Modern China’s heartbreaks open up in new masterpiece
by Rob Neufeld
Shake loose the best-seller lists and book industry mega-promotions, and sample what’s new in trade paperback.
Just out is Yiyun Li’s collection of nine stories, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” a deep look into personal lives in modern China. The first entry, “Kindness,” 80 pages long, is one of the great short stories in literature.
The collection, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” is the subject of Book Discussion X at Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, Thurs., Nov 17.
The magnificent novella
In “Kindness,” a lonely third grade math teacher reflects on the time, 23 years earlier, when she’d been in military camp. Our perception of her transforms in a greatly warming way, as does her perception of herself.
If you want to see a personality flower, read “Kindness.”
“I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers,” Moyan begins her narration.
Regarding her students, she thinks, “I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives.”
The world of Moyan—China a generation after the death of Mao—is a repressive place. Sex, romance, and individualism go underground in a society in which authoritarianism masks itself as a peasant revolution.
This is Li’s modern China, not the world of Amy Tan novels, in which traditional aunties carry their folkways to the West Coast.
The folklore that crops up in “Kindness” is remote. Moyan’s mother sees herself living a sad fairy tale, but romance novels are her bedridden addiction. Hearing owls on guard duty, Moyan recalls her father’s eyebrow rubbing charm.
“I remembered the story—one of the few my father had told me,” Moyan relates, “about the owls that carried the message of death: They would spend each night counting the hairs in a person’s eyebrows, and when they finished counting at daybreak, that person would die.”
On guard duty, another girl, Jie, leaves her post to sit back-to-back with Moyan. Jie confesses she’d once done it with a boy, but could not remember the details.
“How could one forget such things,” Moyan wonders. Later in her life, Moyan realizes, “I have never forgotten any person who has come into my life.”
Enduring love
As it turns out, Moyan is not just the alienated person of the opening paragraphs, but also an exceptionally empathetic person. The repression of this aptitude is the heaviest of the country’s hurts. Yet, Moyan works it out. She discovers kindness in many places: her parents’ accommodating marriage; her squad leader’s reaching out to her as a fellow lonely person; the misdirected mentorship of an old teacher; and herself.
The mentor, Professor Shan, had lost her job because of the discovery of her orphan past; and had been abandoned by her husband (mysteriously) and by her children, emigrants to the U.S. She singled Moyan out, took her under her wing, and read her Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence.
“When one is young,” Professor Shan commented, “one thinks of love as the most important thing. It’s natural if you think so, though I do hope you’ve learned a few things from the books I’ve read to you.”
Though Professor Shan is a “usurper” of Moyan’s selfhood, she is also a loved one, for Moyan dwells on her. It’s as in the story’s beginning, when Moyan mentions her recurring dreams about her brutal camp commander, Lt. Wei.
“The dreams have become less wicked as the years have gone by,” Moyan relates, remembering recent dreams. “I’m back, I tell Lieutenant Wei; I always knew you would be back, she replies.”
For Li, memory equals an ongoing relationship, which equals love.
Literature as ambassador
The English literature-reading that flows into “Kindness” is noteworthy. You will find a similar influence in Dai Sijie’s 2001 novel, “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” and in “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi calls American and European literature the West’s best ambassador.
Hearing Professor Shan read “David Copperfield” to her, Moyan compares its consciousness-dawning effect to “the moment a child first understands the world in words, when what is spoken to her has not yet taken on a definite meaning, but she becomes more confident each day that there is a message behind those jumbled sounds.”
There are parts of “Kindness” that remind me of Southern Mountain literature. Unlike the other girls in camp, Moyan finds the farm chores and long marches through countryside heavenly, despite pig pens and foot blisters.
Li did not need to add these nature-loving parts, even though Professor Shan had told Moyan that trees are better than people. But the author was able to give her character yet one more dimension.
The art of “Kindness” is its most relevant feature. The theme is universal, and the way it’s put forward, through multiple epiphanies, is memorable. I counted ten acts of kindness in “Kindness.” They’re radiant.
The other stories in the book
“A Man like Him,” about a retired art teacher who gets to know a blogged-about adulterer.
“Prison,” about a Chinese-American woman who loses a daughter and goes to China to select a surrogate mother to bear her second child.
“The Proprietress,” about a refuge for wives and children of inmates.
“House Fire” about six elderly women who form a detective agency.
“Number Three, Garden Road” about a 45-year-old housing development, and two old residents making a new life.
“Sweeping Past.” about a three-girl sisterhood and a fatal pact.
“Souvenir,” about an old man who accosts a teenage girl buying condoms in a store.
“Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” about a teacher, her middle-aged son, and her prize student, who form an unorthodox triangle.
More about the book, author, and events
Yiyun Li was born in Beijing in 1972. She came to the U.S. to get a Ph.D. in immunology at the University of Iowa in 1996, and switched to the famous MFA writer’s program in 2000. Her first book, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” won the 2005 PEN/Hemingway award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She published “Vagrants,” a novel, in 2009. She has won the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship; and has been named one of the Best Young American Novelists by “Granta.” She lives in Oakland with her husband and two sons and teaches at University of California at Davis.
Book Discussion X discusses Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li at Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, Grove Arcade, Asheville 7 p.m., Thurs., Nov 17, . Call 252-0020.
“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” by Dai Sijie will be the book under discussion at North Asheville Library, 1030 Merrimon Ave., Asheville, 2 p.m., Tues., Nov. 15. Call 250-4752.
