Dibs

Well, The Vagrants, the long-awaited new novel by mega-mondo-multi-award-winning author Yiyun Li, has finally arrived. Li, who now lives in California, was born in Beijing in 1972, so she grew up during the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution and saw much of its aftermath. Thus this novel, uh, doesn’t make communism look good. At all. It begins as a young woman is about to be executed — on “a date as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary.” Her vocal cords have been severed to keep her from shouting. A jostling crowd watches her public “denunciation ceremony.” She is shot, and her father is billed for the bullet. Other gruesome inhumanities fill these pages in which, as one character sagely notes, “People [are] the most dangerous animals in the world.” … Thank you, Li, for telling the truth about a time and place where millions experienced true hell on earth.