The Vagrants

Jialin was a son from a previous marriage that had ended with a drowning accident; her first husband, a strong man who had grown up near the sea, had dived into the Muddy River and broken his neck, three months before Jialin's birth. A son who came to claim his own father's life, people said when they came to her with marriage offers and advice to give up the baby for adoption. She did not want to hear this nonsense, and waited for ten years before remarrying, but sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake. Had Jialin been taken in by another couple, perhaps he would have had a different life, free of illness and unhappiness, neither of which she understood. Jialin was thirty-two, old for a marriage, too young for death. She would never see him get married to a woman but she would live to see him die. She took a deep breath but tears no longer came to her eyes. She did not know where he had contracted tuberculosis, just as she did not know where his bookishness came from; his own father, like her present husband, was a man without much education. Her three other sons were all robust, rude, boisterous—each a younger version of their father, who worked as a laborer at the loading station. Jialin was different, as if he had come from a different breed, not the son of her first husband but of a kind, graceful man of knowledge. Such a thought sometimes occurred to her, too strange to articulate even to herself.

Jialin's mother had once dreamed about another man, when she had been a new wife and attended a class for illiterate women set up by Teacher Gu. She had been married less than a year. Already her husband had caused her all the pain a man could inflict on a wife. Teacher Gu was the gentlest man she had ever met, his eyes sad behind black-rimmed glasses, his shirt and trousers impeccably clean. She noticed his fingernails, kept neatly short, when he showed her the right way to grip the pencil, and the image made her blush afterward when she lay awake next to her snoring husband. She was disappointed when she heard that Teacher Gu was going to marry one of her classmates, a landlord's concubine, a used woman with a small heart-shaped face, and it was the indignity she felt, as much as her pregnancy, that stopped her from attending the classes. Over the years she caught sight of Teacher Gu in town, quiet and melancholy, as she remembered him. He did not recognize her, but the fact that she could see him from afar was strangely comforting. She imagined how the old man would feel, losing a daughter at gunpoint; even Teacher Gu's wife, once the object of her secret envy, was forgiven now because, after all, a son was what Teacher Gu needed but she had given him just a counterrevolutionary daughter. If only he had a son like Jialin, who, with his pale complexion and the unhealthy blush on his cheeks, was as sad a man as she remembered Teacher Gu to be. They would understand each other, she thought for a long moment, and shook her head. She carried the food to the dining table and sat down next to her husband. Jialin would die a young man; what kind of solace would he be as a son to Teacher Gu? They had kept him in the sanitarium for some time but he had shown little hope of recovering. There was no point in wasting money on him, when the three younger boys seemed to be outgrowing their clothes overnight; she didn't need her husband to remind her of this, before she agreed to take Jialin home. Her husband had built a shack in the yard for Jialin, and it was expected, though not said, that Jialin would spend the rest of his days there.

TEACHER GU LEFT HOME after breakfast, avoiding the eyes of the neighbors who were walking or riding bicycles to their work units. A few students from his school shouted out greetings to him. He nodded, unable to tell if there was a difference in their attitudes toward him. Would their parents tell them about his daughter? He wondered what the children would think of him when he returned to his lectern the next day, teaching the same lessons from which his own daughter had gone astray.