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Charmaine Chan

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

by Yiyun Li

Random House, $171

Chinese fiction often leaves readers wondering about the author's age and agenda, one reason being its historical baggage. Until recently, so much writing by mainlanders has tended towards the didactic, making relatively simple work of  categorising them according to theme and time.

Yiyun Li's short stories are less easy to pigeonhole, although they do hint at a generational bent. A writer in her 30s, she's among Chinese artists too young to have been directly affected by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but not young enough to have emerged uncontaminated by Mao Zedong's malignant policies.

Many of the 10 mostly contemporary stories in her debut collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers contain references to the recent past, revealing the aftermath of decades of hardship.

Take Granny Lin, the central character in the opening story, Extra. One afternoon, the 51-year-old spinster finds herself 'honourably retired' from a state-owned clothes factory (translation: she will not receive a pension because the company is bankrupt).

Meagre savings motivate her to marry an old invalid in the hope of gaining an inheritance when he dies. But plans go pear-shaped and she becomes a maid in a boarding school, where she forms an unlikely friendship with a young student abandoned by his rich, busy father. The boy, like Granny Lin, is a hitch in a rapidly changing society of proletariat entrepreneurs.

Social and political comment forms the backbone of many of Li's sardonic stories. Rather than straight criticism, however, she tackles various topics by peering at relationships - homosexual, adulterous, platonic,  filial. Characters are then placed at crossroads and forced to choose life's direction.

Although the problems encountered by Li's protagonists are universal, the circumstances are anything but, which accounts for much of the collection's appeal.

In Immortality, which last year won Li The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for new writers, the lead character's raison d'etre is his close resemblance to  Mao (referred to as 'the dictator'). An observation on superstition, herd mentality and the whimsical nature of politics, the story starts during the time of eunuchs, the servants of emperors, then zips forward to the dawn of communism in China, when 'the dictator is the only superstar'.  So-called mother heroes vie with each other to produce mini-Maos; the losers are sent for plastic surgery so there is only one leader and a face that represents him in propaganda. Of course, when the dictator is replaced, his doppelganger becomes obsolete. Almost science fiction in its improbable yet feasible scenarios, it makes for curious reading, although Sinophiles may recognise cultural and historical references.

Fans of Chinese-American literature may also be familiar with some of the cultural clashes Li sets up for her characters. A foil for her native country, the US - Li's home since 1996 - is seen as everything China is not. Shame is the dividing line.

Readers who warm to this collection will probably appreciate Li's substance rather than style. Sentences sometimes read like clunky translations and there's the odd trans-cultural cliche whose naivete seems forced: businesses are described as 'sprouting up ... like bamboo shoots after the first spring rain', while in the title tale, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, father figure Mr Shi professes ignorance about what 'led the boat of [his daughter's] marriage to run into a hidden rock'.

Writing in a foreign language, however, may have its advantages: Li has an economic way of rendering large-scale sagas in short-story format. Her talent hasn't gone unnoticed. She was recently named by The Los Angeles Times as one of three authors to watch  this year and hired to teach fiction at the University of Iowa.

'A foreign country gives one foreign thoughts,' she has Mr Shih believing after he visits the US for the first time to see his divorced daughter. In Li's case, living in a new home has allowed her to re-examine her native culture with alien and familiar eyes. Her fictional renderings of those insights are to be applauded.



A Thousand Years of Good Prayers