An Interview with Yiyun Li

R2: The Rice Review is honored to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by faculty and students of Rice University in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.

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This interview was completed by Mia Funk.
 
Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands – the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries...[she] is the real deal.”

Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

In the US, she discovered her love for literature and studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop with Marilynne Robinson, whom she credits for teaching her to read deeply, but the writers which Li says have been a deeper influence on her are William Trevor, Elisabeth Bowen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev

I met Li in Paris during the Festival des Écrivains du Mondeand reconnected a few months later for this phone interview.

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YIYUN LI
Someone asked me why does Kinder Than Solitude start with a death? And I always think, death is not the end of the story. Death is always the starting point of the story. Death is such a—well, there’s no private death. You know, if you think about someone, in the newspaper someone died yesterday—in New York, she was murdered, that went really public. But even when a very unknown person dies all of a sudden, I think it’s no longer private: people would come to the memorial service, people would talk about the person. I think that really death moves people beyond their control of themselves. So I think for that reason, I like to think about death as the detail of a bigger story that no longer belongs to that person.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It’s like an unraveling. So you see how did that person become unraveled, and all the threads that brought them there. 
 
LI
Yes.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So for a while, you were an involuntary soldier in the Chinese army?[1]
 
LI
For about a year, yes.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So, what was that experience like? How did you draw on that for your writing later?
 
LI
I think, in retrospect, I really appreciate it. And partly because I went there when I was 18, and I came out when I was 19, and that was the time you started to develop your whole, I guess, life philosophy and your view of the world. And I went in, when we talked about anger earlier, I was much angrier than when I came out of that service. Partly, I felt that I was– I went in with this– you know young people... I went in with this urge to become someone, to have like a big personality. To become—to have character. But I realized—it’s really boringafter a year—I realized I could become a personality, and I was a personality, and I was a character. And it was rather disappointing. And again the moment you put yourself in that situation, a lot of things are black and white. The army is bad, the people who oppress us, it's the army—they're bad. Then it's not true, everybody is so complicated. So I came out, and I think the moment I left the army, I knew that I could never judge anyone and I became really ambivalent about a lot of things.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, exactly, the army forces you into false positions. And fiction is like the opposite of that. It’s all the shades of gray.
 
LI
Absolutely.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I was curious. I'd read something else–I guess you must have–you witnessed an execution before?
 
LI
Yes, that was when I was, even before elementary school. So probably when I was 5.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Wow, that’s quite extreme.
 
LI
Yes, it’s interesting. I didn’t really feel anything weird. As children, everything comes to you very naturally because you just remember these moments without understanding them. And only when you’re a grown-up you look back you realize there’s more to that understanding.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So was The Vagrants sort of your way of making sense of that, and then the wider story of what happened in that time?
 
LI
Yes, I think so. And I felt it has the setting of 1978-79 which sort of overlapped with my views and my confusion and in a way, I think writing is always a way to sort out your confusion.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, because you were saying, you were taught never to put your thoughts into words, and that must have come out of the cultural revolution. Do you think your writing is part of—you were formed by the cultural revolution in a way?
 
LI
Well, certainly my decision not to write in Chinese is formed by that, I think. Not to put your thoughts into words is a lifelong issue. My parents and they would teach us these things, and so you learn early on these things are not– you’re not supposed to do these things, and I think for me– it’s interesting because as I look back, I think maybe I didn’t have any thoughts because when I was told not to put thoughts into words, maybe I just didn’t have the words for my thoughts. Maybe I only started to really think hard when I started to think in English. So in that sense, maybe I think English is not my second language, but both are my first language. So I would say yes, I think the long detour to writing was partly formed by the cultural revolution.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And I can imagine how frustrating, as someone who is a potential writer and is curious about people to have people hiding their thoughts and not saying. I mean, there is almost like a constant mystery to try to figure out what’s really being thought, and what’s really going on. Did you find you were like that, as a kid? Very curious, asking lots of questions?
 
LI
I was really curious and never asked questions because you also learned quickly not to ask questions. I mean that is very Chinese. When you were young, you were not as confident as you wanted to be so whatever you wanted to know people really did not care about those things. So I didn’t ask questions, but I was very curious. I offended people when I was really young because I was so curious I would stare at them, just for a long time.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Me too. I did that kind of stuff.
 
LI
I know, isn’t that fun, to stare at people. People would really be offended, and they would say very mean things because we were staring at them, so I was curious, yes. And that’s the part where nobody really explained the world to me.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It’s nice to have wonder. It’s really unfortunate, that’s sort of the thing about growing up. You’re supposed to learn not to do these things, not to step on people’s personal space, but the wonder of the child–and I think that’s what all kinds of writers, all kinds of artists, have–this wonder, this curiosity. It’s fortunate for their career that they can keep that alive. It keeps you young, in effect. So, of all the characters you’ve written, who is the closest to your own personality, would you say?
 
LI
That’s a very difficult question. All my characters…I would say the narrator in Kindness, the novella. I think she probably is close to me in many ways. Not my story, but she speaks in a voice that is close to my voice.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
She also has your reading habits.
 
LI
She does, certainly, she does. She loves a lot of writers I do as well. And then I think also with The Vagrants—people ask about that too—with The VagrantsI felt when I was writing it, I felt very close to Teacher Gu, the old man. I sort of felt I lived with all the characters in that novel. But I lived the novel through him more than anybody else. He’s close to me. And then with Kinder than Solitude, it’s very interesting. It’s so difficult, I felt—I still feel very close to Aunt, the mother. 
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I thought about the silence too, her quietness.
 
LI
I mean certainly I am mystified by her and joined to her, but I also feel very close to her. And I asked my best friend, and she likes her too, which is very reassuring.
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I don’t know if you want me to say–because it’s a bit of a spoiler to say that–but I don’t consider her a real murderer. It’s complicated.
 
LI
It is. Someone asked me if she did intend to murder. I don’t think she even knows herself. She just half-heartedly does things, and when you talk of the consequences, it’s interesting because for her she views the world a little differently from us. When I say from us, I mean from everyday people. But she actually did not think about the consequences and, I don’t know, she’s just not concerned with consequences, which is fascinating to me. 
 
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's like she looks at her actions from the perspective of a long time–how do you say–it's like a leader views things that happen that are incidental. Like a death as opposed to the big scheme, the big story.
 
LI
Yes, I know, when you think of the way she looks at herself, I always imagine, like you turn the telescope the wrong way, and you put your hand in front of the telescope, and your hand becomes further away? And it’s really far and small and boring? And I think the whole life she has lived is that way. Like this reverse telescope, and she can look at her life, and somehow she can say, “That life is so far from me,” but I think there are just only a few moments in that novel where she says, “Well, that’s me.” Most of the time she says, “That’s someone. That someone is interesting.”
 
To continue reading:
https://www.pennreview.org/interview-yiyun-li-the-creative-process
 
 
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PORTRAIT OF YIYUN LI
by Mia Funk
 
“There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country,and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”
–YIYUN LI
 
I liked the image suggested by Li’s description of looking at life through an old and a new pair of eyes. Her writing is characterized by subtlety and characters who do not always directly express their emotions. Often their true feelings, motives, actions are submerged, and so I thought it would be interesting to show Li with her eyes closed, with her face reflected in the water.
 
Li told me about her admiration for Patricia Highsmith’s stories, which she calls “masterful because nothing happens. Really, nothing happens and you feel the danger, the threatening that something is going to happen, like a death or something, but really nothing happens. And I think that touch, it’s the same touch. It’s to allude the reader rather than to impose something on you.”
 
Things happen in Li’s books, of course, but her writing also has an alluding touch. And so I thought it would be more interesting for the figure on top to have her eyes closed. I saw her as a kind of iceberg in warm waters. Writers often say that they feel most alive when they are writing, effectively, when they are dreaming, so for me, it made sense for the face of Li above the water to have her eyes closed.
 
Now that she has lived over 20 years in America, the majority of her adult life, she told me she’s “on the cusp of becoming an outsider, and on the cusp of becoming a foreigner in China. I know the language, I can decipher people’s facial expressions which, all of those things are super helpful. So you’re both inside and outside at the same time.”
 
So these were some of the sources I drew on when I was doing her double portrait, as well as her books A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and Kinder than Solitude.