Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

The woman smiled, her teeth very white and even. “How are you feeling, Teacher Gu?”

He did not reply. He realized that the woman was prettier than she intended to appear. “Who are you?” he asked, his tone unfriendly.

“This is Kai,” said Mrs. Gu, coming through the gate. “She reads the news.”

“Ah, of course it's you,” Teacher Gu said. It was impossible to forget her voice, which could easily be compared to a sunny autumn sky, a clear creek in the springtime, or any other empty similes that could be used to describe other female announcers, from the central radio stations to the provincial stations, all well chosen because of the lack of individual features in their voices. What a sad thing it was, to be someone who could so easily be replaced by another perfect, almost identical voice, Teacher Gu thought. What a tedious job it must be, to speak day in and day out words that were not one's own. But then what right did he have to despise her? For all he knew she might enjoy the fame this job brought her. “You have a nice voice,” Teacher Gu said. “Great for being the throat and tongue for the party.”

There was a small pause before Kai nodded hesitantly. Mrs. Gu studied both of them nervously and put a hand on Teacher Gu's arm. “You must be tired now. Why don't you have some lunch and take a nap?” She half supported and half pulled him into the house. He wiggled his arm, with more force than he had intended, to free himself.

Kai carried a pot of chicken stew to the table and asked Teacher Gu how the trip home had been for him. He did not answer. There was no space in his heart for small talk, neither with his wife nor with a stranger. While he had been lying in the hospital for two weeks, he had conducted many conversations with his first wife, sometimes arguing, other times agreeing with her; he wanted no one to interrupt them.

Mrs. Gu apologized to Kai in a low voice, saying the trip might have worn him out. Kai said it was not a problem at all, and in any case, she should be leaving to take care of a few things. Teacher Gu tried to return to his preoccupation, yet the young woman distracted him. He looked up and studied her face. “You were my student, weren't you?” he said all of a sudden, taking both Kai and Mrs. Gu by surprise.

“Kai did not grow up in Muddy River,” Mrs. Gu said, and explained that Kai had become an announcer after she left the theater troupe in the provincial capital.

Teacher Gu stared at Kai. She would make the bed in case he wanted a rest before lunch, Mrs. Gu said.

He had taught hundreds of students in the past thirty years; only lately had he begun to mix up their names and faces, yet, like any older person, the more forgetful he was in his recent life, the sharper his earlier memories became. “You were my student,” Teacher Gu said again.

Kai looked uneasy. “I was in your first-grade class for two months before I moved away,” Kai said.

“When was that?”

“Nineteen sixty.”

Teacher Gu squinted and calculated. “No, it was in 1959. You were in the same class as Shan.”

Mrs. Gu turned to Kai, who looked stricken, and for a moment no one spoke. Teacher Gu tried hard to recollect more about Kai, but all he saw was Shan, in his first-grade class in 1959, a skinny girl with two thin pigtails, the ends yellowed like scorched weeds, a malnourished child among the starved children in the famine that would last three years before losing its grip on the nation.

Mrs. Gu was the first to recover. She ladled stew into a bowl. “Kai brought the chicken and the chestnuts,” she said.

“Why did you change schools?” Teacher Gu asked.

“I was chosen and sent to the Children's Theater School,” Kai said.

Teacher Gu snorted. “I imagine you were well fed as a selected star, then,” he said. Something about this young woman annoyed him, her voice, her being the same age as Shan but with a secure job and an easy life, her intrusion into his home, her lying to his wife about not having met Shan. His own daughter, seven years old back then, had looked up at him with pleading eyes when he divided the meager food he had saved from his own ration for the children who came from bigger families and were hungrier than his daughter. Those children grew up to be the most dangerous youths, their minds as empty and eagerly receptive as their mouths, and they devoured anything fed to them, good and bad and evil. “Have you ever known hunger?” Teacher Gu said to Kai now, not covering his animosity.

“He who is in your house is a guest,” Mrs. Gu said, and he recognized the tone of disapproval. “You're not behaving like a good host today.”

“Teacher Gu must be tired now,” Kai said. “I'll come back later to talk to him.”

He did not answer either woman. He stumbled out of the chair and into the bedroom. The stove was burning well, and all of a sudden he was exhausted by the warmth. He listened to his wife apologizing to Kai, and Kai replying that of course she understood, and no, she did not mind it at all. Soon their conversation became inaudible. Teacher Gu looked at the clock on the wall. He wondered how long it would take his wife to remember her sick husband, made too hot and uncomfortable by the burning stove in the middle of a spring day.

Seven minutes Teacher Gu had counted on the clock when Mrs. Gu came in with the untouched bowl of stew. “You really should eat a little,” she said.

“Where's that woman?” he said.

“Her name is Kai,” Mrs. Gu said.

Teacher Gu struggled to drag himself into a sitting position. He was surprised that his wife did not hurry to help him.

“You were very unfriendly to her, as if she owed you something,” Mrs. Gu said.

“She lied to us. Why was she here?” Teacher Gu demanded. “She's a political tool for the government. What does she want from us?”

His wife stared at him with a quizzical look that reminded him of his rebellious daughter ten years earlier. “Didn't you teach your students to use their brains and not to jump to quick conclusions?”

So this was what he had come home for, Teacher Gu thought, an unpleasant wife who questioned his every word. “How long do you plan to remain this person that I don't think I've had the privilege of knowing before I went to the hospital? Do I deserve an explanation?” he said, raising his voice.

“The doctors said to remain calm,” she said.

“Never is there a calmer person than a dead one.”

His wife put the bowl on a stool next to the bed. He thought she would sit on the stool and feed him. When she did not, he made an effort to reach for the spoon even though he had no appetite.

“There's something you should know—we didn't tell you before because we thought your recovery was more important then,” Mrs. Gu said.

“Who are ‘we’?”

“Kai and I, and her friends. We're mobilizing the townspeople for a petition for Shan.”

The change in his wife—her eyes that were no longer directed downward when she spoke, her clear pronunciation of words beyond her vocabulary—alarmed Teacher Gu. In almost thirty years of being second-class citizens, and especially in the ten years since Shan's imprisonment, they, as a couple, had retreated to a cocoon they had woven together, a flimsy and claustrophobic shell that provided their only warmth; sometimes it was hard to tell where one self ended and the other began; they were the two fish that chose to live the rest of their lives in the same drying puddle—had all this been an illusion? Who was this woman in front of him, trusting young strangers with some crazy and meaningless idea about a protest that could never change his daughter's fate? The feeling of falling down, unable to grab onto something—the same feeling he had experienced when he was first ill—made his breathing difficult.