Yiyun Li - The Vagrants

A while later, Kai's mother entered with a look of panic and despair, and Han quickly wiped the corner of his mouth, his head aching dully. The police had just come and taken Kai away, she told Han. Please, could he help Kai, because he was the only one, now, who could save her.

RUMORS AND SPECULATION, born out of insufficient information and vivid imaginations, took hold in Muddy River on the morning after Ching Ming. People woke up to the seven o'clock news, read not by Kai but by a male colleague of hers. Two retired engineers, who took morning walks together, contemplated what could have happened. It might come down to a political earthquake now, they said to each other. Those who won the game would become kings, they said, citing the old saying, but neither ventured a guess about who would be the winners. The men had both escaped unscathed the various revolutions in their lifetimes. They had known each other for three years now, since meeting in the hospital morgue, two new widowers; in the twilight of their lives they found one another irreplaceable. They had discussed the situation on their daily walks in the past two weeks, each trusting the other as the only one with whom such sensitive matters could be voiced. Neither of them had any expectations, nor did they take a stand—at their age they considered the only role left for them to be theater spectators, and they took their seats and coolly watched from a distance. For every poor soul who was dragged down by this, the two wise men contemplated, there would be another one up for a promotion. A balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you'd have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.

Elsewhere, a woman commented to her husband at the breakfast table that the female announcer was in trouble. One could not tell merely from a changed schedule of her broadcast shifts, the husband argued, but the wife insisted that she herself had been the farsighted one; if not for her, he would have let himself be summoned by the woman's speech to the city square like a fool. The husband ate his dinner in silence, but this gesture was not enough to placate his wife, who, along with several of her close friends, despised the woman reading the news in her beautiful voice to their husbands, making them deaf to their wives’ domestic nagging. “I tell you,” she said now, her voice drowning out the announcer's report on the recordhigh revenue of the city of Muddy River for the first quarter. “I tell you, that woman is a nightmare for any man.”

In the emergency room of the city hospital, where no one was dying or being rushed in to die, a boy lay in the recovery room and his mother dozed by the bedside. The boy had taken part in a gang fight the night before and had his scalp cracked open by a brick. The doctor who had given him twenty-five stitches was off duty now, and her colleagues, two women who had both been at the rally the day before, stood by the window of the recovery room without talking. If it came to a crackdown, the one who had signed the petition thought to herself, she would divorce her husband so his promotion to head of hematology would not be affected; the other woman, more positive due to her optimistic nature in general as well as her decision not to sign the petition, believed that nothing serious would happen, because the law never punished the masses for going astray. No discussion occurred between the two colleagues, yet when they parted for their morning duties, one comforted the other with a pat on the shoulder, and all was understood.

Jialin leaned on his pillow. When his mother entered the shack with a late breakfast he did not move. She had forgotten the kettle of boiled water for the heater, but he did not ask. The night before, his three brothers had come home with blood on their hands and shirts. They had, in a gang fight, smashed a boy's head and, for the first time in their lives, understood the taste of fear. All night they couldn't sleep, taking turns looking out the gate for possible enemies coming with bats and bricks, or worse, policemen with handcuffs. Jialin's youngest brother, who had never talked much to him, came into the shack before daybreak, asking Jialin to take care of their parents if it reached a point where the three of them had to flee for a few years.

Jialin had thought the boy's dramatic behavior laughable but had not said so. Before the boy had entered, Jialin, with his transistor radio tuned to the Hong Kong station, had heard the news that in Beijing the secret police had started to carry out arrests.

“I heard people talk about yesterday's event in the marketplace,” Jialin's mother said, and put the food on the makeshift table made of an old tree stump.

“What did they say?”

“They said the government wouldn't let anyone get off so easily.”

Jialin did not move. “What else did they say?”

“They said the woman announcer is married to an important figure so there's no need for her to worry,” Jialin's mother said, and then glanced at him. “You were with them, weren't you?”

Jialin had always told his family that his friends came to read books with him, but he knew that his mother could easily have guessed the connection. “Other things? What else did people say?”

“They said she must be using the rally to become famous,” Jialin's mother said. “But I don't understand. She's already famous. Why did she need to become more famous?”

“Don't listen to rumors,” said Jialin. “People think they know more than they do.”

“So were you one of them?”

“Yes.”

Jialin's mother did not speak, and after a while, he looked at her and saw her quietly wiping her eyes.

“Mama, don't worry,” he said. “Nothing has happened, and people are just indulging their imaginations.”

“There must not be a heaven above us,” Jialin's mother said, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her blouse. “Or else, why were you given a brain only to get sick, while your brothers are healthy and strong but empty-headed?”

“They'll learn their lesson.”

“How about you? I can't afford to lose you,” Jialin's mother said, and tears dampened the front of her blouse.

Jialin smiled. It was no secret that he would die soon. What mattered to him was how he left this world. His mother wanted him to die in her arms; she wanted him to belong to her, and her only.

“Do you think there'll be trouble? People say different things and I don't know whom I should believe.”

“Listen to nothing and believe no one,” Jialin said.

“What will happen to you?”

Jialin shook his head. Perhaps it was only a matter of days, or hours, before someone would come into his shack and break his mother's heart, but he did not want to share this knowledge with her. “Think about it, Mama, I wasn't meant to live forever.”

Jialin's mother turned her head away.

“There's nothing to be sad about,” Jialin said. “Thirty years from now—no, let's hope it's not that long. Ten years, or five years, from now, they will come to your door and say to you that your son Jialin was a hero, a pioneer, a man of foresight and courage.”

“I would rather you were as unambitious as your brothers.”

“They'll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?”

“I would rather you had never touched a book in your life. I wish I had never stolen a book for you.”

“That's a stupid way of thinking, Mama,” Jialin said, shocked by his own vehemence. After a bout of coughing, he said in a gentle voice, “What else can I leave for you, Mama? I can't give you grandchildren.”