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Yiyun Li. Photo: AP

Yiyun Li goes deep into the human condition in her writing

Yiyun Li's bleak, hard-driving fiction shows she's no fairy godmother, writes Ajay Singh

LIFE

Yiyun Li arrived in the United States in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in biology from Peking University and dreams of becoming an immunologist. Instead, she became a writer.

"I gave up my science career because I really liked writing and happened to be going to a school that has a very good writing programme," she says, referring to the prestigious Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she obtained two master's degrees in fine arts.

This novel is really about how extraordinary any ordinary person can be
Yiyun Li

In less than a decade, Li has evolved into "one of our major writers" in English, according to bestselling author Salman Rushdie. It's a remarkable achievement for someone who neither wrote a word of prose in China nor spoke English well when she arrived in America.

Li's second novel, , was recently published to rave reviews. She has also written acclaimed collections of short stories, two of which have been made into movies by Hong Kong-born film director Wayne Wang. Her debut, a short story collection titled , won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

Li belongs to a rare breed of established writers who continue to write both novels and short stories. "I'm very stubborn in that way," she says. "I want to write in both forms."

From the start, Li says, she had "a vision of what kind of writer I wanted to become". She's a great admirer of William Trevor, the Irish short story writer and novelist widely regarded in the world of fiction as one of the most astute observers of the human condition. "I was very adamant about wanting a career like his," Li says. "I don't write zombies. I don't write fairy tales. I write very realistic fiction."

Li's first novel, , was arguably realistic to the point of being grim. Published in 2009, the book is set in a fictional Chinese town named Muddy River following the death of Mao Zedong. The story follows the execution of a counter-revolutionary, a former female Red Guard who once kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach for being a member of the bourgeoisie.

The daughter of a nuclear physicist, Li was born in Beijing in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution. (Her grandfather used to call Mao the "king of hell", which was "no real calamity, though dangerous", Li recalls.) It's no wonder, then, that she chose to focus her first novel on "a time when there was a lot of harshness for everyone".

She doesn't think the book is excessively gloomy. "To me, it's more depressing when a novel is all about frivolous things. The real bleakness is when people don't pay attention and don't live in a serious way," she says.

Li has been described as something of a 19th-century novelist, more in tune with Charles Dickens than Don DeLillo. And while she understands there's a tendency among young writers of each generation to be experimental and cutting-edge, she's not interested in those things. "I more or less write as a Russian writer. Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy - these are my influences."

Li's latest novel is also a work of emotional desolation - a murder mystery focused on four childhood friends, one of whom is poisoned shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, possibly by one of the others.

Set in China and the US, the novel explores the psychological devastation that the friends suffer, despite their educational and economic successes, as they keep the murder a secret.

A line in neatly captures the suffering of its young protagonists: "The best life is the life unlived." For Li, it's much more than the theme of her book.

"There's always a life that we end up not having, and I'm always curious about that life. It's human nature to want things, but a big part of what we want we never get."

Li set out to explore, in , "psychological violence and the manipulation of people's feelings, emotions and perceptions". At the same time she was intrigued by the role of youth in aggression and psychological turmoil. "We sometimes forget how young people are inexperienced about life and lead very intense lives. And while I wanted to explore the combination of inexperience and intense emotions, I also want readers to see that whether people are young or old they possess a rich internal world. To me, this novel is really about how extraordinary any ordinary person can be."

It took Li just six months to write the 312-page novel, but "thinking about it took me two years", she says, not to mention "a year of revisions".

A resident of Oakland, California, Li was forced to give up her Chinese citizenship for an American one because, she says, China doesn't allow dual citizenship. Her husband, a software engineer who was her college sweetheart in Beijing, emigrated to the US a year after her and is also an American citizen.

Besides her professional writing, Li teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis, where she is a professor in the English department. "Teaching is a nice thing, although personally I don't think writing can be taught," Li says. "When I teach students how to write I'm really teaching them how to read. Sometimes I read with them, and that's rewarding."

What does Li make of the direction in which China is headed? "I think the problems that China has are inevitable," she says, referring to the mainland's growing income disparities and environmental challenges. "It's just like fiction - things happen, and what happens in China will probably become worse."

On the other hand, she lauds issues such as increasing transparency in government. "People probably would not have thought that possible 10 years ago."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Long ago and far away
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