Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

They could start with Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said now, but she was momentarily confused. Where would they begin? When they had picked the bundle up from the grass, or when she had been sneaked out of the village before daybreak by her helpless mother? Mrs. Hua and her husband had looked for anything left by the parents—a name, a birthday, or a message they could later find people to read for them—but the rags that swaddled the baby, ripped from old sheets and worn-out undershirts, had said enough about the reason she had been discarded.

She was the prettiest, Old Hua said. He was as biased as a father could be, Mrs. Hua thought, but did not point it out to him. Morning Glory had been seventeen when Mr. and Mrs. Hua were forced to give up the girls. Seventeen was old enough for a girl to become a wife; still, when they found a family who was willing to take Morning Glory in as a child bride for one of their grown-up sons, they made the family swear to wait until Morning Glory turned eighteen before they would let the husband touch her. Mrs. Hua wondered aloud how well the other parents had kept their promises; they had had daughters themselves, she said, and as parents of girls they must have understood.

Old Hua nodded. He could have said that it made no difference now, and she was glad that he only smoked silently and listened.

“She liked to drink vinegar,” Mrs. Hua said.

Old Hua shook his head as if he did not trust her memory, but she knew she was not wrong about that. Once, when a younger girl had tipped over the vinegar bottle, Morning Glory had cried; she was seven or eight then, old enough not to shed tears over this, and Mrs. Hua remembered later catching the girl munching on clover stems for the tart juice and thinking that it must be one of those things that only her birth parents would have understood. Mrs. Hua wondered if Morning Glory would crave something odd in her pregnancies. Mrs. Hua had never been able to bear a baby herself, and she was always curious about the stories she heard of a pregnant woman's wants.

“How old is Morning Glory?” Mrs. Hua asked suddenly.

Old Hua thought for a moment and replied that she must be forty-one or forty-two now.

Mrs. Hua counted the years, but the liquor made it hard to keep the numbers straight. Middle-aged, she thought, with a litter of children of her own by now. Mrs. Hua wondered what Morning Glory would be like as a mother. She had been gentle with stray cats and wounded birds, and Mrs. Hua remembered her husband had once said that of the seven girls Morning Glory was the one to have the most of a Buddha's heart; a hard thing for a girl to live with, Mrs. Hua remembered herself replying then, but perhaps a full house of children to feed and many in-laws to please had long ago hardened that heart into a rock.

Night fell, and Mrs. Hua poured a cup of liquor for her husband and another cup for herself. The liquor was the best medicine, if only they could afford it, Old Hua said. But it did little to heal the wound left when their daughters were taken away, Mrs. Hua thought, and before she knew it, she felt her face wet with tears. Was she all right? Old Hua asked when he heard her sniffling, and she replied that it was the trick of the liquor and the wind howling outside.

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 usually 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 realized 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 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 high 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.

T he nanny stood by the doorway of the nursery, watching Kai and Ming-Ming with detached patience. The morning leave-taking was never easy, but before the girl's gaze Kai felt more incapable than ever. The nanny was young, fifteen and a half, but there was a look of resignation on her face that made the girl look old, as if an aged woman had taken over and lived out all that was to come in her life before her time.

“Now, now,” said the nanny finally, when Kai failed to pry Ming-Ming's small fingers off her hand. He screamed in protest when he was pulled out of Kai's arms, and the nanny caught the small wrist and shook it gently. “Ming-Ming will be a good boy. Wave to Mama and let Mama go to work. Without work Mama doesn't make money. Without money there is no food. Without food Ming-Ming's tummy will rumble. And when Ming-Ming's tummy rumbles Mama will be too sad to go to work.”