that's …

DR: Pure William Trevor!

TM: I think Chinese readers would be saddened by the repression of emotion here. Since the stories of Lu Xun launched a modern literature in China 90 years ago, Chinese writers have bemoaned the lack of compassion in their society, and much of their writing highlights this bleakness.There are many other books celebrating life in all its innocence, exuberance and raunchiness … but Mao Zedong put politics in command. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if so many politicians weren't absolutely corrupt, as Vagrants shows them to be in Muddy River. Emotion, culture, feeling, love – all the finer things in life are absolutely crushed out of people. As Teacher Gu says: "What marks our era is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words."

JC: So yes, maybe there is a bleakness about this, but it's only the same kind of unforgiving way in which Hardy treats his characters, for example.

AW: But even in Hardy at his most unforgiving, the characters have the odd moment of happiness before the fates deal with them. I don't mean to sound negative about this book, though, because although I can't say I enjoyed it, I'm so pleased I read it. The writing was fantastic. But at the end of it I wasn't reaching for my handkerchief – and there's so much tragedy here that I really should have been.

'WE'RE NOT THE FIRST PARENTS TO LOSE A DAUGHTER'

When Teacher Gu walked past the passenger station, the train running to the provincial capital was making its brief stop. The guardian, who had been sitting in the booth during the day and sleeping in an adjacent cabin as long as Teacher Gu could remember, was yawning by the track. A girl of seven or eight was selling hard-boiled eggs through the windows to the passengers, her fingers frostbitten and as swollen as baby carrots.

Teacher Gu slowed down and looked at her. Out of habit, he thought of finding out where she lived, and if she ever went to school, but he dismissed the idea. For thirty years, he had helped children from poor families, mostly girls, to go to school, paying their tuition and fees when their parents could not spare the money. He saw the joy of being able to read in his wife's eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students – his wife and his daughter – had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn't been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses. His wife would have simply endured the loss of Shan in painful silence, as all illiterate women endured the loss of their children, surrendering them to an indisputable fate and putting their only hope in the next life.

The old guardian rang a bell. Teacher Gu stopped and watched the white steam in the cold morning air, and the passengers who were being taken away from him, a man stuffing an egg into his mouth, a woman nibbling on a homemade sausage. Soon the train sped up, and he could no longer identify faces. This was where he and his wife were in their life, where one day could be indistinguishable from the next, and they shouldn't be worrying about a moment or a day being too long or too miserable. At least that's what he had told his wife when she returned from burning the clothes; they were to look forward and understand that the pains would not be as acute a year or two from now. "Everybody dies," he had said. "We're not the first parents, and won't be the last, to lose a daughter."

• Yiyun Li. From The Vagrants published by Fourth Estate on Monday, price 12.99.

WIN A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE – AND A TASTE OF LOUISIANA

NEXT MONTH we're switching from repressive China to Jazz Age Louisiana as The Scotsman's Book Group reads American novelist Tim Gauteaux's novel The Missing.

If you want to join us, win a free bottle of champagne and a copy of the book, all you have to do is tell us whether you've ever travelled anywhere abroad purely because you've read about it in a novel and the setting was so brilliantly described that it made you want to go there?

Please send your reply to the Scotsman Book Club Competition, Books Editor, The Scotsman, 108 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS. E-mail replies should be sent to [e-mail]. The closing date is 20 February.