REVIEW : From a dark past, luminous tales
Posted on Sunday, December 18, 2005
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Books/140003/
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li, Random House, 203 pages, $ 21. 95
In the 1960 s, my father subscribed
to an English-language Chinese
newspaper called the Peking Review. He laughs when he recalls how the paper devoted regular and lengthy articles to, among other newsworthy items, Chairman Mao’s swimming regimen. At the age of 73, the Great Helmsman was reported to have swum nine miles up the Yangtze River in just over an hour. At the time, the cult of Mao was in full swing, the Cultural Revolution was just beginning and propaganda that was considered preposterous and laughable by American standards was being foisted with ruthless zeal upon the Chinese population. While communism, dictators and the Cultural Revolution are mentioned in Yiyun Li’s new book of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, these topics serve not as a main theme, but rather as the backdrop for the personal and family dramas that play out in her stories. Li, a native Chinese who came to the United States as a student a decade ago, offers her readers an up-close and personal view of modern Chinese life, set in China and the United States. While writers like Amy Tan explore the lives of Chinese-Americans clashing with a Chinese culture to which they no longer wholly belong, Li gives us characters for whom an oppressive past reverberates stronger than any current Western influences. Li pulls back the curtains and lets us peek into the lives of people who have survived their country’s past, and have the scars to show it.
TWO GODS Those people include Han, a zuanshi-wanglaowu, or “diamond bachelor,” so named because of his American citizenship and dollar-based income. In “Son,” Han, a gay man living in San Francisco, travels home to China to visit his mother, a formerly devout Communist who has traded in her party card for a baptismal certificate and a Bible. What disturbs Han is not her new faith, but that the church she has chosen has been approved, and licensed, by the state. For Han, who has finally escaped the shackles of a repressive government, a religion sanctioned by the government seems nothing but a new form of mind slavery. “The church you go to, the god you talk about,” Han says to his mother, “it’s all made up so people like you can be tricked. Don’t you know that all the state-licensed churches recognize the Communist Party as their only leader ? Maybe someday you will even come up with the old conclusion that God and Marx are the same.”
In another story, titled “Immortality,” a boy possesses a remarkable resemblance to the dictator (who, the narrator relates, is never referred to as a “dictator,” but as “Our Father, Our Savior, the North Star of Our Lives, the Never Falling Sun of Our Era” ). While the townsmen quake in fear at this dubious gift, not knowing whether they will be killed for honoring the boy’s likeness to the leader or killed for not doing so, the boy’s resemblance grows stronger each day, until finally, as a grown man, he is whisked away to audition for the part of official impersonator of the now-deceased leader. After a training period in which he and the other look-alike candidates learn to imitate the dictator’s speech and comportment, the unnamed protagonist wins the contest. The others, before they are allowed to return home, undergo plastic surgery to alter their looks, because “there are things that are not allowed to exist in duplicate.”
A NEW VOICE Mostly, Li’s stories focus on the everyday family drama of her characters. In one especially poignant story, “Extra,” an older woman first learns the joy of love when she befriends a neglected little boy at the boarding school where she works. In “Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way,” a girl who lives behind the walls of the nuclear research center called “The Institute” visits her old nanny and the woman’s husband, both of whom live in a little corner of the large villa that once belonged to them before “the liberation.” In “Persimmons,” a gentle man commits a crime to avenge the death of his son, and in “The Princess of Nebraska,” two Chinese expatriates meet in a McDonald’s restaurant to discuss an abortion and the man they both love.
Throughout the stories, Li uses a direct tone befitting the simple tales of her characters, a spare style that resulted, initially, from her lack of English language skills. Remarkably, Li never wrote any fiction until she came to the United States, and then she wrote only in English, rather than in her native tongue. Nabokov, who began his literary career writing in his native Russian before gaining fame as an English-language novelist, once remarked that the conversion had been agony. But for Li, the opportunity to write in a second language appears to have opened up a new world, for her as a writer and for us as readers. Like the daughter in this book’s title story, Li discovered a new voice along with her new language. “We live in a wrong time,” says one of her characters. “We were born into a wrong place, is what our problem is,” replies another. It seems that Li found just the right time and place to tell her luminous, beautifully-written tales of characters struggling to emerge from the shadows of a dark past.