The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li and UFO in Her Eyes, by Xiaolu Guo

A recent film adaptation of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li’s acclaimed book of short stories, can be found in Shanghai DVD stores for about $1.50. The plot synopsis on the packaging, presumably taken from a casual internet review, reads, “This movie felt like it lasted over 1,000 years. ... There is not one genuine moment in its bloated running time.”

Such a gaffe—on a blatantly and badly pirated DVD sold against Chinese laws—is a byproduct of China’s increasingly pervious, or at least more strategically positioned, censorship wall. Yiyun Li’s latest work, a novel, takes place when oppression in China was far cruder: 1979, just a few years after the Cultural Revolution.

The Vagrants is a catalogue of genuine moments of despair and desperation set in Muddy River, a young city of 80,000. It opens with Gu Shan’s parents waiting for her to be put to death as a counterrevolutionary. In a nearby alley, a famished peasant girl named Nini eats the flour paste off the back of a freshly posted execution notice.

When rumors of a “democratic wall,” a sort of pre-internet bulletin board on which people in Beijing have been posting political messages, arrive in Muddy River, a few citizens, including beautiful newsreader Kai, are emboldened to stage a protest demanding an investigation into Gu Shan’s death.

Li steps nimbly in and out of her many characters’ minds, giving distinct voices to, for example, an elderly street sweeper, a patriotic schoolboy, and a jaded intellectual. At times she follows the ramification ripples of Gu’s execution into the heads of characters who exist for just one paragraph, like the prison guard who has nightmares after holding Gu down while her vocal cords were cut, or the surgeon who harvested her kidneys and tries to reassure himself that she had to die anyway.

The novel’s unblinking eye for tragedy—Gu’s parents are even asked to pay the Government 24 cents for the bullet used to kill her—occasionally falls on moments of dark humour. Much of this comes from Bashi, a callous and sardonic 19-year-old who lives off the state, and acts like a trust fund baby, thanks to his dead father, a war hero. At one point, Bashi encounters an old woman buying fake money, which Chinese superstition allows can be spent in the afterlife, to burn for her dead husband. Bashi cautions her, "Maybe he uses your money to buy a woman out there?"

For the most part, however, the novel is tense, with political power hanging in the balance. As Kai’s loyal-communist husband Han says, “It’s the same old truth—the one who robs and succeeds will become the king, and the one who tries to rob and fails will be called a criminal.”

The success of The Vagrants lies in Li’s empathetic reach, which carries as easily to those who wittingly and unwittingly become the brutal political ‘kings’ as those who lose their loves, careers and lives as criminals.

Xiaolu Guo’s novel UFO in Her Eyes is also set in a small Chinese town, but it leaves the all too recent past for the imminent future.

On September 11, 2012, Kwok Yun sees an “enormous metal plate” flying over the rice fields outside Silver Hill Village. Three days later agents Hunan 1989 and Beijing 1919—good cop and bad cop respectively—arrive to investigate the UFO sighting.

Like much of China, the small Hunan village has yet to witness the development seen in major Chinese cities. Villagers tell the investigators that they have often had to “eat bitterness,” even enduring a “Man eats Man” incident during the famine brought on by the Great Leap Forward.

Silver Hill modernises rapidly, however, when village chief Chang leverages the UFO incident to petition the Government for funding. The village booms as a tourist destination—China’s Roswell—but not everyone is pleased with the development, and the harmony that the Chinese Government so cherishes becomes threatened.

UFO in Her Eyes is written as a case file, the literary equivalent of the classified US Military footage that makes up 2008 Godzilla flick Cloverfield. It is composed almost entirely of transcripts of the agents’ interviews with locals, supplemented with letters, emails and the odd sketch.

The novel thus reads like a screenplay written in the very plain language of the no-nonsense agents and the simple, often crude villagers. As well as bemoaning “Bitch Bastard” change, Guo’s characters give it context through mentions of major events in China’s past, some of them conspicuously expository.

The novel works better as parable than sci fi realism. Silver Hill’s development is synecdoche for China’s, a connection Guo develops by imbuing arbitrary numbers with historical significance. The agents’ names, for instance, are the dates of two popular uprisings in Chinese history: the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (1989).

It is also, of course, no coincidence that the UFO is sighted on September 11. In addition to displacing workers and polluting the skies, the modernisation of Silver Village—from which, incredibly, almost no-one seems to benefit—brings with it closer monitoring, hinting at the greater scrutiny that US citizens came under after the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers.

Xialu Guo has inadvertently made her case against monitoring and censorship in another way. Although it shows up on a Google search, her website www.guoxiaolu.com cannot be accessed here in China.