In Praise of Nonconformity: Vagrants, Misfits, Rebels, and Liumang

The Vagrants: A Novel by Li Yiyun

I've just finished reading The Vagrants: A Novel by Li Yiyun.

Now the first thing I'll say is that everyone should read everything Li Yiyun writes. I particularly like the stories in the collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

A couple of things about The Vagrants struck me particularly.

One is that this novel is gives a very realistic account of people in China being swept up in all kinds of different ways in a political campaign. I've read a lot of fiction from China that deals with this issue, but I've never read anything that does so while also conveying the feeling of private life and inner life so convincingly.

Another -- and this is what inspired this blog post -- is that I found myself taken with the central character -- a boy named Bashi -- despite the fact that he is an odd duck . . . a nuisance . . . and potentially worse. (Bashi isn't the only "vagrant" in Li's novel.  In fact, just about everybody who is described has broken free of the moorings of that crushing social system, or nearly so.)

I kept thinking to myself, "This Bashi is just like all those odd boys in Flannery O'Connor novels and stories -- the abrasive Enoch Emery in Wise Blood, the stuck-in-his-ways Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away." Those were characters who made me more and more anxious with each page I read, because they not only had wacky ideas, but they were living them out. I read a lot of O'Connor in college, and wrote quite a bit about her works, and it's only just now becoming clear to me what I really felt as I was doing it.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

These characters often cross the line from "different" to "criminal." (As I said, anyone reading The Vagrants will wonder when Bashi is going to do something really awful.)  After all, Flannery O'Connor didn't just subject me to Enoch Emery and Francis Tarwater, she also made me witness the sadism of "The Misfit" (in "A Good Man is Hard to Find").

Thinking about this has put me in mind of one of my favorite films, City of Sadness. In it, the patriarch of a Taiwanese family describes how his family were always liumang -- operating at cross-purposes with the authority being imposed by the Japanese occupiers in the first half of the 20th century, or by the officials sent by the central Chinese government before that -- in short, anyone who tried to tell them what to do.  Liumang is common Chinese vocabulary word, which we students were taught meant something along the line of "juvenile delinquents" or "bad apples," and in etymology it has some of that flavor of "unmoored." But it was the pride with which the old man in described his family's traditional liumang status that made me thing of it as something to valorize.

The film's subtitiles translate liumang as "gangsters." Take two minutes to click on the City of Sadness trailer above, and see what it feels like to you. Yes, there is a definite element of racketeering. But there's also a feeling of simple, youthful, impulsive, bad behavior. Sort of The Godfather meets Rebel Without a Cause. meets Rome, Open City. (More about this aspect of City of Sadness here.)

I guess the lesson for me in all of this is that we need vagrants, misfits, rebels, and liumang. And that while anxiety is worth noticing, that's not the same as saying it's undesirable, or should be shunned.

So: here's to nonconformity! And to the anxiety it creates . . . .


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