Yiyun Li (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese writer who lives in the United States.Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. And then I remembered. Yiyun Li. A stunning exploration of suffering and loss, Where Reasons End is made all the more wrenching by its real-life context. This gets me thinking, and I’d like to share my thoughts quickly. She had promised to show me a copy of the photo of her and the boy, the one he kept in his marriage bedroom. For contact information and a brief explanation of our review policy, click, © Copyright 2017 | Trevor Berrett | The Mookse and the Gripes. I was an exhausted young mother then, courageously blind to the dangers of the world and stubbornly blind to its beauties. The photo that Lily showed me—what can I say? Brought up by foreign devils, she told a nearby auntie in Cantonese. “What if he turns out to be different from the boy I remember?” she said. After seeing the reference to Singer, I linked up to David Margolies reading his story. I’m telling you, it’s a love story, and it’s a movie.”, “I don’t know anyone who makes movies,” I said. (2005) from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by my limited imagination. Not because it should be ok for a song to be about a man who loves another man, but because the singer is just telling a story and its silly to think of the singer as the subject of the story. Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. I had a much more positive reaction to this and, unlike with the Lethem story which seemed to lessen when I read the comments on this site, I will stand by my response. she asked, and I said Iâd gone back to school because I wanted to become a writer. That’s not to say every sincerely written story will speak to readers or that we can’t offer insight on why we failed to to connect with another’s work. The writer Yiyun Li, who left China in 1996 as a trained scientist and set herself the task of becoming instead an American novelist, might appear to belong to that narrative of success. I couldn’t catch her eyes in the mirror. We both looked up at the mirror. Some faves were: âWeâve waited for this for so many years. Just look at how Li creates a physical space: Once upon a time, I was addicted to a salon. “We often factor in external political/cultural/historical/etc. She said: “People did not think children were human beings. By Trevor Berrett | 2019-03-04T13:35:14-04:00 March 4th, 2019 | Categories: New Yorker Fiction , Yiyun Li | Tags: 2019 New Yorker Fiction | 23 Comments When Lily asked me if I knew the history between the two countries, I almost slipped and said yes. Some rather real, some rather close. “It was a long phone call. It took one haircut for me to get the bare bones of the story, and a few more to gather the details, and still a few more for me to start looking at Lily askance. Comparing stories to other stories, whether by the same author or not, is something we do all the time. I smiled blankly at Lily in the mirror, and she smiled back. However, as this story underscores for me, we shouldn’t let ourselves fall prey to assuming such pieces are the norm. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. The section about the narratorâs inability to write the note is much better, consistent with the characterâs personality. They felt oddly out of place, as if referring to something other than what was in the story, but I didn’t know what. As with the other short stories this week, I was amazed by how much Li got into so few pages (16) and how real the character of Auntie Mei felt to me, how well I thought I knew her and her life by the end. she asked, and I said not really. Then I read Li’s story. The paragraph where Li attempts to describe the photograph of Lily and Tuan is pretty dreadful. The elder sonâs death seemed an unnecessary addition, I must say. Sometimes, sure. But when you say, “For many of my favorite authors, their work was an essay about sometimes personal demons and never led to any solid conclusion or resolution,” the words “essay” and “personal” suggest to me a reading of a text as an artifact that informs a biography and not a literary engagement. “My goal is to dismantle your canon,” she said, pointing to the Tolstoy and Chekhov on my desk. “And then,” Lily said, “you won’t believe this. Liked it? Like I said, writing their experiences might be importantly therapeutic for the writer, but it can (and for me, sometimes does) put a burden on the reader that goes beyond responding to a work of fiction. In any case, Lily didn’t care about my opinions or my stories—she got plenty of both from the uncles and aunties. He lived through three regimes, two … If I miss him this time, we’ll miss each other all our lives.”. I can’t somehow not know what I do know, just because the artist doesn’t want it to matter to the viewer. she asked, and I said not really. I have had mixed feelings about the previous Yiyun Li stories I have read and my main reaction to this one is indifference. The specific way was in regard to the passage I quoted earlier – âI did not know sorrow then, and later, when I did, after my elder sonâs death, I thought that Lilyâs young lover had been fortunate to have so many tears in him. I’ll give him a discount because you’re my best client.”. All the time? I smiled blankly at Lily in the mirror, and she smiled back. I had always prepared the snacks and the stuffed animal and the family photo, but I had never been able to write that note to my children. And sad about what? The Lewis Center eagerly anticipates all she will bring to the University.” The MacArthur Foundation, in its citation to Li’s 2010 Fellowship, praised her body of work for offering readers, “intimate and elegantly constructed portraits of people largely ignored by history—Chinese nationals as well … There are thousands of stories out there — told in prose, verse, song, film — that are not limited to their text. I think he married a good woman. If a reader is interested in the life of the author, then reading stories they write and knowing which bits are drawn from real life experiences can help inform you better about that author as a person. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. And: I could write a tome about this, but Iâll just say: does the fact thAt Chekov never served on a Navy ship make âGusekâ less of a story? Post was not sent - check your email addresses! “ ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”, “Do you know someone who can make our story into a movie?”, For a while, Lily kept asking me that, and each time I replied no, feeling bad for delivering disappointing news, yet not bad enough to stop going to see her. What do you do? The two countries were to blame, not the two of you.”. “We all feel you’re part of our family.”. She was beautiful, he was handsome, but when war broke out between their countries the following year Lily’s father decided that it was no longer safe for his family to live in Vietnam. Her voice was dreamy in a menacing way, like a voice-over in a movie. Knowing about those connections can help better inform me about the author. Like Cusk, Yiyun Li seems interested in what fiction is, what we are doing when we tell stories and whether storytelling is a means of constructing reality for ourselves. What subject? At sixteen, she fell in love with the Vietnamese boy next door, who was sixteen, too. Sorrow only desiccated me. The college was a mere débutante in a world of grand, old institutes, but all those trees and bushes and buildings gave me the impression that life could be as slowly lived, as long-lasting, as we wanted it to be. I could write a tome about this, but I’ll just say: does the fact thAt Chekov never served on a Navy ship make “Gusek” less of a story? “What do you think?” Lily asked, studying my face. And what if we found out that Kafka actually had woken up one morning as a cockroach? Okay, rant over. Years later, after my son died, I felt a constant ache, similar to what I had felt for Lily and the boy when I saw them in the photo. Anyway, thanks for that comment. Tuan cried for three days and three nights in front of Lily’s old house after she and her family left. The daughter said that all three sisters’ names have a Chinese character from my name. She wants to talk with you, too.’ ”. $30. Trevor, I hope you find time and feel moved to write something more about this story. All these years he’s kept your photo on our nightstand.’ ”. Jeff Koons has a painting in which he and his wife of the time are both naked. But that is not about reading a story as art. I know some people won’t know background facts, but I’m not so sure they should always be catered to. I also started to think that she’d made up the whole story, just as I had invented my upbringing in Holland. Do you have a choice? All will be well all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well, yet I could not even write a lying note to console my children. Unlike genre or pop fiction, the beauty of literary work is that, when done in earnest, it’s intentionally and profoundly humanist at its core. I pictured an actress standing in front of an open window, her back to an unlit room, the moonlight cold in her theatrical eyes. There were always dramas in her life. Shouldâve ended with the narrator pissing Lily off and Lily locking her out of the salon. she asked, and I lied again and said I was a student. Yiyun Li, the author, was born in China in 1972 and grew up in the society she describes. If a reader finds a story is enriched by knowing what the author has been through, it doesn’t follow that the reader is confusing the storyteller with the story. Little Steven has argued that actors should never give interviews because the more we know about actors as people the less able they are (or the harder they and we have to work) to get us to see them as just the character we see on the screen in a film. Random House. I could not make a romance out of Lily’s story. I thought of this as a story about a writer trying to learn how to write about profound, powerful subjects. The MacArthur Foundation chose 23 fellows in total, ranging from a quantum astrophysicist to a population geneticist, type designer, stone carver, jazz pianist and indigenous language preservationist. “I remember that once you said to us: One must want to be great in order to be good. I was the only customer under sixty, and the only one who spoke in English. The effort of self-transformation is generally regarded as an improving journey, whatever its vicissitudes may have been. For more information about the site and each contributor, click here. My Chinese name has the character ‘blossom’ in it. I’m sure this diminishes the pool of readers who will respond, but, again, I’m not sure that should be avoided at all costs to make a story self-contained. I don’t think so. As a result, I don’t have more to say about this one, but would welcome someone giving me a reason why I should think more about it. What do you do? As it happens, I was recently reading a transcript of an oral history interview with the photo-realist artist Robert Bechtle (there is, by the way, a fantastic trove of oral history transcripts at the Smithsonian, which is where I found this). I will try to do so soon! I did not know sorrow then, and later, when I did, after my elder son’s death, I thought that Lily’s young lover had been fortunate to have so many tears in him. “Never a step away from our door.” She had heard about this from an old friend whom she had seen recently when he and his wife were visiting their children in America. Even so, I began to resent Lily. No one above, that I can see, is arguing that an author has to have personal knowledge of something in order to write about it. So let me recap the other two before getting to that one. That knowledge changed my perception of the story, both generally and in one very specific way. Or perhaps it was a different day when she decided to tell me a love story. Or what? Allegra Goodman: “A Challenge You Have Overcome”. Yiyun Li reads her story "All Will Be Well," from the March 11, 2019, issue of the magazine. You won’t see each other. If she were to dismantle anything, it would be a house worth buying as a flipper. I wanted to ask. We canât waste our time cryingâ and âWe arenât the kind of people who take time off from work, and he lives in Vietnamâ and âHis wife said, âYouâre the most beautiful woman Iâve ever known.â No one has ever said that to me.â Her insistence that her narrative should be a movie is also consistent with her character, as is her directness in asking if the narrator knows anyone who can make it into one. Then, when I read about Li’s son, it suddenly made sense. Once, her husband broke a toe when he tripped on the carpet that they had finally installed in their house, after ten years of planning. Trevor, if I am interested in the life of an author and, say, reading a biography of that author, I can see how I will be quite interested in connections between the content of the author’s stories and life. Consequently, it seems to me that we then come to feel entitled to critique the end products of the writing process with our own dry, analytical distance, presuming that such fiction is a strictly intellectual affair, designed with the intention that its prose and structural elements and thematic motifs be broken down and coldly scrutinized and for its own sake or our abstract pleasures. In 2012, the novelist Yiyun Li twice tried to take her own life. BTW, it is irrelevant to our reading a story whether the author really experienced what she is writing about. “But I don’t hold it against him that he didn’t. Still, there’s more to like in Li’s writing than to disdain, and the flaws didn’t ruin the story. Once, her youngest son, who went to a state university, overslept on the very same morning that a man hacked at random pedestrians with a knife on their street. Joni Mitchell has said that when she writes songs she feels free to write from the perspective of a character of any gender or age because it’s all storytelling. Once, a student complained about a J. M. Coetzee novel I’d assigned. Take a second to support The Mookse and the Gripes on Patreon! . Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. “In the bedroom the two of them share?” I asked. Yiyun Li: “All Will Be Well” This week's New Yorker fiction is Yiyun Li's "All Will Be Well." Where had that thought of a tunnel come from? You’re the only love he’s had. Lily’s family had become boat people, migrating from Vietnam to Hong Kong to Hawaii and later to California. Yiyun Li on the Distance Necessary for Stories, Photograph by Ina Jang for The New Yorker. Listen to Li read the story or read online at The New Yorker. But yes. A recurring fear I had, during those years, was that on a windy day a eucalyptus branch would fall on our heads. “Reader”: I’m glad my reading was helpful but I really wanted to write and thank YOU for that incredibly sensitive, well-articulated “rant” (which it is not) about increasing our readerly sensitivity. We all had our reasons for doing this as long as no harm was done. I had opinions, and yet I was as stubborn as Bartleby. Lily forgave me then for not being able to speak one of the languages she preferred. She picked up a strand of hair and let it fall. Moreover, what is spelled out is a bit bland. . A good short story is like a lie that tells the truth. And any upset is when one feels not on the way to truth or to a good ending. That somewhere it all fell apart. Someone died young, someone got a bad doctor’s diagnosis or deep love goes unfulfilled. Yet, that is all part of real life even if it doesn’t make a good story. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Why would anyone lie to anyone? Sorry for the soap boxing. If I read Alice Munro, I can of course get a lot out of reading one story on its own or I can see her develop and explore themes sheâs struggled with in the past. “He was waiting for me to come back,” Lily said. . At the end of the third night, his older brothers were finally able to take him back to their house. In many regards, the various pieces of this puzzle didn’t end up fitting together in a compelling or coherent way. We'll be using #TolstoyTogether to organize the ongoing conversation. The damp and moldy air, the scurrying bugs and rats, the rusty nails I had collected in a box as treasure—I felt terror imagining my children on an exploration like that. Yet…just as, and I know this is big compliment, Proust ends with his alter-ego character/the narrator being able to write the novel you’ve just read, here the narrator character is finally ready to start dealing with deeper issues, and, in fact, just has done so. Audible, please sponsor me. She had helped her parents in their Chinese takeout, apprenticed with an older cousin who ran a hair salon in Los Angeles, married, and had children. 392 … There is a third way to read a story that you have mentioned through talking about Bergman and Munro. by Yiyun Li I understand, of course, that writers write about events from their own lives all the time and also, of course, there can be great therapeutic value to the writer to do it, but as a reader it makes me uncomfortable to know about it, especially when the events and writing are so recent and the events are so awful. One of his most famous paintings is â ’61 Pontiacâ and it shows the artist, his wife, and their two kids posing alongside the eponymous car. $25. We as readers should approach each piece in good faith, assuming that it is a form of deeply personal expression and engaging it with the generosity and tact required whenever someone has the courage to open themselves up to other. she asked, and I said not really.” And she undercuts the optimism of the title with truthful limitations such as “Why would anyone lie to anyone? But people do, I thought, all the time.”. We learn that they live in a two-room shack in a neighborhood which consists of two-room shacks jammed closely together. I never told you. If you are interested in having The Mookse and the Gripes review a book or film, please let us know. But it is good, and there are layers and complications that become visible when we know more about the story’s provenance, perhaps seeing how … Political, cultural, or historical facts can help when they fill in a broader context that the story takes place in or when comparing the world of the story with the real world can illuminate the story, but that is a different matter. It seemed both intense and peculiar. She grew up in an ethnic-Chinese family in Vietnam. Published: Mon, March 4, 2019 4:00 AM. What was real? Why shouldn’t it be factored in? She said that she was travelling in South America. She didn’t sound perturbed when she recounted the girl’s words, which troubled me. Personal History. Forget life, real or unreal. I would say the same about authors. Desiccation persisted. On this I think we agree. The interviewer states at one point that Bechtle uses his own family as models in some of his painting, and mentions that Bechtle has stated that it shouldn’t matter who these models are. Some rather real, some rather close.”. If I shed one tear, I might become Alice, swimming in an ocean of my tears. The friendships between the fathers and between the eldest sons of the two families were recollected, but friendships severed by war were hardly worth a movie. But to want to write them down in a list cataloguing them, and not just as a list, but on a spreadsheet, suggesting many different sortable columns of information about each, strikes me as almost pathological behaviour (and no, not of the sort that can be excused by the irrationality of grief). If you are an existing subscriber, sign up for access here. Edward Hirsch is the author of ten poetry books, most recently Stranger by Night (2020). Does he deserve your love, or does he deserve to be killed by you? If your teacher is reading this to you, it means that Mommy and Daddy are late picking you up; it may also mean that we will never come back for you, but all will be well in the end. The former student sort of said, “I thought your principles were nonsense but I still learned from them. That kind of predicts one reaction the reader can perceive at the end. The optimism of the title may seem ironic but it is very empowering if it can be seen in that way. I haven’t gotten on here to explain my own positive reaction to this story, and I apologize! She must have put a spell on me, tricking me into her chair, hypnotizing me with girlish dreams that had not been hardened by life. Once is simply a plot idea she came up with. What is real? I think this story conveys a lot that helps me better face life sort of like “Catcher in the Rye.”  The writer wants to seem in control but is at loose ends trying to make sense of what has no sense. That has value. Not for everyone because we look at the same specifics in different ways. Both laughed. The fact that, for example, Li chose to write about her son’s suicide in at least two stories now tells us something about how she deals with that grief. My parents’ generation had dug the tunnels when it was feared that a war between China and the Soviet Union was inevitable. Not the girl he remembered?”, “It’s only a phone call. You also wrote, “I donât believe Iâm guilty of the fallacy of confusing the story with the storyteller when I, as a reader, explore how an author has dealt with his or her own life through art.” I think you are making a confusion here, but it might be one of confusing an interest in an author as a person and an interest in an author as an artist. She picked up a strand of hair and let it fall. These are real literary questions. New subscribers can subscribe here. Lily was working on the nape of my neck when she said this. It can be irrelevant, if our goal is to isolate the piece from the author and seek some elusive objective hierarchy of writing. She opened an envelope in which a sepia-toned black-and-white photo was preserved between two sheets of tissue paper. . It is similar to the idea of a text as source material for an interest in the biography of a writer, but importantly different because the interest is in the writer not as a person in general, but as an artist. “Before we parted, he said he would wait for me all his life.”. All rights reserved. That’s the only perspective that makes sense to me. But, placed in history, that war was no more than a skinned knee or a sneeze to mankind. Once, campus security sent out a warning that an unaccompanied pit bull had been spotted roaming near the swimming pool. By Cressida Leysho n “Do you think I should call him? Most of the time, however–be it out of the author’s desire to protect their/their close relations’ privacy and vulnerability (note to Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd) or simply to allow a narrative to take on a life of its own–there’s a degree of distillation that takes place in fiction, which allows for the emotional undercurrents of a piece to ring true to an author’s experience while the particular circumstances are fictitious. On the contrary, I know there is nothing wrong with that. The story would be different, and not as effective, if the author had to explain the background. With others Lily used Vietnamese, Cantonese, or Mandarin. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space. When Li allows her style to be a bit more undulant and winding is when sheâs at her best, be it in her fiction or her essays. Ad Choices. Please feel free to leave your thoughts! So please welcome the Frank O’Connor International Short Story award winner, Ms. Yiyun Li! If having children is a gamble, one has no choice but to bluff. We can’t waste our time crying.’ ”, After a long while, as he was still crying, one of his daughters took the phone away from him. The same ache, I imagined, would afflict those who now looked at photos of my son—he died at about the age Lily and Tuan were when they fell in love. To order a copy for £11.43 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. But you know what made me the saddest? When I was in elementary school in Beijing, my best friend subscribed to a children’s magazine that often featured stories set on the border between Vietnam and China, with illustrations of maimed bodies and bombed villages and the heroic faces of intrepid soldiers. But since I do know who they are, the painting acquires a whole extra element of feeling; it can’t be helped. I had to make an effort to read it just as story not to get lost in worrying about her or wanting to just stop reading. Very arresting. I also found this very powerful and moving. The ways that a story can show signs of growth, development, maturity or regression and decay are real literary engagements with writing, but they are ones where the artist is the focus of the examination and the art plays a supporting role.
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