A Thousand Years of Good Prayers with Author YIYUN LI

Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands – the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries...[she] is the real deal.”

Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

In the US, she discovered her love for literature and studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop with Marilynne Robinson, whom she credits for teaching her to read deeply, but the writers which Li says have been a deeper influence on her are William Trevor, Elisabeth Bowen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.

I met Li in Paris during the Festival des Écrivains du Monde and reconnected a few months later for this phone interview.

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I was wondering––since you came to America, got married and had children––how do you feel your writing has changed over the years?

YIYUN LI

It's interesting because I actually became a writer after I had my first child, so I've always been a mother, I suppose. I've been a mother longer than I have been a writer. I think for me at one point, you know, you're writing in this vacuum and all of a sudden you realise your children are growing up and you realise that one day they're going to read your writing. That's a little different. That's always at the back of my mind, so I wouldn't say my fiction has changed greatly, except I think–how do I put this?–I would think twice before putting a child through suffering.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, this is something you were talking about before, about your mother not reading your fiction. And now you have this other element of responsibility for your own children, I can understand how that’s an issue. But I feel your writing is so delicate that even when you write about something shocking, like a poisoning, murder, or infidelity, it's done with such lightness of touch that I think you needn't worry about sharing it with your children.

I don't actually worry so much because I know they have read some of my work. So I think it's just interesting, you know, you may have a fiction world and you think this world has nothing to do with your life, but it's not true. The fiction world and real life, they actually overlap sometimes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

This is interesting because it's something that immigrants possibly think more about because immigration is an act of reinvention, right?

Yes, absolutely.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So you come to America and you begin telling your story a lot because people are asking you, and so you begin to think of your life with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's seems like a great advantage––for a writer to be able to draw on two languages, to have many stages of your life…

–

I think I might be an old-fashioned writer. People often comment that I'm a 19th-century writer. And I think maybe it's true. I think there are different ways to look at the world.

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Yes, I think it's especially interesting, as you say, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think for those of us who have crossed borders–the artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country, and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

In the title story of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yilan says that she grew up in a language where she never learned to express her feelings, which she only learned to do when she found herself in a new language––English.

And it's interesting because that line is often quoted, you know for better or for worse people quote that line. And I hate to say it, but that's my feeling. I don't want to align myself with that character, but I do think that's true when you have a new language, especially this language you have gained. Other than is given to you by your mother tongue, you have gained this new language. You have gained a lot of new skills with the language. You have gained a vocabulary you don't have in your mother tongue and those things are important.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Especially that moment when you're not proficient at it, you can be more honest because you don't have the choice of being so elegant and diplomatic. You can't hide yourself so much.

Yes, and you have to be to the point sometimes, right?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's almost like an actor. You are yourself, but you are also embodying a role. The way an actor becomes himself even though he is playing a role who is not him. You have a freedom to express a different part of yourself?

I agree with you and I think, especially if you take the script away from the actors, just give them minimum words. Yes, they have to find the exact words to say the exact things that they need to say. And I think all immigrants went through that stage.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

One of the reasons why I enjoy your novels and stories is that they explore old-fashioned themes like duty, shame, honour, loss of face, suppressed emotion, collective responsibility... and this is not addressed by a lot of writers because of the way society is now.

I think I might be an old-fashioned writer. (Li laughs.) People often comment that I'm a 19th-century writer. And I think maybe it's true. I think there are different ways to look at the world.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Yuki Jiang. Assignment Editor was Sorella Lark. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis and performed by the Athenian Trio. With special thanks to Nicolette D'Angelo and Amelia Goodman and Kimberley Leong for editorial assistance.

The Creative Process

The Creative Process: Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories

The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.

Majka and Sina by Paola Trimarco

Sufferer’s Grave by Şeyma Koç

The Fever Is In Here by Heather Hartley

Tales of the Orange Time of Day by Lethokuhle Msimang

The Season for Hairy Crabs by Elaine Chiew

PORTRAIT OF YIYUN LI
by Mia Funk

“There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country, and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”

–YIYUN LI

I liked the image suggested by Li’s description of looking at life through an old and a new pair of eyes. Her writing is characterised by subtlety and characters who do not always directly express their emotions. Often their true feelings, motives, actions are submerged, and so I thought it would be interesting to show Li with her eyes closed, with her face reflected in the water.

Li told me about her admiration for Patricia Highsmith’s stories, which she calls “masterful because nothing happens. Really, nothing happens and you feel the danger, the threatening that something is going to happen, like a death or something, but really nothing happens. And I think that touch, it’s the same touch. It’s to allude the reader rather than to impose something on you.”

Things happen in Li’s books, of course, but her writing also has an alluding touch. And so I thought it would be more interesting for the figure on top to have her eyes closed. I saw her as a kind of iceberg in warm waters. Writers often say that they feel most alive when they are writing, effectively, when they are dreaming, so for me it made sense for the face of Li above the water to have her eyes closed.

Now that she has lived 19 years in America, the majority of her adult life, she told me she’s “on the cusp of becoming an outsider, and on the cusp of becoming a foreigner in China. I know the language, I can decipher people’s facial expressions which, all of those things are super helpful. So you’re both inside and outside at the same time.”

So these were some of the sources I drew on when I was doing her double portrait, as well as her books A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and Kinder than Solitude.