Interview: Yiyun Li

James Kidd

"YIYUN LI  is known for her delicately sombre writing. But a spark of humor flashes through her new collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Striking a rare note of levity among its nine fictional pieces, House Fire tells of six middle-aged women, divorced or widowed, who have "declared war against love outside marriage". Their means is a special form of detective agency that investigates unfaithful husbands. The women (who call themselves "saviors of burning houses") become famous and successful. Then things start to fall apart. One day, a man called Dao asks the women to deduce whether his wife is having an affair with his father. Each woman reacts differently to this request; the jovial surface cracks, as does the women's solidarity.

Because this is a Yiyun Li story the women don't confront each other. Instead, they sense the undercurrents generated within the group by their private selves. Beneath the light-hearted surface, Li has fashioned a fable about the individual's unstable relationship with society - and about women's unstable relationships with one another in modern China. The story asks a question typical of Li's fiction: how do human beings navigate a path between their innermost selves (including their pasts and their desires) and the outside world? It is also typical that she offers no easy answers.

One of the most memorable lines in House Fire is: "Odd People at this Unique Time". In the story, it is a throwaway joke: the title of a fictitious gossip column in a magazine. But "Odd People at this Unique Time" could have its serious side: a fitting term, perhaps, if used to refer to Li's already impressive body of work. This comprises a novel, 2009's The vagrants, and two volumes of short stories: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and her 2005 debut, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Li's people are generally speaking "odd" - or at least gently at odds with mainstream Chinese society. From the start, her work has been populated by the lonely, the bereft, the dispossessed, the eccentric and the punished: the forgotten people of China. "My characters are often like extras from society," she tells me. "They wouldn't be leading characters in a mainstream narrative. I don't like flashy characters; mine tend to be older or lonelier. They mask themselves really well."

This attention paid to the outsider might seem contrived if it weren't for the nuances and simplicity of Li's prose, which establishes her protagonists with little straining after effect. Her characters are outsiders, but rarely exiles: they exist on the margins of society, not apart from it completely. Their masks see to that. True, The vagrants is driven by a young woman, Gu Shan, who is sentenced to death in 1979 as a counter-revolutionary and then executed, but she becomes the hub around which Li's dramatis personae orbit. Most of them are ordinary residents of the town of Muddy River: teachers, road sweepers, factory workers, and people who fall in love, struggle to survive, yearn for intimacy (or shrink from it) and try to live their lives. What they share is that they have been abandoned by lovers, family, work or, often, China itself Some find their masks slipping in the aftershock of Gu Shan's death; others need their masks more than ever.

She is part-way through a book tour behind Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. But just when she thought her promotional duties could not be any more intense, she was awarded one of this year's MacArthur "Genius" awards. Bestowed annually, MacArthur fellowships recognise "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits", rewarding them with grants of US $500,OOO, paid quarterly for five years.

Li emerges as someone defined by fundamental tensions, creative and personal. While her literary focus is almost exclusively on her birthplace, China, her literary career has been made almost entirely in the West. Li writes in English (her work has not even been translated into Chinese), even though she hardly spoke a word until she moved to Iowa in 1996, aged 24. She insists, moreover, that until she went to America the thought of writing fiction hadn't crossed her mind. "I was never a writer in China. I would never have thought about writing if I had stayed."

This negotiation between East and West has characterised most of Li's existence. Ask for her main literary influence and she names William Trevor. Ask what she read as a child and her first thought is to name classic works, not by Lu Xun, Mao Dun or Ba Jin, but from the English, American and European traditions: Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Hemingway and Tolstoy. Li detailed this youthful appreciation of such authors in another recent story, the autobiographical Kindness. "One reason to write it was to explore how literature started to grow in one person's life. I read these same authors, and also Hemingway, Jack London and Gone with the Wind."

With Li, stresses abound. She has attracted considerable admiration in the West: she writes regularly for The New Yorker; A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won The Guardian First Book Award; The Sunday Times compared her to Chekov and Tolstoy. Yet Li is also conscious that sections of this same audience see her as a spokeswoman of sorts, a conduit for explaining China. "Every time you write, you get readers who are right and wrong for you. Some people just want to read about China," she explains. "I think they will find themselves disappointed and a bit lost. It is really not my goal to present a vision of China. I don't feel any pressure to portray a whole picture. I am more interested in individual stories."

Li is an intensely private person whose career has thrust her into the limelight. While her work dips quietly below the surface to explore the inner truths of her characters, she keeps most questions about herself at a polite distance. When I ask what awoke her inner author, she claims to have no idea. "I can't explain it very well. It seems such a radical and illogical position. I think I just happened to be in a place and at a time in my life when I wanted to do something different. The something I chose was writing."

This measured elusiveness might reflect Li's unwillingness to analyses the mysterious operations of her imagination. If she does this at all, it is something she reserves for her writing. It is certainly a notion that crops up in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. In Kindness, a teacher (Professor Shan) declares:

"People who think they know their own stories do not appreciate other people's mysteries." In The Proprietress, the leading character, Mrs. Jin, speaks approvingly of "fear and reverence for what was beyond control ... in life".

At other times, Li simply seems wary of venturing an opinion, especially where politics are concerned. I ask her opinion of Liu Xiaobo's winning the Nobel Peace Prize. "Oh," she begins, sounding surprised at the question. "I have to say I didn't really read the news, I just saw the headlines. I can't make any comment until I understand everything. I really need some time off to think."

Li's reticence is understandable. Expatriate Chinese writers are often criticized for commenting on current affairs in their homeland from the distance of a foreign country. In 2008, Ma Jian published an article in The Guardian examining the power of the Chinese government, media and bloggers in combating dissent offered in the West: "Even in the West, anyone who speaks out of line is eventually compelled to toe the Communist Party line," he said.

As the comments page accompanying his think piece proved, Ma Jian was not exempt from criticism either. One reader noted: "Just the opinion of a writer who has moved from the mainland since 1986 and presumably has lost touch with the many changes there since then. I don't see why we should give much weight to his opinions." Another wrote: "The author clearly has an axe to grind with the Chinese government, and thus wrote this opinion piece."

Li's unwillingness to discuss politics implies a honed awareness of the potential pitfalls of making unguarded or researched comments. "I worry about it all the time. To me that is expected. Nothing surprises me, positive or negative, from China. It just confirms my expectations." I ask whether she feels she presents a critical vision of China. "I would say I present a dark image of life. I write about America and America is no brighter in my writing than China. And anyway, most writers don't present bright pictures of human nature to readers."

The roots of this artistic pessimism can be traced to her earliest years.

Li was born in Beijing in 1972. Her father was a physicist, her mother a teacher. The family lived in a compound reserved for scientists, especially those in the field of nuclear energy. Her father's choice of profession (highly confidential, intellectual but badly paid) goes some way to explaining defining traits of Li's childhood: secrecy, intelligence and want. She describes life in the compound as "secluded and secure", adding: "We know we were not as affected [by political events] as the rest of the country."

For Li's parents, the sense of protection was a welcome buffer against China's political instability. This was a delicate subject for the family: after Japan invaded China Li's grandfather joined the Kuomintang and later, with his two sons, fought against the Communists during the Civil War. Their choices had varying effects on the three men.

 

"One of my uncles went to Taiwan. He was gone for 40 years. The uncle who stayed in mainland China had a very hard life. Demotion after demotion." Li's grandfather escaped lightly by comparison. Although he had been born to capitalists (his parents ran a fabric shop) and was a self-proclaimed intellectual, his main punishment following the Communist victory was unemployment. Eventually taken on by a Beijing publisher, he may have been beaten down, but he was unbowed: he regularly referred to Mao as "the King of Hell" and Party officials as "gate-guarding devils" - comments that invited imprisonment. He took early retirement and moved in with Li's parents. In an article in The New Yorker, Li notes: "incredibly ... he survived the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution without once being beaten up by the Red Guards". While tens of thousands of perceived counter-revolutionaries were killed, Li's grandfather "lived a happy and healthy life".

Li learned the value of silent self-censorship. "It doesn't matter which country you come from, people keep their secrets. In China, people of my parents' generation kept their secrets for specific reasons. They wanted to stay safe and sound. They wanted to stay away from political turmoil."

As Li describes it, her childhood was content, but solitary and materially unsatisfying. "My family was neither rich nor poor. In the early 1980s everything was rationed - especially food. Ai; a child, you always felt that insufficiency of what life could provide you. We didn't have enough of anything, just like every family we knew." In Kindness, Professor Shan again shares some wisdom: "One's fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses." Li's fate - to experience China as if from afar - was sealed at an early age.

In the guarded atmosphere of semi-deprivation Li became introspective, restless and possessed of a "wild imagination" that she quickly learned to hide from the world: her first mask. She was an exile-in-waiting: "I was very private, which is hard growing up in China. People interpret you like you have some ugly secret to hide from them." Li credits compound life with being a significant influence on the intensity of her tales. "My stories are claustrophobic. When you live in a compound you live in each other's eyes. Everyone is watching you."

 

On a more practical level, Li's sensitivity to this constant surveillance was partly behind her desire to leave China as fast as she could. "By 11 or 12 I knew I wanted to leave China. People around me had emigrated to America. I knew fairly early on that was where I wanted to go."

Li had no realistic idea of what America was like. It simply meant freedom from family, from Beijing and from China. "It represented a future away from your parents. If you grew up in Beijing there was nowhere else to go apart from Shanghai. I wanted another world." The all-consuming desire to escape coloured Li's eventual decision to study immunology at Beijing University. The choice of subject was partly influenced by her parents; partly, it represented the means to her own ends. "It was my ticket to America. I didn't particularly love immunology. I could just do it very well."

Before Li began her degree, history intervened in the shape of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Li was 16. She recalls being locked inside the family apartment with her father while her mother went to see what was happening: she witnessed scenes of death and fear, including a mother holding her seven-year-old son, who had been shot and killed. "I was of course very angry, as everyone else my age was in Beijing. We were also shattered. That was the historical moment that made me a grown-up. It has a lot of influence on me and my generation. For my parents, it was the Cultural Revolution. For me, it was Tiananmen."

The most immediate consequence for Li was an enforced year in the People's Liberation Army: the government hoped to drive a wedge between the generation of student protesters and those that came after them. The defiant and angry Li was the perfect target. "As a teenager, I was very rebellious against the political reasons for being in the army." This is the experience Li fictionalized in Kindness. Narrated by Moyan, a 41-year-old teacher, the story recalls her youthful conscription and her gradual decision to cut herself off from love and other feelings.

"In retrospect, I am happy I had that experience," Li recalls. "But at the time it was not a happy experience. Being very private, the army was an extreme experience. I felt very uncomfortable. In the army there was a constant clash with the outside world."

As Kindness reveals, it was in the army that Li's love for classic literature matured. She had always been a precocious reader, diving into adult novels before she was in her teens. "I didn't grow up with children's books. From eight years old I read literature and fairly complex stories. To begin with, these comprised classic Russian and modern Soviet novels." Ironically for a writer often compared to Chekov, his were not among them. "He came much later. He is a little hard for children." Possibly, but Li's youth did not stop her loving Turgenev, Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky.

When I ask which home-grown authors she enjoyed, she says they were mainly poets. "From the age of three I would memories every poet taught to me," she says. "That practice lasted until my late teens." Shen Congwen was a preferred writer, as were the novelists who became prominent during the 1980s: Wang Meng, Zhang Xinxin, Han Shaogong.

Lu Xun is another intriguing influence: Li recently contributed an afterword to the Penguin edition of The Real Story of Ah-Q. "Lu Xun and I have a very complex connection, as every Chinese writer does with him. I think he was a great storyteller. His best writing is unmatched by anyone of his generation. But he was uneven - he wrote some terrible stories. It is very hard to deny his influence, but I don't idolize him as some people do."

 

In 1996 Li left China for Iowa City. She spoke only rudimentary English and her sister's suggestion that she learn by viewing Baywatch proved unhelpful. Li says she didn't suffer from culture shock. Instead, she found that America was a place that indulged her need for privacy. "Part of the reason I started writing was that people left me alone. I arrived as an immigrant and a student. For me it was a very comfortable place to be."

What Li didn't know to begin with was that, coincidentally, Iowa had one of the most prestigious creative-writing schools in the world; the Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni, including Michael Cunningham, John Irving and Ann Patchett, have won 17 Pulitzer Prizes.

It would be some years before Li would win a place on the programme. She earned her PhD in immunology with research into allergies, asthma and the behaviour of B- and T-cells, and married her college boyfriend, Dapeng, now a computer programmer. It was a two-month writing course at a community college that set her on the literary path: a story about her grandmother impressed the tutor so much he encouraged her to try to be published.

 

Li's first stories, collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, reveal a novice author trying to find her identity. Relatively experimental compared to her later work, they play with voice and subject matter. She tries the first-person singular narrative in Death is Not a Bad Joke if Told the Right way. In Immortality she uses the first-person plural to tell the communal history of a Chinese town that was noted for providing the "imperial families with their most reliable servants. Eunuchs they are called, though out of reverence we call them Great Papas." A related descendant proves to be a doppelganger of Mao and the story becomes a potted history of China, from the dynasties of empire through the Communist Revolution and beyond. Its hyper-realistic approach (Li's version of what the critic James Wood calls hysterical realism) would not last long: Li would ditch witty, but incredible devices such as Mao-alikes and settle into a traditional, if intimate, realist approach. "In your first book, you will try everything," Li says. "Now I have found what I would consider my natural voice."

From the start, two ideas were non-negotiable. First, Li's writing was an attempt to understand China. "Those first stories asked who those people were I used to know really well. They were not about me." Second, she chose to write in English. "English liberated me to write. It had little to do with my earlier history." In particular, Li was able to write about feelings. "English freed me to write about emotions. Chinese was a language where I hid from people. English is a language where I don't hide. I can't entirely explain it, but I cannot write about people or feelings in Chinese."

It is a divide Li dramatizes in stories in which China clashes with an English-speaking West, for example The Princess of Nebraska and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. In the latter, Mr. Shi, a retired rocket scientist, visits his newly divorced daughter in America in the hope of understanding "her situation". When she remains stubbornly silent, he berates her for withholding her feelings, only to have her turn the cultural tables: "You never talked, and Mama never talked, when you both knew there was a problem in your marriage. I learned not to talk." However, she explains that thanks to life in America and conversation in English, she has found her tongue. She even admits her responsibility for the break-up, which was the result of her affair with a Romanian man: "We talk in English, and it's easier. I don't talk well in Chinese ... Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person."

In Li's case it also makes you a writer. Having won a place at the workshop, she gradually began to feel a literary career might be possible. "By the time I left I had finished my first book and my second was under contract." Li adds that Iowa didn't so much teach her to write as teach her to read. It was at Iowa, for example, that she discovered William Trevor, her literary hero and mentor. He is thanked in the acknowledgements of her two most recent books. When I ask what struck a chord, Li again sounds lost for words. "It's just his sensibility. He can be so kind and so ruthless at the same time. He exposes his characters, but not in a mean way. He is just curious about people."

Trevor's combination of kindness and ruthlessness has had a dear effect on Li's prose, which portrays the most private existences of individuals with cool precision. Li is not a visual writer: when she collaborated with Wayne Wang on the film of the story A Thousand Years of Good Prayers she found the process of transforming her characters' interior lives into dramatic action difficult. On the page, Li explores thought processes as much as plot. She doesn't judge her characters, or pin them down, but allows them to exist in all their complexity of action and motivation. "Every time you have a hero or villain you are advocating something. I cannot write literature as propaganda. I cannot give readers anything that is a simplification of life. Heroes, villains and victims are all simplifications of life."

In Kindness, narrator Moyan chooses a life of introspection rather than one of engagement with the world: it is a wall that protects her from the pain of life. At the same time, she retains a keen awareness of her self-imposed segregation. A middle-school mathematics teacher, she exhibits a pessimism genuinely felt and intellectually abstract: "I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives," she thinks. "It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else's life."

In The vagrants, characters struggle to balance similar tensions. Set against the political instabilities of late-1970s China, the novel investigates varying notions of heroism. At the centre is Kai, a former child star who portrayed mythical characters in the theatre and who has become the voice of her home town, Muddy River: she is the news announcer on the radio station. Kai has ascended the social ranks to marry a powerful official, but she lives a double life: she consorts with Jialin, who belongs to an underground political movement that protests against Gu Shan's execution. Kai's opposition to the system is not only self-destructive but has repercussions for her family. Li asks: is her act one of self-sacrificing political nobility or simply one of selfishness?

Li's authorial disinterest has caused unease in some readers. Her most controversial character is arguably Bashi, the fool of The Vagrants, whose naive sociability is tarnished by darker sexual impulses. An otherwise normal adolescent desire to see the female anatomy has been warped into dreams of inspecting the bodies of unwanted baby girls, who are occasionally left beside the Muddy River. Li mentions that some readers branded Bashi a paedophile because of his relationship with Nini, a 12-year-old girl shunned by her family because of a deformed hand and leg. And yet, Bashi is not presented as a straightforward monster: that honour goes to Kwen, whom Bashi discovers has desecrated Gu Shan's body.

 

"I was very surprised how angry readers were with Bashi. Critics found him very difficult to read," says Li. "He is one of my favorite characters from the novel. He doesn't wear any masks. He is just himself He has real kindness. He wants to help other people. That doesn't mean he's not disturbing. But no more than any of the other characters."

* * *

It is tempting to read this literary ambivalence as a reflection of Li's own relationship with China: although she left the country as soon as she could, its people and culture continue to fill her imagination. "I need some distance from my subjects," she notes at one point. Self-imposed exile, however agreeable, has its consequences. Of primary interest for Li is her sense of time - a preoccupation she shares with Trevor. "One of my major interests in themes is how time passes in people's lives and in their memories. Some novelists are really good at writing about the dramatic moment. For me, and William Trevor too, that moment often happens in the past or is going to happen in the future. We write about the world after the dramatic moment or the world leading up to it." Occasionally a narrative plays out in the present tense, but more often she follows a Wordsworthian template of emotion recollected in tranquility - although the line between tranquility and isolation is blurred.

Again, one could suggest that the importance of memory in Li's work stems from her relationship with her homeland. Although she returns regularly, China must exist more in her mind as a recollection than as an everyday reality. But it is not an argument Li accepts easily, on a number of counts. She contends that the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl attempt to examine contemporary China. A Man Like Him has a typical Li protagonist: an isolated, introverted and embittered teacher with a shadowy sexual history taking out his frustrations on internet-enabled social networks.

It is one of several recent stories that concentrate on the place of women in modern Chinese society: House Fire and The Proprietress also feature ad hoc communities of women who exist in an uneasy solidarity. In A Man Like Him, the blacker cousin of the whimsical House Fire, the women's group exists on the internet. After her father abandons his family, a young girl creates a blog that reviles wandering husbands: "MY FATHER IS LESS OF A CREATURE THAN A PIG OR A DOG BECAUSE HE IS AN ADULTERER."

Li argues that anger has defined generations of Chinese women. "Anger is an uninteresting emotion. It simplifies life by targeting a villain." Ironically, this reduction by fury is precisely what makes the young girl in A Man Like Him so intriguing to Li. "She is representative of women from the last two or three generations - from the Communist Revolution and even during the Cultural Revolution. These angry women who act without any deeper connection to the world ... I have seen so many in previous generations and my own generation."

In Sweeping Past, the frictions between women double as differences between generations. Ying, an ambitious young Chinese girl brought up in Portugal, visits her grandmother Ailin in China. The culture clash manifests itself through conflicts of language and propriety: Ying admires a photograph of her grandmother in her teens as being "very Chinese"; but Ailin is shocked when Ying casually asks if an old friend was raped. Ying has "accumulated wisdom beyond her age", but is nevertheless too young to understand one of life's greatest mysteries: "that hatred, as much as love, did not come out of reason but out of a mindless nudge of a force beyond one's awareness".

 

Li insists that these encounters are not specific to China but are universal.

Beijing's landscape, pace of life, economy and politics might be altering faster than those of most cities, but its people exist in a continuum with the past. "I go to China to see the people, to see the country, to see the surface change. But you realize pretty quickly that people don't really change much. The country has had a facelift. The economy is better. But human beings don't evolve that fast." Li mentions a young, female Chinese journalist who asked how Li hoped to convey the pains and struggles of her current generation when she lived abroad. "Every generation thinks its pains and struggles are unique. But I don't think her struggles are so different from those of the heroine of a Jane Austen novel. I really do think human nature evolves really slowly."

In The Vagrants, Li harnesses the diverse perspectives of her stories within a single narrative. In one memorable passage, our point of view deviates suddenly from the main characters and settles on a "fourth grader" who discovers her "silk Young Pioneer's kerchief [has] been ripped by her little brother". Li's focus moves swiftly to a truck driver in bed with his wife, then to a hospital nurse arriving late for work because her son has overslept. The chapter ends with a bad-tempered girl working a switchboard. The excerpt is suggestive of Li's restless narrative voice: a switch is flicked and the character changes.

These multiple points of view have a powerful effect and offer an artistic challenge to the political and moral certainties that defined Li's life in China. One can imagine the novel's changing perspectives challenging the absolutism of a totalitarian state. "Growing up in that sort of environment, there is only one sort of truth. When you become a writer you realize there is no absolute truth. You have to approach that from as many angles as you possibly can.

It is a sort of minor rebellion. It is my nature not to trust that one truth broadcast by people. Fiction allows you to explore those questions."

Thanks to the MacArthur Fellowship, Li should be financially free to explore many more questions in the coming years. There is a new novel, but with her typical reticence she prefers not to discuss a work in progress. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis and serves as an editor with the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space. If there is any irony in the notion that Li is happy in a land where happiness is pursued so vigorously, she laughs it off. "I do think America is a funny place. Everywhere you go you see all these self-help books that have the same message - happiness is your goal. I think that is why many of my American readers find my writing too fatalistic."

Chinese-speaking audiences will have a long wait before they can read Li.

She dismisses any likelihood of her work being translated soon. It is a mood she transfers to China in general. I wonder whether her characters - her odd people in this unique time - might be happier in the future than they have been in the past. "Probably not," Li says after a pause. "I am optimistic if you are talking about changes decades from now. In the next five years, I think change will be very slow." Li sounds dejected. I doubt she would have it any other way.

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW