Yiyun Li - Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories

As always, I am deeply grateful to:

Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh, for taking extraordinary care of my work; Kate Medina and Nicholas Pearson, for their continuing support; Cressida Leyshon, for the many great discussions about stories.

Amy Leach and Aviya Kushner, for being indefatigable friends.

Dapeng, Vincent, and James, for their love.

Mr. William Trevor, for his generosity and kindness.

ALSO BY YIYUN LI

The Vagrants
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Y IYUN L I is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.

Reading Group Questions and Discussion Topics for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl:

1. It seems that none of the stories from the collection can straightforwardly be called a happy story, yet happiness is never far from the characters minds. For instance, in , the unnamed young woman believes that she was happiest when she sat with a young man who had gone crazy from torture, because she could be like a piece of harmless furniture to him. What are other instances of happiness for the characters in this collection? What have the characters given up to achieve their happiness, and what do these compromises reveal about the characters and the time they live in?

2. Every one of the stories in the collection has a love story, or several love stories, in it. What are the moments in these stories when love transcends the bleakness and fatality of humankind, as the young woman in calls it at the end of the story?

3. Many of the stories are set in China at a time when the modern world clashes with traditions, creating situations that baffle the characters and change their lives in one way or another. For instance, in , a young woman finds herself the object of a great deal of media attention when she petitions to have a baby with her husband, who is on death row. What are some other situations that you find especially fascinating or perplexing in these stories? Do you think these situations are particular to life in China, or are they more universal?

4. The beauty of human memory is that, in any given moment, each of us is living multiple lives, anchored in different time periodsour decisions and perceptions about our lives reflect not only the present moment but also what has been carried on in our memories. History, especially Chinese history in the past fifty years, has given Lis characters richly layered memories. Which of their memories moved you most, and why?

5. Many of the stories feature older charactersan old woman unwilling to give her son and daughter-in-law control of her life in . What do you think Li, a writer in her thirties, has done to make these characters believable? What makes their stories important and compelling?

6. Many of the stories are set in China, which, in the past thirty years, has transformed itself with dazzling speed. Yet in any society, during any given period, human nature evolves at a much slower pace. What are some of the beauties and follies of human nature that you have seen in the characters that seem to have remained unchanged, despite the surface excitement of a new country and a new millennium?

7. The centerpiece of the collection is the novella . What sorts of kindness and unkindness are present in the novella? And in the other stories? How do the characters in these stories come to term with the kindness and unkindness of their fates?

8. Despite the major and minor tragedies many of these characters have to live with, there are moments in each story when a character allows him- or herself to envision a future , ends with Siyus thought that they were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness. What are other instances when the characters, despite the harshness or bleakness of their lives, do not lose their ability to imagine a better future?

9. Li grew up in China, and English is not her first language. Is there anything about her writing that would indicate this to you, if you didnt know already? What do you think makes her writing stand out, as a writer in a second language?

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. Apart from a trip to a cheap seaside resort, taken with my parents the summer I turned five, I have not traveled much; I spent a year in an army camp in central China, but other than that I have never lived away from home. In college, after a few failed attempts to convince me of the importance of being a community member, my adviser stopped acknowledging my presence, and the bed assigned to me was taken over by the five other girls in the dorm and their trunks.

I have not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends, though as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting; never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.

I teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone elses life.

I have no hobby that takes me outside my flat during my spare time. I do not own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a century older than I am. I have never in my life hurt a soul, or, if I have done any harm unintentionally the pain I inflicted was the most trivial kind, forgotten the moment it was feltif indeed it could be felt in any way. But that cannot be a happy life, or much of a life at all, you might say. That may very well be true. Why are you unhappy? To this day, if I close my eyes I can feel Lieutenant Weis finger under my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. Tell me, how can we make you happy?

The questions, put to me twenty-three years ago, have remained unanswerable, though it no longer matters, as, you see, Lieutenant Wei died three weeks ago, at forty-six, mother of a teenage daughter, wife of a stationery merchant, veteran of Unit 20256, Peoples Liberation Army, from which she retired at forty-three, already afflicted with a malignant tumor. She was Major Wei in the funeral announcement. I do not know why the news of her death was mailed to me except perhaps that the funeral committeeit was from such a committee that the letter had come, befitting her statusthought I was one of her long-lost friends, my name scribbled in an old address book. I wonder if the announcement was sent to the other girls, though not many of them would still be at the same address. I remember the day Lieutenant Weis wedding invitation arrived, in a distant past, and thinking then that it would be the last time I would hear from her.