The Vagrants

She had changed her mind, Mrs. Gu said, and she looked for her coat; she could not let a stranger send off her daughter.

“It's too late,” Teacher Gu said. “It's over now.”

“I want to see her one last time.”

Teacher Gu did not speak. For the past ten years, he had visited Shan only twice, at the beginning of her sentence and right before the retrial. The first time he had gone with his wife, and they had both been hopeful despite the fact that Shan had been given a ten-year sentence. Shan was eighteen then, still a child. Ten years were not hard to go through, he said to his wife and daughter, just a small fraction of one's long life. Things could be worse, he told them.

Shan was sneering the entire time that he spoke. Afterward she said, “Baba, doesn't it make you tired to talk about things you yourself don't even believe in?”

“I believe in good patience,” replied Teacher Gu. It did not surprise him that his daughter behaved this way toward him. The arrest had come as a shock for Teacher Gu and his wife; they had thought of their daughter as a revolutionary youth. Only later did they learn that Shan had written a letter to her boyfriend and expressed doubts about Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution. Teacher Gu and his wife had not known she had a boyfriend. He would have warned Shan had he been told about the man; he would have said—once and again, even if she did not listen—that betrayals often came from the most intimate and beloved people in one's life. He would have demanded that she bring the boyfriend to meet them. But would they have been able to make a difference? The boyfriend turned the letter in to the city Revolution Committee. Shan got a ten-year sentence and her boyfriend was awarded the privilege of joining the army, even though his background—a family of capitalists and counterrevolutionaries—had not been good enough for him to enlist.

People were the most dangerous animals in the world, Teacher Gu thought of telling his daughter during that visit ten years ago; stay small and unimportant, like a grain of dust, he thought of advising her, but before he had the chance, his daughter refused to stay in the room and signaled for the guards to take her away.

Teacher Gu had not visited his daughter after that. His wife had gone but only once or twice a year. She had worried that too many visits would harm Shan's record and add more time to her term. They rarely talked about their daughter, each in secret hoping that ten years would somehow pass without any incidents. What came at the end of the term, however, was a notice saying that Shan would receive a retrial—she had been unrepentant in prison and had written, year after year, letters of appeal for herself, and personal journals that contained the most evil slanders of Communism.

At the weekly meeting at his school, the party secretary asked Teacher Gu to share his thoughts on his daughter's upcoming retrial. He had nothing to say, Teacher Gu answered, and all the party members shook their heads at him in disappointment. “Let me tell you what I think, since you have nothing to say,” said the party secretary. “Last time your daughter was sentenced for her slander of our Communist cause. She was young and educable then, and was given this chance to correct her wrong notion. But what happened? She didn't take the opportunity. She not only refused to reclaim her love and trust for our party and our Communist cause, she also argued against us from the most counterrevolutionary point of view. That,” the secretary said, his index and middle fingers pointing at Teacher Gu, “will never be tolerated.”

Teacher Gu did not tell his wife about the meeting. Such a meeting must have taken place in her work unit too, and a similar message conveyed. He heard her weeping sometimes at night. When he tried to comfort her, she acted cheerful and said that they should not worry too much. Shan was still a young woman, she said, and she had already spent ten years in prison; the judge would be lenient and the retrial would be only a form of warning.