They were at the mercy of strangers, as always.Li provides a look at a host of little people, tiny (meaningless) in their ant-like travails against the machine of the masses or the public (fate). Great crowds of people eager like panting dogs to scent the wind and see which way it will blow that they too might turn with it and not stick out--this is a crushing force, a force that grinds down our humanity, a force that is the source of much pain and misery. But it is also one of the most primal human forces. We wouldn't be human if we weren't part of the masses. In isolation a human becomes something different.
He saw the joy of being able to read, in his wife’s eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students—his wife and his daughter—had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn’t been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses.
And idiocy seemed to be one of the rare crimes for which one could never get enough punishment. A robber or a thief got a sentence for a year or more for a crime, but the tag of idiot, just as counterrevolutionary, was a charge against someone’s very being, and for that reason Bashi did not like his fellow townsfolk.
The city came to life in the boy’s baffled gaze, some people more prepared than others for this important day. A fourth grader found to her horror that her silk Young Pioneer’s kerchief had been ripped by her little brother, who had bound it around his cat’s paw and played tug-of-war with the cat. Her mother tried to comfort her—didn’t she have a spare cotton one, her mother asked, and even if she wore the silk kerchief, nobody would notice the small tear—but nothing could stop the girl’s howling. How could they expect her, a captain of the Communist Young Pioneers in her class, to wear a plain cotton kerchief or a ripped one? The girl cried until it became clear that her tears would only make her look worse for the day; for the first time in her life, she felt its immense worthlessness, when a cat’s small paw could destroy the grandest dream.
But Li follows a tale of a city through a host of these little people, blown by the winds. No one of them is particularly heroic or good or holy or evil or anything other than strikingly like the people we know: capable of good and evil, often times surprising and rarely as box-like as we would imagine. She places before us the challenge of truly comprehending another's pain. It is one thing to recognize that the whole world is a mass of suffering wounds, that all of us are in the same boat, bearing pain and cuts and bruises from our tumble through this life--truly this is hard enough to actually recognize and know within ourselves. But how much more difficult is it to comprehend a fellow being's pain? That is something that few people attain. The Vagrants come close sometimes to revealing moments where two wounded souls recognize the shape of the cuts on those next to them. For the most part though, it is a sad tale of people missing each other's pain completely for the pain of their own wounds. It's a sad story, I won't lie. But not a dark story. There is something good glowing inside it.
Respect must be shown to Li also for her choice of epigraph. Li could not have chosen better than the sixth stanza of T H Auden's "The Shield of Achilles."
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
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