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Cloud Call Center Community Featured Article

[January 14, 2006]

Revealing the essence of Chinese life

(The Irish Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Short Stories : This collection of short stories is Yiyun Li's first book but already she is a famous author, having won several prizes including the world's biggest short story prize, the Frank O'Connor Award

So what is so great about her work? " 'There is always a road when you get into the mountain,' Auntie Wang, Granny Lin's neighbour, says . . . 'And there is a Toyota wherever there is a road.' The second line of Toyota's commercial slips out before Granny realises it." Most of the stories in the collection deal with this sort of intersection of the traditional and the modern in Chinese life. Armed not so much with a thousand prayers as with a thousand proverbs - at least 20 are quoted - the characters forge their own paths from ancient places through the frequently treacherous mountains of Maoist and post-Maoist China and in some instances the desirable but bizarre heights of American individualism: "Americans . . . She envied these people . . . They were born to be themselves, naive and contented with their naivety."

Naivety is a luxury Yiyun Li's characters cannot afford, pitted as they are not only against the vagaries of capricious fate but against those of a capricious state. Granny Lin loses her job and her pension, but institutionalised double-talk does not permit either of these tragedies to be acknowledged. A word out of place can have fatal consequences: a tipsy carpenter makes a joke about motherhood just after the dictator has decided that mothers who produce many babies are granted the title "mother hero". "My sow has given birth to 10 babies in a litter. Shouldn't she be given a title too?" he quips, and is immediately executed for treason. In another story, set in a later period, it is the one-child-per-family law that ruins a couple's life.

Characters deploy a variety of clever strategies to cope with challenging situations; many resort to comforting aphorisms or at least to an aphoristic way of thinking. If tradition does not supply it they make up a new proverb, like the Toyota advertisers. "A good man should live in the present moment, with Madam, a dear friend, at his side, holding up a perfect golden ginko leaf to the sun for him to see," thinks old Mr Shi on a bewildering visit to his daughter in the US, where she earns more in one year working as a librarian than he did in 20 as a "rocket scientist"-cum-office boy in China. It is the last sentence of the collection and sums up the philosophy of many of its stoical characters, although others in the book find more ingenious ways of coping (e.g. eating sunflower seeds spiked with opium).

The characters are always low-key, however, and so is the writer. Anger simmers far below the surface. On top all is quiet, distanced; our perspective is that of a fly on the wall rather than a laser camera inside the head. People are often called Mr or Mrs, rather than by their first names. Stylistically the stories recall folktales - stylised, somewhat one- dimensional; stream of consciousness is seldom used. We observe action and listen to dialogue. From that we must deduce thoughts and feelings. And we can, thanks to the writer's skill.

English is Yiyun Li's second language, and it may be that her plain but efficient prose augments the power of her work, which relies on great narrative skill rather than on more ornamental aesthetic considerations. She addresses the language issue in the last story in the book, in which Mr Shi realises that love transcends language. Likewise, strong stories have never had any difficulty in crossing linguistic boundaries.

The most interesting aspect of these stories is what they reveal about Chinese life - and those set in China are, tellingly, more effective than those dealing with life in America (such as The Princess of Nebraska). Yiyun Li demonstrates that the best way to learn about people in a foreign culture is through good fiction. One senses that she communicates the very essence of what it meant to live in a village in Inner Mongolia, or in a flat in Beijing, in the 1980s or 1990s, or as a eunuch in the Chinese court in the unspecified past.

Such illumination of the truth of life is something which cannot be expressed in any other way than through the medium of art - through fiction in general and the short story in particular.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers By Yiyun Li, Fourth Estate, 206pp. GBP14.99

EilIs NI Dhuibhne is a writer, folklorist and assistant keeper at the National Library. Her latest novel in Irish, Hurlamaboc , has just been published.

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