Interview with Yiyun Li
The Nassau Literary Review is honored to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by
faculty and students of Princeton University in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.
YIYUN LI
Interviewed by Mia Funk
Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands — the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries…[she] is the real deal.”
Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
In the US, she discovered her love for literature and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with Marilynne Robinson, whom she credits for teaching her to read deeply, but the writers which Li says have been a deeper influence on her are William Trevor, Elisabeth Bowen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.
I met Li in Paris during the Festival des Écrivains du Monde and reconnected a few months later for this phone interview.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I was wondering — since you came to America, got married and had children — how do you feel your writing has changed over the years?
YIYUN LI
It’s interesting because I actually became a writer after I had my first child, so I’ve always been a mother, I suppose. I’ve been a mother longer than I have been a writer. I think for me at one point, you’re writing in this vacuum, and all of a sudden you realize your children are growing up and you realize that one day they’re going to read your writing. That’s a little different. That’s always at the back of my mind, so I wouldn’t say my fiction has changed greatly, except I think — how do I put this — I would think twice before putting a child through suffering.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, this is something you were talking about before, about your mother not reading your fiction. And now you have this other element of responsibility for your own children; I can understand how that’s an issue. But I feel your writing is so delicate that even when you write about something shocking, like a poisoning, murder, or infidelity, it’s done with such lightness of touch that I think you needn’t worry about sharing it with your children.
LI
I don’t actually worry so much because I know they have read some of my work. So I think it’s just interesting, you may have a fiction world, and you think this world has nothing to do with your life, but it’s not true. The fiction world and real life, they actually overlap sometimes.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
This is interesting because it’s something that immigrants possibly think more about because immigration is an act of reinvention, right?
LI
Yes, absolutely.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So you come to America, and you begin telling your story a lot because people are asking you, and so you begin to think of your life with a beginning, a middle and an end. It seems like a great advantage — for a writer to be able to draw on two languages, to have many stages of your life…
LI
Yes, I think it’s especially interesting, as you say, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think for those of us who have crossed borders, the artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut — old life, that’s old country, and there’s new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there’s always that ambivalence — Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In the title story of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yilan says that she grew up in a language which she never used to express her feelings– something she only learned to do when she found herself in a new language — English.
LI
It’s interesting because that line is often quoted. For better or for worse, people quote that line. And I hate to say it, but that’s my feeling. I don’t want to align myself with that character, but I do think that’s true when you have a new language, especially this language you have gained. Other than that which is given to you by your mother tongue, you have gained this new language. You have gained a lot of new skills with the language. You have gained a vocabulary you don’t have in your mother tongue, and those things are important.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Especially that moment when you’re not proficient at it, you can be more honest because you don’t have the choice of being so elegant and diplomatic. You can’t hide yourself so much.
LI
Yes, and you have to be to the point sometimes, right?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It’s almost like an actor. You are yourself, but you are also embodying a role. The way an actor becomes himself even though he is playing a role who is not him. You have the freedom to express a different part of yourself?
LI
I agree with you, and I think, especially if you take the script away from the actors, just give them minimum words. Yes, they have to find the exact words to say the exact things that they need to say. And I think all immigrants went through that stage.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
One of the reasons why I enjoy your novels and stories is that they explore old-fashioned themes like duty, shame, honor, loss of face, suppressed emotion, collective responsibility… and this is not addressed by a lot of writers because of the way society is now.
LI
I think I might be an old-fashioned writer. (Li laughs.) People often comment that I’m a 19th-century writer. And I think maybe it’s true. I think there are different ways to look at the world. I think it’s not because my characters live in an older world. If you look at, for instance, Americans, I think they do feel shame, these oppressed feelings. I look around at Americans around me, I think they feel these things acutely, but it’s not something that would be oftentimes recent by American writers. I do think American writers write different things or they focus on different themes. So for me, I’m just drawn to those characters, and I’m drawn to those themes.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
To me, I don’t think it’s so old-fashioned, but it’s a contemporary truth for certain people. So to me, because I grew up in a multi-generational immigrant family, that’s normal to me.
LI
Where are your grandparents from?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
They’re Chinese from my grandfather, not Mandarin-speaking. But I left that culture and America, where most of my family lives now, when I was very young.
LI
You have Irish background too?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, Irish as well. I’m Irish-American, and I have an Irish passport, too.
LI
See, so you understand it’s a mixing. And I actually think the Irish and Chinese are quite alike in many ways.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Ah, that’s strange, yes, because you have an affinity, I think, you spoke about William Trevor being one of your “teachers.”
LI
Yes, and I think so, yes.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And because, that’s an interesting thing too, because it’s not spoken about a lot by all my Chinese friends. I don’t know, but when I was growing up, I think the impression is, among Americans, that they lump all the Asians together. And I don’t think that Asians are still perceived as being very humorous. But the Chinese are very funny. When you said to me they have a lot in common with the Irish, I think that that’s one of the things.
LI
Yes, it’s interesting because when people lump people together, I think they lack imagination in a way even– they look at your skin color, they look at your hair color, they put you together. I don’t know if you read– I think last year there was this Irish man in Brooklyn, and he went to China to become a stand-up comedian.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I heard about him.
LI
He said something like, “Well the Irish and the Chinese are similar.” And I said, “Oh I’ve said that for years” and it’s just the humor and everything. But it’s harder to imagine the wider audience if you’re from a different part of the world and you look differently.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, well, I think it’s changing now, but it’s also because, I don’t know, not to talk about racism but there is this perception. And because in Western countries you’re still not seeing a lot of representation of Asians — of any kind of Asian, there is still this foreignness. It is changing, but it’s good too when you’re not over-exposed as well because then, as you say, you can always be redefining yourself.
Another thing to talk about is your style. What I love about your writing, and I think what you’re probably known for is these small human observations and the lightness of touch, like reserve. I love it. I think there is a Lao Tzu saying, “The fish must put his own mouth on the hook.” And I think that that’s how a reader feels when they’re reading your fiction. It’s just suggested, the hook is there, but we have to imagine it. We have to go after it.
LI
Yes, and I strongly believe reading is as important as writing. And I don’t mean my reading, but the reader’s reading. I think that, with Nabokov, the readers do have a job, the writers do have [a job], and they meet at the tip top of the mountain. And I think that requires a certain kind of reader. Not every reader has the patience; not every reader has the time to think or the willingness to imagine. But for me, I think I write for those readers who like to imagine with me and so I’m not sprouting up things for them. I think they have to lift to a certain moment and I think that might always be the case.
To continue reading:
prismmagazine.ca/interview-yiyun-li-the-creative-process
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