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Review
"Li is extraordinary . . . a storyteller of the first order . . . each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart. . . Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one one cannot help but marvel at her remarkable talents." Junot Díaz
"This is work that lasts. These sly women, punished men, these worried, worrying, surprising characters are held aloft and illuminated in Yiyun Li's strong and magical prose." Amy Bloom
"In the most dismal circumstances and the most unlikely subjects: the old, the forgotten, the bookish, the unattractive; Yiyun Li has the rare ability to conjure hope. She writes with precision and delicacy about the Chinese diaspora and about the new China and in doing so, she writes about us all." Mona Simpson
Product Description
The second collection of stories from Yiyun Li, author of the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants.
The stories in this collection, like the stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, are mostly set in China. The country portrayed here is the China of the 21st century, where economic development has led to new situations unknown to previous decades: residents in a shabby apartment building witnessing in awe the real estate boom; a local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist sheltering women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired women discovering fame late in their lives as private investigators specializing in extramarital affairs; a young woman setting up a blog to publicize an alleged affair of her father.
Underneath the veneer of prosperity and opportunity, however, lie the struggles of characters trying to reorient themselves in the unfamiliar landscapes of modern China: a widower, reminiscing about his wife, confronts a young unmarried woman purchasing condoms in a pharmacy; a new wife makes a plea to have a baby with her husband who was to be executed only to discover that she has become an instant celebrity; a middle-aged couple in America, who, upon losing their only daughter, return to their hometown in China to hire a young woman as a surrogate mother. These characters' fates are affected as much by the historical moments in which they reside as by the choices they make.
Yiyun Li's new collection of stories is a report from the frontline of a changing world, and confirms Li to be an unmissable writer.
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"I am a forty-one-year old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers."
Over the course of this novella, flashbacks reveal how the narrator has ended up in this position and how a life in which friendship and kindness have been proffered is now so empty. These themes of misunderstanding and miscommunication are revisited in the book's other stories in which the characters' loneliness, desire, or hatred lead them to delusion, sometimes leavened by hope.
The stories are all set in China and the memory of Mao's regime lurks in the background, sometimes coming brutally to the fore in glancing but powerful details. There are also brief glimpses into the lives of Chinese migrants abroad.
Yiyun Li's first collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Guardian First Book Award, and this is an equally accomplished and satisfying read.
I would describe this as a collection of unfinished stories rather than short stories. Sorry!
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