In 2005, a new literary star emerged with a collection of short stories that immediately started to hoover up awards. Yiyun Li was a 33-year-old science graduate of Peking University, a former maths prodigy who had emigrated from China to the US to study immunology and had taken up creative writing in an effort to improve her English. Within two years, she had been listed as one of Granta’s 21 best young American novelists, without actually having published a novel, and two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers had been made into films by the Chinese American director Wayne Wang.
In two novels and a second short story collection published over the next decade she continued to focus on Chinese lives, observed through a long-distance telescope, but then suddenly everything changed. She started to write about herself, she embraced the first person for the first time in her fiction, and she began to range beyond China. “At the beginning,” says Li, from her home in Princeton, New Jersey, where she has a day job as a professor of creative writing, “people thought: ‘Here is a very nice Chinese lady who could write in English’ – but I’m not that kind of nice, friendly lady who can also just write a little. Being subversive is important to me. And part of being subversive is not to follow the narratives that are most convenient.”
