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When I grew up in Beijing, in a two-bedroom flat shared by my parents, my grandfather, my sister, and me, the only good piece of furniture we had was a hardwood wardrobe, which my grandfather had purchased for my parents when they got married. The wardrobe was painted deep red, and on both doors were golden characters in the most elegant calligraphy.

I was an early and a late reader at the same time – early meaning I had begun, around three, assigned sound and meaning to each of the characters on the wardrobe, and depending on the days and my mood the characters would together form different messages; late being that only when I turned seven did I realize that the words on the wardrobe was a quote of Chairman Mao, calling all Chinese people to take on the glorious task of liberating the repressed working class around the world.
Once I knew the exact meanings of the words on the wardrobe, I lost interest in them and turned my attention to the outside world, though at the time the world offered little for a hungry mind – I would be 13 before I was allowed into a library; there were not many books nor magazines for a child to read but for the Communist Young Pioneers’ Weekly; on my parents’ bookcases there were old translations of Russian and Soviet novels, but the long and incomprehensible names of the characters intimidated me, and I did not pursue them until much later.

The execution announcements thus came as a much needed education. From late 1970s to early 1980s, there was a surge of executions across the nation, and every month several new announcements would cover the old ones from the previous month at the entrance to our residence compound. I read the announcements – with trepidation at first, fearing the grownups’ disapproval, but when my mother would read along with me on our walks to the nearby marketplace I knew I could return to the announcements and reread them as many times as I wanted. I soon accumulated legal vocabularies such as counterrevolutionary hooliganism. Oftentimes, apart from the basic information about a criminal – name, sex, birth date and place, verdict – there would be a small paragraph of narrative about the crime, offering barely enough details for a child’s mind to run wild with imagination. To this day I remember distinctly a few cases: in one, two brothers seduced newly-wed women to have sex with the promise of watching imported movies from the west because they considered it a less crime than seducing a virgin; in another, a teenager robbed a fruit peddler his day of learning; and yet in another a group of young men and women were caught having parties where they learned yao-bai-wu – the Chinese translation for swing dance, which had become a sign of new hooliganism under western influence.

I spent the years between eight and 11 reading the announcements until they became less frequent in mid 1980s. Still, the huge checks in red ink – a sign for immediate execution – covering the black words on white paper, the golden national emblem on the announcements, and the official signatures stayed with me, and much later, when I became a writer, I would go back to the memory. Many of the death sentences, in retrospect, were unfortunate products of the era. It is a writer’s job then, to re-imagine what was not given in those death announcements, just as once I had assigned meanings and interpretations to the Chairman Mao’s message on our wardrobe: it was awareness that lives and stories of real people could not be summarized into one paragraph on an execution announcement, along with other memories, that began my journey to write The Vagrants.

Further reading...

The Vagrants
by Yiyun Li
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Meet the rest of Waterstone’s New Voices 2009: Matthew Plampin, Jenn Ashworth, Patrick deWitt. Francesca Kay, Amanda Smyth, Catherine Hall, Dave Boling, Richard Millward, Mari Strachan. Janice Lee, Anthony Quinn and Yiyun Li

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