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BY LARRY ROHTER
OAKLAND, California – Growing up in Beijing as the daughter of a physicist, Yiyun Li seemed destined for science. But she would surreptitiously read from Tang dynasty poetry while “pretending to do math.” Years later, studying for a Ph.D. in immunology at the University of Iowa, she read short stories clipped from The New Yorker as she did lab work.
“My parents were very much against writing and even very much against me reading literature, which they thought put wrong thoughts in your head,” she recalled. “I don’t think they liked me reading anything but science.”
About a dozen years ago, Ms. Li abandoned medicine and enrolled in the renowned writing program at Iowa. Since then, she has published two highly praised short-story collections, written a pair of novels, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” (a no-strings attached stipend of $625,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years) and been named to lists of “ best young American writers.”
Yet, when she arrived in the United State in 1996, she had written nothing in either Chinese or English, a language she could speak, if not yet colloquially.
“She’s an interesting case for a writer writing in a second language,” said John Freeman, a former editor of Granta, the British literary magazine that named Ms. Li, now 41, to its best young novelist list.
“There’s an elegance and smoothness to her writing that is actually disguising the quite passionate and intense feelings of equivocation and loss that her characters feel.”
Ms. Li’s latest novel, “Kinder than Solitude,” from Random House, shifts between China and the United States. Its four main characters start out as adolescent friends growing up around a Beijing courtyard in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After the oldest is poisoned, perhaps by one of the others, the survivors drift apart: One becomes a prosperous but soulless businessman riding China’s economic boom, while the other two flee to America, settling in college towns like Berkeley, Madison and Cambridge but never quite learning how to fit in.
Because of these immigrant touches, Ms. Li is often grouped with novelist like Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart and Daniel Alarcon as a first-generation “new American” writer. But she points out that she came to the United State as an adult, and did not grow up bilingual.
“I actually don’t know what an immigrant writer should be written about,” she said, “and if you look at my characters, they don’t struggle as immigrants. They actually do fairly well. If they want, they can have a good life. It’s more that they have to deal with their internal struggles” and the problems they bring from China.
Ms. Li seems to have adapted smoothly to America. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and described ferrying her sons, Vincent and James, to music lessons and sports; her husband, Dapeng Li, who was her college sweetheart in China, is a software engineer at the Pandora music service.
Ms. Li said that in China she did not write anything in Chinese, except a journal she kept as a teenager. Though most of her characters are Chinese, when she hears them talking in her head, they are speaking English. English “felt very natural to me very fast,” she said. “I think in English, I dream in English. I came to English as a grown-up, which is probably to my advantage. The disadvantage is that you don’t have that intimacy with the language.”
The writer Amy Leach, a classmate at Iowa and still a close friend, said, “We’ve talked about how it can be an advantage not to have all those ready-made clichés springing to your mind and precluding more original thinking and wording.”
Ms. Li said, “You miss a lot of idioms, cultural things,” if you don’t go to middle school or high school in the language. “On the other hand, I think if you do approach a language as a grown-up and then use it to write, you also bypass a lot of silliness.”
Taken from The New York Times International Weekly, TODAY Saturday Edition, March 8, 2014
