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.

China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation, by Xinran

One of the few florists in Shanghai that doesn’t make bouquets out of dozens of small blue teddy bears lies in a small lane off Wukang Lu. As the sole employee prepared flowers for me one night recently I struck up a conversation with her boyfriend.

He was a student and hoped to marry the florist (who shook her head demurely at the idea) in a year or two when he graduated. He was young and ambitious and caught me altogether off guard when he said, “I think you have a better life than us.”

It would have been disingenuous to argue the point yet it’s a strange thing to consider. How do you weigh your lived life against the vague imaginings of another’s?

Xinran Xue attempts a similarly fraught comparison in her latest book, China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation. Which generation living in China today has had it best, and which has lived the worthiest lives?

Xinran puts these questions, among others, to 17 members of the generation of grandparents living in contemporary China, a group who have lived under a staggering range of social conditions. Many were born before the Japanese invaded in WWII, saw China ‘liberated’ by the Communist Party, endured the paranoia and destruction of the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, have seen their children and grandchildren embrace the admonition attributed to Deng Xiaoping, “to get rich is glorious.”

As young adults, many of the interviewees endured hardships that read like the unhappy beginnings of fairy tales. An acrobat named Yishujia, whose skills included juggling umbrellas with her feet, was so poor growing up that her family “couldn’t even afford soap, you had to wash clothes with a fistful of salt.” When attempts were made to populate China’s icy North West, Sun, one of the region’s first teachers, tells of sitting on her long plaits in the classroom to keep out the cold of her mud-clod chair.

Despite the deprivation and hardships they faced, most recall their youth with fondness and pride. Mrs You, one of China’s first oil prospectors, remembers working in the cold until her socks stuck to her skin and couldn’t be removed. Nevertheless, she says:

I feel a real nostalgia for our enthusiasm and cheerfulness under those conditions: we used to … start up a song on one mountain, and they’d pick up the tune on the next mountain.

Several claim their early efforts have given them boundless energy ever since and lament the failure of younger generations to display the same work ethic. The former acrobat shows Xinran some family pictures. “My son isn’t as handsome as his father. Can you see? He doesn’t have his father’s spirit … The child doesn’t have the spirit we did!”

Likewise, some prefer the social systems that were in place back in their day. Under Mao there was “not so much of a gap between rich and poor.” Also, they say, people were either too tired (before the Communist Revolution) or too frightened (during it) to commit crimes. In contrast, “a lot of people are sick with rage at the empty boasting, bribery and corruption we see nowadays.” While it’s difficult for Xinran to stomach, some tell her that “Mao did a better job.”

Xinran began her journalism career when a Communist Party transmitter used to muddy the reception of foreign radio shows was converted into a working Chinese radio station. She was chosen to host a late night radio show called “Words on the Night Breeze”, which formed the foundation of her first book, The Good Women of China.

Having thus honed her skills, Xinran approaches the interviews in China Witness like an expert interrogator, outlining her techniques for tackling her subjects’ caution and modesty. She doggedly pursues emotional responses, and one topic in particular consistently yields results. Tears fall almost reliably when Xinran raises the subject of her interviewees’ relationships with their children.

Like many Chinese now in their middle age, Mrs You’s kids were raised by their grandparents – concerns for family were seen as “petty bourgeois”, and the good of the country came first. Furthermore, her children were denied schooling when their father was ‘struggled against’ and imprisoned for having received training in the Soviet Union. “I want to make it up to them,” she says, “…and I don’t know if they’re grateful for what I’ve given up.”

There’s more to China Witness than this weighing of a generation’s merits and misdeeds. The book covers mammoth geographical and thematic ground. Xinran talks to a street-side shoe mender with two children in graduate school. She meets a retired prostitute from Nanjing who mocks current contraceptive methods, having put herbs in her clothes and burnt incense while bathing to stave off pregnancy. A man named Wu tells her how he became a professional news singer, and so on.

But again and again Xinran’s attempt to record the histories of a generation of Chinese hints at her need to understand her personal past. She doesn’t write about it in China witness, but Xinran didn’t meet her mother until she was five years old and when she did she called her “Ayi”, Auntie. Two weeks later, during the Cultural Revolution, her parents were arrested and imprisoned for 15 years. Thinking back on interviews with older Chinese who missed out on relationships with their children Xinran writes, “How many times have I dreamed that I was small again and my parents were making a fuss of their little girl…?”

China Witness is a sprawling collection of lives packed with historical curiosities. It’s also an ambitious, heartfelt attempt to better know the older generation as a means to celebrate their triumphs in tumultuous times and, where necessary, to forgive them.