Born in China, Yiyun Li currently lives in Oakland, California. This is her first novel, though she previously published a prize-winning book of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers ( ).
The Story: Following the death of Mao Zedong, many young Chinese who had eagerly embraced his Cultural Revolution became caught up in a dangerous game of denunciations. Some teenagers who were called on to participate in the revolution committed terrible acts and were later jailed, ironically, as counterrevolutionaries. One young woman, Gu Shan, faces death as a result this pattern. But she has no voice in this novel; indeed, before her public execution in the fictional town of Muddy River, her vocal chords have been severed. Instead, the book tells the stories of those who will witness her death: her parents; a girl whose life was severely altered by Gu’s actions; and Kai, a childhood friend whose life took a very different course. While each character is affected by the spectacular execution, it is the efforts of Kai to memorialize her friend that ultimately reconcile these stories with the overall trajectory of dissent in China.
Random House. 337 pages. $25. ISBN: 1400063132
Chicago Tribune
"Every character is vivid, engaging and yet somehow indescribable outside the world of Muddy River, where even dusty sparrows hunched on the smoky rooftops seem inured to the possibility of flight. In this most amazing first novel, Yiyun Li has found a way to combine the jeweled precision of her short-story-writer’s gaze with a spellbinding vision of the power of the human spirit to not only survive near-annihilation, but to open up a space in the devastation for some kind of healing." Conan Putnam
Independent (UK)
"With its controlled understatement and scrupulous and unsparing lucidity, The Vagrants is a work of great moral poise and dignity. … As a chronicle of political betrayal under a modern dictatorship, The Vagrants is a minor classic; I have not read such a compelling work in years." Ian Thomson
Denver Post
"The Vagrants is a stunning debut novel, bleak in its clarity about life in the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution. … It is the emotions of the characters—the grief of the parents for the child they lost long ago, Kai’s longing for something more important than her life, Nini’s and Bashi’s outcast loneliness, even Tong’s search for his lost dog—that make the story powerful." Robin Vidimos
Guardian (UK)
"Li’s characters, with a few exceptions, are marginal people with little access to officialdom. The execution and its consequences are largely seen from their perspective—that of people for whom the state is something to be placated rather than discussed—and the novel concentrates on the unexpected ways in which the political and the personal intersect." Christopher Tayler
New York Times
"Ms. Li presents a desolate yet fully transporting vision of China in the turmoil of the late 1970s, still reeling from the death of Mao Zedong and clinging to unclear measures of political rectitude and very clear methods of political corruption. She skillfully encapsulates this larger vision into the monstrous, Sino-Dickensian details of Muddy River’s dysfunctional family life." Janet Maslin
San Francisco Chronicle
"A meditation on fate, causality and suffering, The Vagrants is not for the fainthearted." Joan Frank
Washington Post
"[Li] doesn’t condemn or condescend to a single soul here, just makes us see how nerve-racking and soul-killing it must be to live in a despotic nation run by a lot of very high-strung people. For readers who love complex novels about worlds we scarcely understand, The Vagrants will be a revelation." Carolyn See
Critical Summary
Reviewers were clearly impressed by The Vagrants, especially noteworthy because it is Li’s first novel. They valued its memorable and nuanced characters, its simultaneous severity and humor, and the way Li creates moral ambiguity without diminishing the bravery and sacrifice of Chinese dissidents. The only complaint was that Li’s portrayal of the misery of Muddy River can be somewhat overwhelming; readers "may grow numbed, or more strangely (and disturbingly), inured under its assault" (San Francisco Chronicle). But even that reviewer compared The Vagrants to some of the great Western works that explore the absurdity of rituals of persecution, suggesting that this novel has a power that easily transcends its particular time and place.