Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

Teacher Gu nodded, trying to cover his disappointment. “Thank you, Mrs. Hua.”

“Bring Mrs. Gu over for a cup of tea when she feels like it,” Mrs. Hua said. She hesitated and added, “We've lost daughters too.”

T he stadium was half-full when the Red Star Elementary arrived. “Communism Is Good,” a song Tong remembered by heart, was broadcast through the loudspeakers, and he hummed along. The students were assigned seats in the front rows, and once they settled down, some children in Tong's class started to open the snacks their parents had packed into their school bags; others drank from their canteens. Tong, feeling solemn and important, did not make these childish mistakes.

The denunciation ceremony started at nine. A woman, in a brand-new blue woolen Mao jacket and wearing a red ribbon on her chest, came onto the stage and asked the audience to stand and join the Workers Choir to sing “Without the Communist Party We Don't Have a Life.” Tong sprang to his feet and looked up at the woman with admiration. When Tong had first arrived at Muddy River, before he had learned the streets of the city by heart, he used to sit in the yard with Ear in the morning and late afternoon and listen to the news announcer's voice from the loudspeakers. He had little understanding of the news she reported, but her voice, warm and comforting, reminded him of the loving hands of his grandmother from when she had put him to sleep.

It took several minutes for the grown-ups to get onto their feet, and even when the choir began singing, half the people were still talking and laughing. The woman signaled the audience to raise their voices, and Tong flushed and sang at the top of his lungs. The different sections of the stadium proceeded at different speeds, and when the choir and the accompanying music ended, it took another minute for the audience to reach the end of the song, each session taking its time to finish. There was some good-humored laughter here and there.

The first speaker was introduced, a party representative from the city government, and it took a few seconds for the grown-ups to quiet down. More speakers, from different work units and schools, went onto the stage and denounced the counterrevolutionary, their speeches all ending with slogans shouted into the microphone and repeated by the audience. The speech Tong admired most was presented by a fifth grader from his school, the captain of the school's Young Pioneers and the leading singer of the Muddy River Young Pioneers Choir. She recited harsh, condemning words in a melodious voice, and Tong knew that he would never sound as perfect as she did, nor would he have the right accent to gain him the honor of speaking in a solemn ceremony like this.

After a while, there was still no sign of the most exhilarating moment of the gathering—the denouncing of the counterrevolutionary in person, before she was escorted to the execution site. The criminal had to be transported from site to site, the woman explained, and then she called for more patriotic music.

The grown-ups started to wander around, talking and joking. Some women brought out knitting needles and balls of yarn. A teacher told the children to eat their snacks. A boy reported in a loud voice that his mother wanted him to pee at least once at the stadium, which led to several boys and girls raising their hands and making the same request. The teacher counted, and when she had gathered enough children, she led them single file to the back of the stadium.

Tong sat straight in his seat, the crackers his mother had packed for him untouched in his bag. He wished the woman announcer would come onstage and chastise the children and grown-ups who had turned the ceremony into a street fair, but he had learned, since his arrival in Muddy River, that the opinions of a child like him held no meaning in the world. Back in his grandparents’ village the peasants respected him because he had once been chosen by a famous fortune-teller as an apprentice. Tong had been two and a half then, before he could remember the story, and all he knew were the tales repeated by his grandparents and their neighbors: The old blind man, weakened by years of traveling from village to village and telling other people's fortunes, had foreseen his own death coming, and decided to choose a boy who would inherit his secret wisdom and knowledge of the world. He had walked across three mountains and combed through eighteen villages before finding Tong. Legend had it that when the old man came to the village, he studied the shape of the skulls of all the boys under age ten, disappointed each time until he reached Tong, the youngest in the line; the old man touched Tong's head and instantly shed tears of relief. In the next six months, the old man settled down in the village and came to Tong's bed every morning before sunrise, teaching Tong to chant, and to memorize rhymes and formulas that Tong would need for his fortune-telling career.

Tong no longer remembered his master. The old man had died shortly after Tong turned three, surprising the villagers, as the master fortune-teller failed to foretell his own death with accuracy. It was a pity that the blind man's wisdom was lost to the world; still, the short stint as the fortune-teller's apprentice marked Tong as a boy with a special status, revered by the villagers. But these stories meant little to Tong's parents and the townspeople. They did not look into Tong's eyes, which old people back in the village had always said were profoundly humane. An extraordinary boy, they had said of him, and Tong knew he was meant for a grand cause. But how could he convince Muddy River of his importance, when his existence was not much more noticeable than the existence of dogs and cats in the street?

A squad of policemen marched into the stadium and guarded both ends of every aisle. The announcer called for the audience to return to their seats. Her voice was muffled, as if she had caught a cold, and from the front row where Tong sat, he could see her knitted eyebrows. He wondered if she felt hurt as much as he did by people's lack of enthusiasm, but she did not see his upturned and concerned face when she announced the arrival of the counterrevolutionary.

Hushed talk rippled through the stadium when the counterrevolutionary was dragged onto the stage by two policemen dressed in well-ironed snow-white uniforms. Her arms were bound behind her back, and her weight was supported by the two men's hands, her feet barely touching the ground. For the first time since the beginning of the ceremony, the audience heaved a collective sigh. The woman's head drooped as if she were asleep. One of the two policemen pulled her head up by her hair, and Tong could see that her neck was wrapped in thick surgical tape, stained dark by blood. Her eyes, half-open, seemed to be looking at the children in the front rows without registering anything, and when the policeman let go of her hair, her head drooped again as if she were falling back into sleep.

The audience was called to its feet, and the shouting of slogans began. Tong shouted along with his classmates, but he felt cheated. The woman was not what he had expected: Her head was not shaved bald, as his parents had guessed it would be, nor did she look like the devil described to him by a classmate. From where he stood, he could see the top of her head, a bald patch in the middle, and her body, small in the prisoner's uniform that draped over her like a gray flour sack, did not make her look like a dangerous criminal.

After a few minutes the woman was escorted off the stage and disappeared with the two policemen to the back of the stadium. The slogan shouting trailed off until there was nothing for the audience to do but go home. Some grown-ups started to move toward the exits, but the security guards refused to let them pass. A fight or two broke out, attracting more security guards, and soon the woman announcer hurried back to the stage and signaled the audience to join the choir for a few more revolutionary songs. Already losing interest, most grown-ups just crowded toward the exits, the banners they had brought with them abandoned on the seats.