by Yiyun Li
He listens to her speak English on the phone, her voice shriller than he has ever known it to be. She speaks fast and laughs often. He does not understand her words, but even more, he does not understand her manner. Her voice, too sharp, too loud, too immodest, is so unpleasant to his ears that for a moment he feels as if he had accidentally caught a glimpse of her naked body, a total stranger, not the daughter he knows.
He stares at her when she comes out of the room. She puts the receiver back, and sits down at the table without saying anything. He watches her face for a moment, and asks, “Who was it on the phone?”
“A friend.”
“A male friend, or a female?”
“A male.”
He waits for her to give further explanation, but she seems to have no such intention. After a while, he says, “Is this man—is he a special friend?”
“Special? Sure.”
“How special is he?”
“Baba, maybe this’ll make you worry less about me—yes, he is a very special one. More than a friend,” his daughter says. “A lover. Do you feel better now that you know my life isn’t as miserable as you thought?”
“Is he American?”
“An American now, yes, but he came from Romania.” At least the man grew up in a communist country, Mr. Shi thinks, trying to be positive. “Do you know him well? Does he understand you—where you were from, and your culture—well? Remember, you can’t make the same mistakes twice. You have to be really careful.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time.”
“A long time? A month is not a long time!”
“Longer than that, Baba.”
“One and half months at most, right? Listen, I know you are in pain, but a woman shouldn’t rush, especially in your situation. Abandoned women—they make mistakes in loneliness!”
His daughter looks up. “Baba, my marriage wasn’t what you thought. I wasn’t abandoned.”
Mr. Shi looks at his daughter, her eyes candid with resolve and relief. For a moment he almost wants her to spare him any further detail, but like all people, once she starts talking, he cannot stop her. “Baba, we were divorced because of this man. I was the abandoner, if you want to use the term.”
“But why?”
“Things go wrong in a marriage, Baba.”
“One night of being husband and wife in bed makes them in love for a hundred days. You were married for seven years! How could you do this to your husband? What was the problem, anyway, besides your little extramarital affair?” Mr. Shi says. A disloyal woman is the last thing he raised his daughter to be.
“There’s no point talking about it now.”
“I’m your father. I have a right to know,” Mr. Shi says, banging on the table with a hand.
“Our problem was I never talked enough for my husband. He always suspected that I was hiding something from him because I was quiet.”
“You were hiding a lover from him.”
Mr. Shi’s daughter ignores his words. “The more he asked me to talk, the more I wanted to be quiet and alone. I’m not good at talking, as you’ve pointed out.”
“But that’s a lie. You just talked over the phone with such immodesty! You talked, you laughed, like a prostitute!”
Mr. Shi’s daughter, startled by the vehemence of his words, looks at him for a long moment before she replies in a softer voice. “It’s different, Baba. We talk in English, and it’s easier. I don’t talk well in Chinese.”
“That’s a ridiculous excuse!”
“Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”
“Are you blaming your mother and me for your adultery?”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Baba!”
“But isn’t it what you meant? We didn’t do a good job bringing you up in Chinese so you decided to find a new language and a new lover when you couldn’t talk to your husband honestly about your marriage.”
“You never talked, and Mama never talked, when you both knew there was a problem in your marriage. I learned not to talk.”
“Your mother and I never had a problem. We were just quiet people.”
“But it’s a lie!”
“No, it’s not. I know I made the mistake of being too preoccupied with my work, but you have to understand I was quiet because of my profession.”
“Baba,” Mr. Shi’s daughter said, pity in her eyes. “You know it’s a lie, too. You were never a rocket scientist. Mama knew. I knew. Everybody knew.”
Mr. Shi stares at his daughter for a long time. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“But you know, Baba. You never talked about what you did at work, true, but other people—they talked about you.”
Mr. Shi tries to find some words to defend himself, but his lips quiver without making a sound.
His daughter says, “I’m sorry, Baba. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Mr. Shi takes long breaths and tries to maintain his dignity. It is not hard to do so, after all, as he has, for all his life, remained calm about disasters. “You didn’t hurt me. Like you said, you were only talking about truth,” he says, and stands up. Before he retreats to the guest bedroom, she says quietly behind him, “Baba, I’ll book the tours for you tomorrow.”
MR. SHISITS in the park and waits to say his farewell to Madam. He has asked his daughter to arrange for him to leave from San Francisco after his tour of America. There’ll still be a week before he leaves, but he has only the courage to talk to Madam one last time, to clarify all the lies he has told about himself. He was not a rocket scientist. He had had the training, and had been one for three years out of the thirty-eight years he worked for the Institute. Hard for a young man to remain quiet about his work, Mr. Shi rehearses in his mind. A young rocket scientist, such pride and glory. You just wanted to share the excitement with someone.
That someone—twenty-five years old, forty-two years ago—was the girl working on the card-punching machine for Mr. Shi. Punchers they were called back then, a profession that has long been replaced by more advanced computers, but of all the things that have disappeared from his life, a card puncher is what he misses most. His card puncher. “Name is Yilan,” Mr. Shi says aloud to the air, and someone greets the name with a happy hello. Madam is walking toward him with basket of autumn leaves. She picks up one and hands it to Mr. Shi. “Beautiful,” she says.
Mr. Shi studies the leaf, its veins to the tiniest branches, the different shades of yellow and orange. Never before has he seen the world in such detail. He tries to remember the softened edges and dulled colors he was more used to, but like a patient with his cataracts taken away, he finds everything sharp and bright, appalling yet attractive. “I want to tell something to you,” Mr. Shi says, and Madam flashes an eager smile. Mr. Shi shifts on the bench, and says in English, “I was not a rocket scientist.”
Madam nods hard. Mr. Shi looks at her, and then looks away. “I was not a rocket scientist because of a woman. The only thing we did was talk. Nothing wrong with talking, you would imagine, but no, talking between a married man and an unmarried girl was not accepted. That’s how sad our time was back then.” Yes, sad is the word, not crazy as young people use to talk about that period. “One would always want to talk, even when not talking was part of our training.” And talking, such a commonplace thing, but how people got addicted to it! Their talking started from five minutes of break in the office, and later they sat in the cafeteria and talked the whole lunch break. They talked about their hope and excitement in the grand history they were taking part in, of building the first rocket for their young communist mother.
“Once you started talking, you talked more, and more. It was different than going home and talking to your wife because you didn’t have to hide anything. We talked about our own lives, of course. Talking is like riding with an unreined horse, you don’t know where you end up a
nd you don’t have to think about it. That’s what our talking was like, but we weren’t having an affair as they said. We were never in love,” Mr. Shi says, and then, for a short moment, is confused by his own words. What kind of love is he talking about? Surely they were in love, not the love they were suspected of having—he always kept a respectful distance, their hands never touched. But a love in which they talked freely, a love in which their minds touched—wasn’t it love, too? Wasn’t it how his daughter ended her marriage, because of all the talking with another man? Mr. Shi shifts on the bench, and starts to sweat despite the cool breeze of October. He insisted they were innocent when they were accused of having an affair; he appealed for her when she was sent down to a provincial town. She was a good puncher, but a puncher was always easier to train. He was, however, promised to remain in the position on the condition that he publicly admitted his love affair and gave a self-criticism. He refused because he believed he was wronged. “I stopped being a rocket scientist at thirty-two. Never was I involved in any research after that, but everything at work was confidential so the wife didn’t know.” At least that was what he thought until the previous night. He was assigned to the lowest position that could happen to someone with his training—he decorated offices for the birthdays of Chairman Mao and the Party; he wheeled the notebooks and paperwork from one research group to the other; in the evening he collected his colleagues’ notebooks and paperwork, logged them in, and locked them in the file cabinet in the presence of two security guards. He maintained his dignity at work, and went home to his wife as a preoccupied and silent rocket scientist. He looked away from the questions in his wife’s eyes until the questions disappeared one day; he watched his daughter grow up, quiet and understanding as his wife was, a good girl, a good woman. Thirty-two guards he worked with during his career, young men in uniforms and carrying empty holsters on their belts, but the bayonets on their rifles were real.
But then, there was no other choice for him. The decision he made—wasn’t it out of loyalty to the wife, and to the other woman? How could he have admitted the love affair, hurt his good wife, and remained a selfish rocket scientist— or, even more impossible, given up a career, a wife, and a two-year-old daughter for the not so glorious desire to spend a lifetime with another woman? “It is what we sacrifice that makes life meaningful”—Mr. Shi says the line that was often repeated in their training. He shakes his head hard. A foreign country gives one foreign thoughts, he thinks. For an old man like him, it is not healthy to ponder too much over memory. A good man should live in the present moment, with Madam, a dear friend sitting next to him, holding up a perfect golden ginkgo leaf to the sunshine for him to see.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Kate Medina, my editor, and Richard Abate, my agent, for their trust, insight, and support; Kate Lee and Danielle Posen for all the hard work; editors who have taken risks on a new voice: Brigid Hughes, Cressida Leyshon, Deborah Treisman, Don Lee, Alex Linklater, Michael Ray, Linda Swanson-Davies, Susan Burmeister-Brown, and David Hamilton; the Paris Review Foundation and the Medway Institute for their generosity in offering space and time for this project; and Connie Brothers, whom I admire for countless reasons.
To teachers and writers whose wisdom has inspired me in the past two years: Marilynne Robinson, Frank Conroy, Edward Carey, and Stuart Dybek.
To friends for their support: Chen Reis, Amy Leach, Jebediah Reed, Kerry Reilly, Paul Ingram, Marilyn Abildskov, Katherine Bell, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Anne O’Reilly.
To my family for believing in everything I do.
Endless gratitude to the following people, who have changed my life: James Alan McPherson, my mentor; Barbara Bryan, my forever first reader; and Aviya Kushner, the enhancer of everything good in the world.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS
Yiyun Li
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Yiyun Li
QUESTION: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers presents readers with a stunning vision of China, past and present. When you think of your homeland, what thoughts or images come to mind? What are your feelings about China today?
YIYUN LI: I have always said that there are two Chinas. The first is a country filled with people, like my family and many others, who try to lead serious and meaningful lives despite the political, economic and cultural dilemmas they face. The second is a country with a government controlled by one party, made rich from corruption and injustice. I love the first China but do not love the second. So when I think about China today, I always have mixed feelings.
Q: When did you come to America, and what brought you here?
YL: I came to America in 1996 to attend the University of Iowa. I had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in immunology and hoped to stay in the medical science field as a researcher.
Q: But instead of becoming an immunologist, you became a writer—that is quite a switch! How did that happen?
YL: I had never thought of becoming a writer nor had I written anything before I came to Iowa. But once there I stumbled into a community writing class, which led to more writing classes, and I began to seriously consider changing my career.
Q: Such a career change must have been quite daunting. What inspired you to actually pursue writing? Did you have a literary role model or teacher, who encouraged you along the way?
YL: Several teachers early on were very encouraging and supportive, among them the Pulitzer Prize–winner James Alan McPherson, a great mentor and friend. When he read my first story, “Immortality,” he became so excited that he actually tracked me down through a friend. He asked her to bring me two things: a present for my baby (I was seven months pregnant when I workshopped the story with him), and a message saying I was a great writer and that I had to keep writing. From that moment on I had no doubt that I wanted to write, and that I wanted to write well.
My literary role model is William Trevor, a great writer himself and a true gentleman. I always consider him my most important teacher in writing. I read his work again and again to get to my own voice.
Q: Speaking about your own voice and approach, how do you go about constructing a story? What process do you go through, to imagine the characters, structure, and plotline?
YL: I like to ask myself what kind of character would do certain things that other people would not do. For instance, I once saw a news clip that reported a beggar coming into a crowded marketplace with a sign: “If you give me ten yuan, I will let you cut me once; if you finish my life in one cut, you don’t owe me anything.” It was just one of the hundreds of little tales we hear and see every day, but I could not forget the beggar. In my mind, I kept imagining a woman who would come forward and cut the beggar with all justification and tenderness. What kind of character would do this? I thought about this and eventually the character Sansan (from “Love in the Marketplace”) came to me. Most of my stories come this way, with a minor character (sometimes very minor) as a seed for imagination.
Q: I was struck by a wonderful line in the title story about the power of a new language. As Mr. Shi’s daughter says, a new language “makes you a new person.” Did you find this to be true when you began writing in English?
YL: Absolutely. For me, writing in English is the most liberating experience. In English, I am free to express things that I would have consciously censored—both out of political pressure and cultural pressure—had I been writing in Chinese.
Q: The “American dream” is a prevalent theme in your work. What does it mean to you personally, and also in your storytelling?
YL: For me, the American dream meant that I could pick up writing and become a writer, something I had never dared to dream before coming here. For my characters, it means freedom to escape totalitarian control on many different levels—from parental supervision to the ideological control of the Communist party.
Q: The stories in this collection are infused with aphorism and mythology. Where did you learn these wise and wonderful proverbs?
YL: Most of them I inherited from Chinese tradition and translated into English. Someone at a reading once said that he counted more than sixty of these sayings and I was quite surprised by the number. A lot of them are used in dialogue, which is how Chinese speak: full of proverbs and references to mythology. I used these to make the dialogue more genuine.
Q: Along those lines, what is your own favorite adage about life?
YL: There is a saying in Chinese: For someone to achieve anything, he has to first work as hard as he can; whether he is allowed the achievement, however, is determined afterwards by the heavenly power. I think the saying reflects how I feel about life and my characters. Several readers have commented on the fatalism of many of the characters in the stories, and I think that the fatalism came with my belief in this Chinese saying.
Q: Are you working on anything new?
YL: I am working on a novel set in China in 1979. It tells the story of the disintegration of a community after a public execution of a female political prisoner.
Q: America’s history with China is complex, to say the least, and will be a defining relationship for the world of the twenty-first century. What do you think Americans should know about China that they might not already know? On the other hand, what do you think the Chinese should know about Americans?
YL: One time, I met two old women in the street here in America who read “Extra” and loved the story. They said to me, “we both agreed we could be Granny Lin.” Another time someone told me that after reading “The Princess of Nebraska,” he realized every Chinese graduate student he walked past in the street might have a rich story. These are the things that I think people in both countries tend to forget—that deep down we are all human beings, and the pains and joys we have are the same. In a way, I think the two countries are set up in the public view as competitors, which can lead some Americans and Chinese to feel wariness or animosity toward one another. But in the end, people here in America are like what you will find in China, too.