MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing. She came to the US in 1996 and has since won acclaim for her fiction writing in English. She has a new book of short stories out next week called Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Yiyun, tell us a bit about your own journey from China to the US. How did you go from living in China and not speaking English to then writing acclaimed fiction in English and teaching writing now at U Cal Davis?
YIYUN LI: That’s just one of those things that you can never find a good explanation in life. I was a science student in China and I guess when I was in China my whole goal was to go to American graduate school for science. So I could leave China. And I did and I landed in Iowa City, Iowa, where there are a lot of writers around.
WERMAN: Very strong writing program there.
LI: That’s right and somehow I just thought maybe I would try writing, so I give up my science career and enrolled in the writing program. Since then, I became a writer.
WERMAN: I know you didn’t really speak English when you came to the United States, but I understand that when you were still in China your sister encouraged you to watch Baywatch to learn how Americans dress. Were you also learning English too from Baywatch?
LI: I watched Baywatch with the Chinese. It wasn’t subtitled, but I was told to watch how Americans behave or talked or dressed. And I didn’t speak English but I could read English when I left China.
WERMAN: And how did that jibe with what you found in Iowa City? Were there some similarities between Baywatch and Iowa City?
LI: Well, [INDISCERNIBLE] not the same thing.
WERMAN: Not exactly. You’re writing about the Chinese experience, both in China and the US, but writing in English only for mostly non-Chinese readers. Do you think the people who read your fiction get the world you’re writing about?
LI: Yes, I think you have to trust your readers. I guess my goal is when my readers read these stories, they won’t constantly think oh, this is China, this is so different from America, or this is how things work in another world so exotic and strange. And if they are really in the stories, they will forget for a moment that it happens in China. It could happen anywhere in the world.
WERMAN: A lot of the stories in this new collection of fiction called Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, they feature characters who have been disappointed in some way or another by life. What draws you to characters like that?
LI: To me I think there is my view that everybody lives a secret life and everybody has some secrets and oftentimes I think people walk in the world or they live in a world in a way they hide those things away. And for writer, for me, the writer’s job is to look at those places where they don’t tell you the stories right away and you explore those secrets and see how people feel lonely or isolated or disappointed in certain ways. And in a way I think I’m drawn to these characters because if you look at the stories you cannot possibly find villains. You can’t say this is a villain in the story who does these things to other people. In a way I think every character in my story takes something from others while others also take things from them. And in the end, people [SOUNDS LIKE] rock one another a little bit and that’s the only way people – I mean not the only way, I think it’s one of the ways people connect to each other is to take and be taken from.
WERMAN: The title story in your collection Gold Boy, Emerald Girl struck me in particular. Three people all facing some kind of disappointment and all three getting used to the idea of spending their lives together. It reminded me of Sartre’s No Exit and its dark conclusion that Hell is other people. You’ve got this last line, “They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.” And I was just wondering how much of an element of reality do those lines contain for many people in Beijing today?
LI: That’s a very good question. I’m sure that’s how people feel or I think when I went back to Beijing I noticed that it was so present, that feeling, but people would not admit it. And there were so many ways to deny it. You know you go to parties, you go to a restaurant, you have a good meal, you get drunk, you go to karaoke bars. But I think again as a writer, you strip those things away and you look into the character or you look deep into the people and see what is there, what do they want they don’t have. And oftentimes it is the loneliness. It’s lack of connection.
WERMAN: You were born in 1972. That was the year that Nixon went to China. You lived through Tiananmen Square. What is it like to live in the US now and watch China changing so fast from the country you knew when you were growing up?
LI: It’s like watching your childhood friend all of a sudden becoming very successful and doing all these things that you would not imagine your friend being able to do. But I think for me is I can still see those friend’s childhood and I can still see where he comes from and underneath those successful surface I can still see his pain or his suffering.
WERMAN: Has your work been translated into Chinese? If it hasn’t, do you want it to be?
LI: Officially no, the work has not been translated. There are some translations on the internet, but there’s not copyright or anything on the internet. At this moment I would say I don’t know if I want my work translated into Chinese. I think out of a very personal concern that my parents do live in China and I don’t want them to read my work or to have to face whatever reaction the readers have, they will be exposed to.
WERMAN: And now when you go back, given the success that you’ve experienced here in the United States, does that change how you interact with people in Beijing, how you move about?
LI: No. I think I’m in a very interesting situation whereas my success is mostly unknown in China, which suits me very well. So when I’m in China I’m very anonymous. Because the last time I went back to China, I went back with my children. I have two boys. In China, because of the one child policy you don’t often see a young woman with two children. So I was right away taken as a babysitter. And people treated me horribly when they thought you were a babysitter. And I rather liked that. You know that gave me like an angle to observe how this society treats people. Otherwise people would be much nicer to me I imagine.
WERMAN: Yiyun Li’s new collection of stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, is out next week. Thanks very much for speaking with us, Yiyun.
LI: Thank you very much for having me.
Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li, who has just been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation
Three Questions: China and Literature (VOA) ZT
For most people, it is only a dream to be called a genius and handed a big check. But in the United States, 23 people recently received a phone call announcing that dream had come true. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation hands out "genius" fellowships each year to assist people it determines are doing exceptional work. This year's recipients of the $500,000 "no strings attached" grant include a stone carver, a quantum astrophysicist, a jazz pianist and a high school physics teacher.
One of the winners is Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li, who grew up in Beijing and graduated from Peking University. She then headed to the University of Iowa in the United States to study science, but eventually enrolled in the school's prestigious creative writing program. Li has written such critically acclaimed books as the short-story collections "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" and "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," as well as the novel "The Vagrants." Her fiction is set in both China and the United States. VOA spoke to Yiyun Li in Oakland, California, where she lives with her hu*****and and two sons.
Why did you pursue literature rather than science? And do you write in Mandarin, English or both?
I think that decision really came abruptly because just all of sudden I found that I just really loved writing and I wanted to give it a try. So I sort of just gave up my science career to try. And it worked out well. I only write in English, I never write in Chinese. I had never written in Chinese, and so when I started writing, I used English. So English actually is my first language in writing, so there's just that, I don't think I can write in Chinese, because I've never done that.
You write about China as well as the United States. Is it hard to write about a country in which you no longer live or perhaps easier. And how has living in the United States impacted your writing?
I think it is easier. To many writers, or at least to me, I think that physical distance between me and my subject often times provides another layer where you can have more space to think and to process things.
I don't think living in America per se influenced my writing, although it is in America that I have become a writer. So in that case, America is where I became a writer. I like that in America I'm left alone more than in China, so I like that.
Has your writing changed over the years, and what do you hope to portray in your writing?
Writing is like you grow up, It's just how you grow up, or to become more mature. I do think my writing has of course matured a little over the past five years. [I hope to portray] human nature. Often times I forget my characters are Chinese or American because when you write about their inner world, it doesn't matter what ethnicity or which countries they belong to. Really, it's just how they feel about things and how they see the world. And often times, I think that comes with human nature, so that's my hope, just to portray human nature.
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