Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

The door to the house opened. “Do you need help?” asked an older woman wrapped in a long cotton coat.

Kai pointed to the shack and said in a muffled voice that she was looking for Jialin. The older woman, who was no doubt Jialin's mother, with traces of him recognizable in her face, nodded and waved before closing the door.

His mother had learned not to ask about his life, Jialin explained when he caught her glancing back at the closed door of the house. He let Kai into the shack and pointed to the only chair.

“Your mother—she's not working today?” Kai asked.

“She has a cold.”

“And your brothers—are they at school?”

Jialin looked surprised by the small talk that never occurred between them. He hoped they were at school, he said, but rumors were that they had become part of a street gang and skipped school for their own business.

“Do your parents know?”

“The parents are always the last to learn of any bad news.”

“Don't you want to talk to your brothers, or at least let your parents know?”

They expected him not to interfere with their lives, Jialin said; in return they left him to his own world. Besides, they were only his half brothers, and there was little reason for him to step in front of their birth father and claim any responsibility. Did he share these stories about his life with his other friends? Kai wondered, thinking of all the questions she could not ask him.

Jialin waited for a moment, and when Kai did not speak, he asked if there was anything she needed to speak to him about. Yes, Kai replied, the same request she had put to him all along: a protest on Shan's behalf, not for her life now but for her rights to be recognized as wrongfully executed. Kai spoke of the suspiciously expedited trial and of Shan's kidneys, transplanted into another man's body; she spoke of Mrs. Gu's insubordinate action at the crossroad, remembering Mrs. Gu's straight back when she had been dragged away from the smoldering fire. It was time to wake up the townspeople of Muddy River to the atrocity and injustice done to a daughter and a mother.

Neither spoke for a moment after Kai had finished her speech. Then Jialin beckoned her to a corner of the shack and removed some plastic sheeting. Underneath were a mimeograph set and a pile of newly printed leaflets. Kai picked one up; she recognized Jialin's handwriting. It was a letter addressed to the townspeople of Muddy River, dated on the day of the execution. Kai looked up, perplexed. “Did you have them ready yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't know you had done everything by yourself.”

Jialin shook his head and said it had been done with the help of several other friends.

“But why did we wait if you had the leaflets ready?” Kai asked.

“Situations change every day,” Jialin said. Then he asked her if she had heard any news about the democratic wall in Beijing. Kai shook her head, and Jialin seemed surprised. He thought she would have heard the news even though she would not be allowed to broadcast it, Jialin said. She replied that she was no more than a voice for the government, and she relied on him more than anyone else for real news about the world.

A wall had been set up in the national capital, Jialin said, where people could express their opinions freely; in the past few weeks many had posted comments, requesting a more open and democratic government. As he spoke Kai felt a strange sense of loss. She did not know how long Jialin had been following the news, but he had never told her this in his letters. She imagined young people gathered in groups in the nation's capital, sharing their dreams. Even in Jialin's shack his other friends must stay up late at night sometimes, hoping for any positive news on the shortwave radio. Where was she on those nights, but playing out her role as a dutiful wife and a good mother?

Could she meet Jialin's friends? Kai asked.

Jialin took off his glasses. He massaged his eyes, wiped the lenses with his sleeve, and put the glasses back on. “You do understand you're not as free as most of us are, don't you?” he asked gently. “My hope is not for you to be part of this. At least not yet.”

“Why? Can't you trust me?”

Jialin shook his head. Once the leaflets were delivered to the world, he said, waving a hand at the pile, there was no turning back for anyone, and he would have not only his own life but also the lives of his friends to be responsible for.

“Am I different from your other friends?” Kai asked.

“I'd be lying if I said no,” Jialin said, and explained that there had been some disagreement among his friends; he was vague in his explanation but Kai realized right away that it was not Jialin but his friends, whoever they were, who did not trust her. She wondered if he had spoken up for her in front of his friends, and if they had questioned him about how he had known her, to defend her. Her letters, read and then burned by him, would not be of any assistance, but even if he had kept them, she could not imagine his showing her letters to his friends. “They may not know you as well as I do,” Jialin said, apology in his eyes.

“And you won't help them get to know me better?”

He had to protect everyone, Jialin said, and it was his averted eyes, more than his words, that made Kai understand there was more than the simple unfriendliness of his cohorts that he was concealing.

“So if I went to the police to report on you, your friends would be spared, as I would not know who they are?” Kai asked.

“I'm protecting you too,” Jialin said. “Each one of us could be the one to sell out our friends.”

“Was it a decision agreed to by all your friends, for you to write to me?” Kai asked. “Or was there disagreement in the first place?”

It mattered little, Jialin said, now that he had let her down. But she wanted to know, Kai insisted. They had thought of finding someone in the government, Jialin said, but then the plan was determined to be immature.

“So you wrote to me on your own?”

Jialin looked away without replying.

“Why?” Kai asked.

Years ago he had seen her act as Autumn Jade, Jialin said finally, and he had always wondered since then what kind of person she was, whether she could put on a performance like that without having the purity and nobleness of a martyr in her heart. “You could've been a different person and I'd have been sitting out my sentence now. You could say I took a bet with myself, writing to you, because I wanted to know, but how I did not lose the bet I do not know. By pure chance, perhaps. I'd not have been surprised if it had turned out the other way,” Jialin said, trying to suppress the cough that threatened to overtake him at any moment.

So that was the history they had been avoiding all along, Kai thought, imagining Jialin as an audience, before his illness had taken over perhaps, before her marriage. That one's existence could extend beyond one's knowledge was not a new discovery; many times in the theater troupe Kai had received letters from her fans, some written under real or made-up names, others left unsigned. But the crossing of paths at a wrong time—too early or too late, and Kai could no longer tell which was the case in her encounter with Jialin— could not be understood. It was to be endured, as anything beyond one's control. Had she met Jialin not as a new mother but as an older woman, Kai thought, imagining the time when Ming-Ming would be a young man, she would perhaps be grateful for this encounter; she would even be free to choose again. But illness would soon be replaced by death on Jialin's part, before she was liberated by time; soon their paths would part.

“You must know I am not turning you away as a friend,” Jialin said gently.