The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Author:Yiyun Li
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

FOR TONG, spring this year had started on March 21, the day of the equinox, when he had seen the first swallow coming back from the south and had noted it in his nature journal. Swallows were the messengers of spring, Old Hua said; they were the most nostalgic and loyal birds, coming back year after year to their old nests. But that meant they would never get a family of swallows to live under their roof, Tong worried aloud, because there was no nest there. In that case, Old Hua said, they had to wait for a young couple who would not return to their parents but would make a new home of their own.

The next day, Tong saw a flock of geese flying across the sunny afternoon sky, the head goose pointing north. Like swallows, geese never mistook where they were flying to, Old Hua said, but when Tong asked him why they never got lost, the only answer Old Hua had was that they were born that way.

Every afternoon after school, Tong went to the city square, where the day's newspapers were displayed in glass cases. There were more than a dozen to choose from, newspapers printed both in Beijing and in the provincial capital, but for Tong, the most important one was Muddy River Daily, from which he copied the temperatures of the local weather forecast into his journal. Tong had read, in an outdated copy of Children's Quarterly, that Old Hua had found a few weeks earlier, about a boy who had for years recorded temperatures three times a day in a nature journal. The year the boy turned thirteen, he noticed a change in the temperature pattern and successfully predicted an earthquake, earning him the title of “Science Hero” for saving people's lives. The story did not say what kind of change the boy had noticed, leaving Tong to construct his own theory about that, but the article showed him a new way to become a hero. His parents, of course, would say they did not have money idling in their pocket for a thermometer, so Tong did not ask. Instead, he decided to use the local newspaper. When Old Hua heard about the nature journal, he wondered why anyone needed to rely on the numbers at all, when one's own skin was the best way to detect minute changes in the air temperature. Tong did not tell the old man of his plan, holding on to the secret and hoping that one day Muddy River would thank him for his vigilance.

According to the weather forecast, the temperature had climbed above the freezing point on March 22, the day after the denunciation ceremony, and the wind in the midafternoon no longer felt like a razor on one's face. Children left school bareheaded, some throwing their hats high into the sky and then catching them as they fell. Ear came home in the evening with a girl's pink mitten, a hole in the tip of

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