Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

“Why do you want to take him home?” The hedgehog looked dead in the young man's arms, though Tong knew better than to worry.

“Because I need a pet. You have a dog named Ear, don't you?”

“Have you seen him today? I'm looking for him,” Tong said.

Bashi looked at Tong with a strange smile. He wondered how fast the boy who had killed Ear walked. By now he must be past the city boundary. “He may be running somewhere with his girlfriend now,” said Bashi.

“He doesn't have a girlfriend,” Tong said.

“How do you know?” Bashi said with a grin that made Tong uneasy. Tong decided not to talk to the man. He turned to walk away but Bashi caught up with him, holding the hedgehog in the cup of his two hands. “I'm teaching you a lesson. Sometimes you think your dog is your best friend but you may be wrong. For instance, all of a sudden he may decide to go home with someone else.”

“He won't,” Tong said, a little angry.

“How do you know?”

“Of course I know. He's my dog.”

Bashi said nothing and whistled. After a while, Tong said, “Why are you following me?”

“You're going back to town, and I am too. So how come it is not you who's following me?”

Tong stopped, and the man did too. Tong turned and walked back toward the river and Bashi turned, walking side by side with the boy.

“Now you're following me,” Tong said.

“It just so happened that I changed my mind and decided to go in that direction too,” Bashi said, and winked.

Tong flushed with anger. What a shameless grown-up; even a five-year-old would know more of the rules of the world. “I don't want to walk with you,” Tong said. “Stop following me.”

“I want to walk with you,” said Bashi, affecting a child's voice. “There's no law that says I can't walk with you.”

“But you don't follow people if they tell you they don't want to play with you,” Tong said with exasperation.

“Whose rule is that? You don't own this road, do you? So I can put my feet wherever I want on this road, no? If I like, I can follow you anywhere, as long as I don't go into your house.”

Tong was in tears, speechless. He had never met a person like the man in front of him, and he didn't know how to reason with him. Bashi looked at Tong's tears with great interest and then smiled. “Okay, now I don't want to play with you anymore,” he said, still in a little boy's voice. He walked away, throwing the hedgehog up like a ball and catching it with gloved hands. A few times he missed and the hedgehog rolled onto the road, which made him laugh.

Ear didn't return by dinnertime. When Tong mentioned this absence to his parents, his father, who slumped in the only armchair and looked at the wall, where there was nothing to see, said dully, “He'll come home when he will.”

It was useless to talk with his father about anything before dinner—for him, it was the most important meal and nothing, not even a falling sky, could disturb him while he waited for it. Tong's mother glanced at him with sympathy but said nothing. She put dinner on the table and brought out a bottle of rice liquor. Tong took the bottle from her and poured some of the liquor into a porcelain cup. When his father was drunk and asleep, he would beg his mother for help.

Tong carried the cup with both hands to his father. “Dinner is ready, Baba.”

Tong's father accepted the cup and tapped on Tong's head with his knuckles. It hurt but Tong tried not to let it show. “It's better raising a boy than a dog,” his father said, his way of showing his approval of Tong. He moved to the table and downed the cup. “Now pour me another one, Son.”

Tong did and his father asked him if he wanted to try some. His mother intervened halfheartedly, but his father wouldn't listen. “Try once,” he urged Tong. “You're old enough. When I was your age, I smoked and drank with my father every night,” he said, and he struck the table with his fist. “My father—your grandfather—wasn't he a real man? I tell you, Son, don't ever do anything less than he did.”

Tong's paternal grandfather was, according to his father's drunken tales, a local legend, with a firecracker temper, ready to fight anyone over the slightest injustice. He had died in 1951, in his late forties. The story was that he had had a big fight defending his fellow villagers against a party official, sent down to supervise the process of turning private land into a collective commune. He had beaten the official half to death; the next day he had been arrested and executed on the spot as an enemy of the new Communist nation.

Tong's mother scooped some fried peanuts onto his father's plate. “Don't drink on an empty stomach,” she said.

Tong's father ignored her. He poured himself another cup and pointed his chopsticks at Tong. “Listen, your grandfather was a real man. Your father is nothing less. You'd better not disappoint us. Now move here next to me.”

Tong hesitated. He did not like his father's breath and his intimate gestures when he was drunk, but his mother moved his chair, with him in it, before he could protest. His father put a hand on Tong's shoulder and said, “Let me tell you this story, and you'll know how a man was made. Have you heard of Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han dynasty? Before he became an emperor, he had to fight many years with Xiang Yu, his toughest enemy. Once, Xiang Yu caught Liu Bang's grandparents, his mother, and his wife. He brought them to the battlefield and sent a messenger to Liu Bang. If you don't surrender this very moment, I'll cook them into meat paste and my soldiers will have a feast tonight. Guess what Liu Bang said? Ah, wasn't he the hero of all heroes! He wrote back to Xiang Yu, Thank you for letting me know about the banquet. Would you be a good and generous person and send me, your hungry enemy, a bowl of the meat paste? Think about that, Son. If your heart is hard enough to eat your mother and your wife, nothing can beat you in life.”

Tong looked at his mother, on the other side of the table. She gave him a smile, and he tried to smile back. They were on their way, it seemed, to another night during which he and his mother would have to sit and listen to his father tell the same old stories; the dishes and the rice would be reheated a few times, until his father was finally too drunk to carry on with his tales, and eventually Tong and his mother would be permitted to eat.

Tong thought about Ear; his father said that love for a dog was a lowly thing to feel, and his only concern, when it came to Tong, seemed to be to make him into a manly man. Tong wondered if he would disappoint his father. If an enemy were to threaten him with his grandparents’ and his mother's lives, he would cry and beg, promising anything in exchange for their lives.

After several more rounds of drinking, Tong's father pushed his chair back and told his mother to get a brick—she kept a pile of bricks in the kitchen for him to demonstrate his kung-fu skills with, and she replenished the stock dutifully when it was running low. When she came back with a red brick, he shook his head and said it would be too easy; he needed a bigger, harder brick tonight. Hear that? he said, stretching his fingers and making cracking sounds with his knuckles. She replied that the red bricks were all they had, and wouldn't it work for him if she stacked two bricks. Tong's father lost his temper, calling her a brainless woman and ordering her to go out and borrow one from their neighbors, who were building an extra shack in their yard for a granduncle who had come to visit and decided not to leave.

When she returned with a heavy construction brick, six times as big as the red brick, Tong's father took it over and put another hand on her neck. “I could wring your neck with two fingers. Do you believe me?” he asked. She giggled and said of course, she had no doubt about it. He snorted with satisfaction and set down the brick in the middle of the yard.