Quotes of the Day

In the fall of 1991, at the age of 18, Yiyun Li reported to the barren city of Xinyang for a year in the Chinese army. The government had decreed that any student bound for Beijing's Peking University, as Li was, first had to complete a period of military training and political re-education—an ideological vaccine in the wake of Tiananmen. Li had been a high school student in Beijing during the protests, too young to take part herself, but she knew what had happened. That knowledge was dangerous. "Imagine a zipper on your mouth," her mother told Li before she left for the army. "Zip it up tight." But Li would not be muzzled. Despite the risk, she told her comrades of the massacre, of the corpses she had seen piled high in a hospital, and of the government's hollow insistence that none of this had happened. "I couldn't help myself," Li says now. "I was in a suicidal mode all year."

She got lucky—a friendly superior's decision not to report Li's blasphemies saved her from serious trouble. Once out of the army, she heeded her mother's advice and stayed silent. In college, Li worked singlemindedly with the hope of escaping to America, and she finally left China in 1996 to study immunology at the University of Iowa. There, in the American Midwest, Li regained her voice—and discovered it was in English. Despite her initially limited command of the written language, she eventually dropped her plans to become a scientist and earned writing degrees from Iowa's prestigious graduate program. She soon began publishing astonishingly mature short stories in magazines like The New Yorker and earned a $200,000 publishing deal from Random House at the age of 31. Now she has released her first book, a short-story collection titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Though Li has rarely returned to her homeland since her departure a decade ago, the best stories in this volume, written in her flawlessly pure and limpid prose, fully capture China's wrenching social changes. In "Extra," Granny Lin finds she has been "honorably retired" from her state-owned garment factory—which means the plant has gone bankrupt and Lin won't be getting her pension. She's lucky enough to find a new job as a maid at one of the posh new private schools sprouting outside Beijing, but it's not long before Lin discovers she has no real place in this new world. In another story, "Immortality," the rise and fall of a professional Mao impersonator comes to symbolize China's astounding past century, from decaying empire to totalitarian nightmare to capitalist powerhouse. The story, which won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for first fiction, is narrated collectively by the citizens of the impersonator's home village, as if all of them are speaking in a single voice. The effect is as mesmerizing as an incantation, and a reminder of the constant presence of the communal in China. When Mao scoffs at the threat of U.S. nukes, the villagers take heart. "For the years to come, we will live with our eyes turned to the sky, waiting for the American bombs to rain down on us, waiting to prove to the dictator our courage, and our loyalty." Li knows the warm grip of collective insanity.

Like the author herself, Li's characters seem free to reinvent themselves only when they've left China behind. In the title story, a retired scientist named Mr. Shi goes to the U.S. to visit his newly divorced adult daughter and discovers, as he hears her speaking to a man in English over the phone, that she has become someone else. (When he finds out his daughter's new boyfriend is from Romania, Mr. Shi tries to stay positive: "At least the man grew up in a communist country.") In their reborn American selves, father and daughter achieve a level of honesty, however painful, that was impossible in China. "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," the daughter explains to him. "It makes you a new person"—a sentiment echoed in Li's own experience.

Li, who now teaches at Mills College in Oakland, California, is already deep into her first novel, and she's looking to broaden her subject matter beyond China. That's good for her, but a loss for readers hungry to understand her changing homeland. Li is an invaluable resource. China's post-Tiananmen generation has produced precious few serious authors, and virtually none who can write with Li's fluency in English. It seems that exile has become a requirement for China's most honest writers—the country's only Nobel prizewinner, Gao Xingjian, lives in France—but Li's exile may prove short-lived. In 2004 Li applied for permanent residency in the U.S., but her first attempt was denied on the grounds that she had not sufficiently distinguished herself in her field of endeavor to earn a green card. (She still has a valid temporary visa.) Li is reapplying, but she knows the odds for a writer could be long. To earn residency, she explains, "You need to prove that you're extraordinary. But it's hard to prove that you're an extraordinary artist!" For Yiyun Li, the proof is on the page.

• Bryan Walsh
• Freed by the English language, Yiyun Li dissects modern China in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers