The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘How Yiyun Li Became a Beacon for Readers in Mourning’

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

Yiyun Li has garnered legions of fans with her unsparing prose, writing extensively about her own struggles with depression and suicidality.Her latest novel, “The Book of Goose,” is no different, sharing the same quality that has made Ms. Li something of a beacon to those suffering beneath unbearable emotional weight.Alexandra Kleeman, also a novelist, meets Ms. Li to discover the secrets of her charm, her experience of growing up in China and her writing process.This story was written by Alexandra Kleeman and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Hi, my name's Alexandra Kleeman. I'm a novelist and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. When I write fiction, I get to construct a universe. But with a profile, I have to really observe and come to understand someone as they are. Who is the person behind the work? And so, this Sunday read you're about to hear is a profile I got to write about maybe the most well-known writer's writer in the literary world, Yi Yun Li.

Yi Yun's had a pretty stunning career. When she was young, reading material was scarce in Beijing, where she grew up. She was so hungry to read every scrap of text she could that she'd save the newspaper from the fishmonger to read later in private. Later in life, she attended the best university in China and then eventually came to Iowa to work on a PhD in immunology. But during that time, she began writing stories in private while working in a hospital. She wrote in English.

And before she had any academic training, before she attended any MFA program, she got a story published in the Paris Review. I followed Yiyan's work for many years. I think she's someone who can put difficult emotions on the page in this really crisp, new, and complex way, particularly grief. I know several people who, after losing someone close, have been pointed toward her books. And I think it's because Yi Yan manages to avoid all the prepackaged things that people tell you about loss. Yi Yan wrote a novel based on the loss of her son,

titled Where Reason Ends, which was published in 2019. The book is a conversation between a mother and a son who's no longer here. It's a perfect combination of form and feeling, even though the story is told through a sparse dialogue. The strong presence of someone who no longer exists the same way they once did. And I think it's that paradoxical aspect of loss that Ian captures so well. Ian lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey, and I went out to visit her there a couple months ago.

She's just so curious about the world. She paused what we were talking about to examine swallowtail butterflies orbiting some flowers, or like a landscaper setting out a type of sprinkler we had never seen before. When you're with her, you see the world through that set of eyes, a landscaper setting out a type of sprinkler we had never seen before. When you're with her, you see the world through that set of eyes, and you're more aware of what's happening around you.

Now, there are those writers who'd love to tell you their story, but Yi'an would rather sit back and listen to yours. So here's my article, How Yi'an Li Became a Beacon for Readers in Morning, read other publications on your smartphone. Download Autumn on the App Store or the Play Store. Visit autumn.com for more details. As a teenager growing up in communist China, the expatriate novelist Yi Yunli discovered her gift for writing propaganda. She would channel language through the rhetorical modes of the great patriotic writers she had studied in school, spooling out long, moving passages

embroidered with beautiful clichés about boats returning to the motherland. There were moments in life when I would be performing those public speeches, knowing that I did not trust anything I said. She told me as we sat in the cool shadow of a library at Princeton University, where Lee teaches creative writing. She remembers gazing out at her audience after giving a patriotic speech and witnessing, with some horror, the tears on their faces. She couldn't believe how deeply they believed her.

I think that was the end of my relationship with Chinese, she said, her voice quiet and steady amid the sound of landscaping equipment buzzing in the summer heat. steady amid the sound of landscaping equipment buzzing in the summer heat. I know Chinese is beautiful. I love its poetry. But the moment I speak, I always think of that day I moved people to tears. Now 49, the author of 10 books and the recipient of countless honors, from a Whiting Award to Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships,

Li is repulsed by dogma. I would never say, I know this, I'm certain that this is the case. I will never say that in English, she told me. I feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty. Lee has a steady, serene gaze, her face youthfully round beneath dark cropped hair that shows a subtle web of gray. In her author photos, she exudes an almost zealous calm.

But in person, that intensity is mitigated, like sunlight filtered through leaves. She smiles easily, in a closed-mouthed way that can read as either stern or mischievous. Meticulous in her thinking, she takes even offhand questions seriously. But when, while walking through Princeton's Disney-esque downtown, we came across a comedic scene, a mannequin in a high-end clothing store window with its shorts unfastened and pulled down around its feet, spare limbs strewn around the floor. She stopped to take a series of photos from slightly different angles, delighted by this glimpse of chaos in an otherwise straight-laced shop full of boat shoes and chinos. When Lee describes herself,

she says that she can be quite dull, that she can become almost invisible in many situations. From time to time, she has had the experience of having someone talk at her vigorously for several minutes and then tell her that she's a wonderful conversationalist, even though she hasn't said a word. But as we wound our way slowly through the gothic grounds of the university, I was startled at how time seemed to arrange itself into singular, subtly memorable moments when I was at her side. A gardener explained to us how he feels in his body the parchedness of the plants. A little girl sitting with her parents

interrogated them about the Diet Coke that Lee was drinking, finally declaring, I want to drink that too. It was as if taking notice of others, as Lee does reflexively, also caused them to notice her. Details of behavior and character were heightened by her receptivity to the world. As we sat together on a smooth stone bench, we noticed an Asian girl of maybe 11 or 12 years old sitting a long arm's length away, watching us silently and steadily. We paused to ask her the sort of small, uninteresting questions that adults ask children. Are you visiting campus? Are you with your parents?

And she stared mutely, giving only the slightest one-shoulder shrug in response. mutely, giving only the slightest one-shoulder shrug in response. Both our minds turned naturally, unavoidably toward our observer as we tried to continue a conversation. Until once, when we looked up, we saw her walking away, her small hand hung lightly on her father's palm, gazing up at him and saying something that we could no longer hear. Long after we left, Lee was still thinking about the girl who watched us silently, who was so comfortable declining to speak. I think she was amazing, she said with reverence. I wonder what life is going to be like for that girl.

Wondering about a person, whether real or fictional, often marks the start of a story for Leigh, who has a habit of speaking about her characters as though they were people she knows personally, people she might have caught up with the week before. Her latest novel, The Book of Goose, being published in late September by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, found its origin point in a conversation between two adolescent girls living in post-war France, Agnès and Fabienne, that appeared in Lee's thoughts one day as though it were a private conversation she was eavesdropping on. Fabienne poses a question to Agnes. How do you grow happiness? When Agnes wonders whether happiness can be grown at all, Fabienne admonishes her, telling her, you can grow anything, just like potatoes. Fabienne proposes that the two of them try two different approaches, one growing happiness as though it were a crop of beets, the other growing it as though it were potatoes, a philosophical discussion about the

nature of the good life, conducted in their own private terminology. But in acquiescing, however innocently, to this nonsense proposition, Agnes begins the process by which their friendship will be cleaved in half. The Book of Goose is told from a point far in the story's future, by an older Agnes who looks back on their youth together with a mixture of sadness and amazement. The girls were two halves of one odd magnetic hole. But the effortless balance between them begins to shift when Fabienne decides that they should write a book together and eventually pressures Agnès to be the public face of the story collection. Agnès is thrust into the spotlight as a prodigy from rural France, embodying an authenticity and a natural talent that others are hungry to manipulate and shape.

An experience of literary fame that slyly echoes some of the ways in which others are hungry to manipulate and shape. An experience of literary fame that slyly echoes some of the ways in which others have tried to push Lee to write more appealing commercial novels, where Asian American families navigate broadly recognizable stories of assimilation and ambition. Ultimately, Lee admires both characters for their ability to create a path for themselves in an inhospitable time that offered little for women of their class other than manual labor and child-rearing. In the lineage of Elizabeth Bowen,

who defined flat characters as those who have no alternatives, Agnes and Fabienne fabricate alternatives out of pure imagination, the essence of a writer's work. Lee narrates from the fringes of her own experience, subverting the notion that a writer should be bounded by her own identity, that identity is both personal property and territory to be defended. She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way. There's her almost radical commitment to character and interiority over plot,

the way she elides political argument in favor of individual character studies, her personal canon of classic Russian authors intermingled with untrendy British and Irish writers like Rebecca West, John McGahern, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. She specializes in the movements, feints, and fragile suspensions of what she sometimes calls life with a lid on, borrowing a phrase from Bowen, stories capturing the richness and depth of inner life that is not guaranteed an outlet in action, or even outward expression.

Sometimes it feels to me like this almost old-fashioned 19th century sense of authorship. The novelist Garth Greenwell, who grew close to Lee in 2016 at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, told me, where one feels that the writer's attention toward her characters is like what one imagines God's attention to us would be like, this sort of utterly un-self-concerned, unsentimental love. A kind of brutal attention. Li was born in Beijing in 1972, the year President Richard M. Nixon visited China, and her earliest memory is of an earthquake that shook her awake in the middle of the night with its rolling rhythm. She and her family rushed out onto the street,

where she saw the entire neighborhood standing together in their underwear and bedclothes. I think that was the moment that I became a writer, she told me, watching all those people. The youngest of two daughters, raised by a father who was reticent about his work as a nuclear physicist and a mother who worked as a schoolteacher, she often preferred the position of an observer to that of the sentimental participant.

She was admonished by a teacher for turning to examine the expressions of her classmates during the memorial service for Chairman Mao. Growing up under communist austerity, she had a fierce appetite for stories, and never felt that there was enough to read. She would save the fragments of newspaper that fishmongers wrapped their wares in and unfurl them in private, or rush home during her school lunch break to listen to the serialized narratives read out over the radio each day at noon. Russian novels were more available in China at that time. She pored over Turgenev in particular, as well as Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov.

Around age 12, she began learning English in school and still remembers what it was like to open an English language book for the first time. I have to say this was my favorite memory, she said, laughing. When she began to read in English, the thing that struck her most acutely was the letter I running rampant across the page, disturbing in its profusion. She served her mandatory military service before attending Peking University on the science track, doing military drills and learning Marxist history during the day,

and reading pirated Reader's Digests on photocopied paper in her spare time. digests on photocopied paper in her spare time. In 1996, as a talented scientist with a degree from China's most prestigious university, Li moved to Iowa City to begin a PhD in immunology, researching the communication between T-cells and B-cells, two specialized types of white blood cells that work together to coordinate immune responses. In her 2017 memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, she wrote that she liked the concept of the immune system because its job is to detect and attack non-self. It has memories, some as long-lasting as life. Its memories can go awry selectively,

or worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to eliminate. After four years in her course of study, working with lab mice and giving birth to her first son, she told her husband that she no longer wanted to be a

scientist. She wanted to write. She took an evening class taught by a poet and wrote for two years on her own, working at a hospital during the days, until eventually she completed Immortality, an ambitious generation-spanning story written in the voice of a collective we, where individuals surface from the vast sea of the narration, taking a precious breath before they are enfolded once more in the brutal sweep of history, a movement replicated in one of Lee's favorite books, War and Peace. Immortality was plucked from the slush pile of the Paris Review and published by the editor at the time, Bridget Hughes, who has become a lifelong friend.

From then on, recognition came quickly. Admission to the highly selective Iowa Writers Workshop for an MFA in fiction, the Paris Review's coveted Plimpton Prize for debut short story writers, and a two-book deal for her first story collection and the novel The Vagrants, about a remote Chinese village and the consequences of the execution of a young local woman who resisted the communist order. Lee was 41 and writing Must I Go?, a novel about

a California woman named Lilia reflecting on her life and the untimely loss of her daughter to suicide when her eldest son took his own life at age 16. The tragic coincidence halted her work on the novel. Lee describes her family as stoic, and though they mourned in long-lasting ways, she went back to teaching the next week, fearful of spending unstructured time alone with her thoughts. The grief and pain that Lee carried with her took the shape of her lean, piercing 2019 novel, Where Reasons End, a fictional dialogue between a mother and a teenage son lost to suicide. They discuss literature and argue over the meaning of metaphors, and she tells him details of the physical world that he is no longer able to perceive. The weather, the new house they

moved into, the garden out back where his flowers bloom. Where Reasons End is startling in its spare, stark emotionality and its formal innovation, in its utter refusal of melodrama. When I first read it, familiar with the premise, I groped in my mind to find the emotional vantage point from which the story is told, because it is so different from most accounts of trauma and loss. Nikolai, the name given to the son and a name Lee's son sometimes used for himself in fiction, has a shifting, bantering, challenging presence throughout the book, and is ultimately so animated that the reader loses her grasp on his context, shifting back and forth between his impossible liveliness and the understanding,

apprehended again and again, that he is no longer alive. In prose that's tender and funny and at times painfully cutting, Lee manages to bestow on Nikolai that paradoxically ephemeral and enduring vitality that belongs only to fictional characters. Lee has become known for distilling the essence of unbearable grief, and doing so with exactitude and an unexpected lightness. She has written extensively about her own struggles with suicidality and depression, always in an elliptical, focused way that eludes cliche and familiar sentiment.

Uncharitably, one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much. Uncharitably, one writes to become closer to that feeling self, reads one aphoristic passage from her 2017 memoir. When editing difficult pieces, Lee and her editor at The New Yorker, Cressida Leishen, speak of putting a text under anesthesia, separating it from the pain of its content. People always say you dissect characters, you dissect the world, Lee says. But you cannot dissect anything until you have removed that. A result on the page is a shattering emotion stilled for examination, something that can be regarded without abandoning reason entirely. This quality has made Lee something of a beacon to those

suffering beneath unbearable weight, an unusual role for a person with reclusive tendencies. The most difficult messages Lee receives are from faraway teenagers struggling with suicidal impulses, and she tries to respond to every one. Sometimes, strangers write from circumstances very similar to her own. One message in particular left a lasting effect on her. I'm sure he had lost a child, but he didn't say that, Lee told me. He said, I've written to many people in my career, but I've never written to an author because of her work. And then he gave me a haiku by Isa about losing his child, and he said, this has sustained me for years. I hope it will sustain

you. The poem, written by the 18th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Isa, reads in its entirety, So this world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet. Lee balances a certain tension between reading as the ultimate act of privacy and as a way of connecting with other minds, both real and fictional. But during the early days of the pandemic, reading became for her a public square where people gathered at a distance.

As her friend Bridget Hughes shut down the offices of the literary journal A Public Space, Lee had plans to begin her annual re-reading of War and Peace, and they thought it might be interesting, in a time of forced solitude, to read the book collectively. What emerged was Tolstoy Together, a project where a large and diverse group of readers, including authors like Carl Phillips, Esme Weijun Wang, Matt Gallagher, and Amitava Kumar, portioned out the classic novel over the course of 85 days, reading daily observations from Lee about each section and posting their own. There was this extraordinary community of people who were all reading together,

on Twitter of all places, and I think that that gave the experience a certain momentum, Hughes told me over the phone, that you can sort of pop in and find a stranger who felt like a leader, or someone who noticed a detail that you had overlooked. To be invited into Lee's way of reading, she cycles through several books in a day, To be invited into Lee's way of reading, she cycles through several books in a day, focusing on 10 to 15 pages in each sitting, is to share in Lee's intimate relationships with the characters, letting their stories diffuse throughout the mundane tasks of living. Experiencing this book over such a stretch is like decanting it, the critic Alexander Schwartz wrote in The New Yorker about the

experience. It begins to breathe, to take on new color and flavor, and to perfume everything with its own essence. Lee's observations, eventually collected in a volume and published by a public space alongside a selection of reader comments, range from delight at the encapsulation of a character in the description of a handshake to ruminations on the Tolstoyan distinction between awkwardness and embarrassment. Lee writes that awkwardness is visible to all, but embarrassment is a sort of self-consciousness

experienced by only its subject. To moments of startling resonance in the way the crises of Tolstoy's time resemble our own, the mundane and the extraordinary sidling close, the softness and particularity of human beings bent into new shapes by historical forces. Lee writes, when people say you can skip the war parts of War and Peace and read the peace parts only, they may be saying, let's pretend we could skip this pandemic, or any catastrophe, uncertainty, and inconvenience,

and make the world go as we want it to. There's a Chinese proverb that translates, roughly, as, Please enter the urn. As the tale goes, a Tang Dynasty official who served as a member of the secret police was sent to extract a confession from a colleague suspected of conspiring against the Empress. Over a meal, he asked the man what he would do to extract a confession from a particularly recalcitrant subject. That's easy, the man said. I would get a big urn and set a fire beneath it. When you put the accused inside,

they will tell you everything. The official had an urn brought and a fire made, and then he turned to the man who had given him the idea and invited him to step in. Lee used the phrase in an email she sent before we met, after I asked her a question that I found in Where Reasons End. In the book, the mother confesses that what she really wishes she could ask others boils down to a single question. What do you do all day? How meddlesome, how intrusive, how impertinent, Nikolai replies. If days are where we live, the mother explains in response,

I will always want to know how people live in their days. When I asked Lee over email how she spends her days, she demurred, sending me the four characters that make up the proverb and promising to tell me more later. The next day, a long email came. She goes to the office and teaches. She swims at the on-campus pool. She reads five to ten hours a day and writes some days. But most of all, Lee wrote, she works to remain mid-thought throughout the day, suspended in a mindset of multiplicity and openness, full and empty at the same time. One has to be mid-thought when

one writes, she says. I don't think writing is the beginning of the thought. The beginning happens before we start typing the first word, and usually the thought doesn't end when a story or a novel ends. The thought, several thoughts, still goes on. When I arrived at Lee's home to see for myself how she lives in her days, she served me fruit salad from a large bowl, which she brought out of a refrigerator shaggy with family photos and handmade greeting cards. Though Lee's younger son, who is 17, was upstairs in his room, the only trace of him I could see was a stack of textbooks on Sami grammar, which he was studying for a linguistics project.

Traces of Lee's eldest son are as quietly present and as inevitable in their home as the punctuation at the end of a sentence. From their ecru-colored cockapoo, Quintus, named by him because it was the fifth member of the family, to the stories and small details she is continually sharing, like a proud parent whose child is off at college. This year, Lee celebrated his birthday by baking a Basque cheesecake, the sort of challenging, esoteric recipe that her son loved to perfect. In the garden, just beyond the glass,

swallowtail butterflies circled one another as they funneled upward into the sky. The Proverbs message is about cruelty and justice. That which you inflict on others may eventually be inflicted on you. But it also suggests a more foundational truth about the way our experience tends to take on the shape of our mental life. To enter the urn is to meet the conditions of your own consciousness, to encounter the question of how to endure within them.

There's a please-enter-the-urine moment whenever you ask Lee a hazy question, one you haven't fully thought through. When I asked Lee if she would consider herself a private person, she turned the question back on me and then suggested we look to etymology. We went to her office, a chapel-like space once shared by a celebrated economist couple

who owned the house previously. Lee described with unqualified amazement how she imagines them working simultaneously at the desks she found placed on opposite ends of the room. From atop a desk the size of a French church door, Lee extracted her favorite dictionary, Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, from a topography of books permanently unshelved. There was privity, for private communication or joint understanding, and privy, for a place of retirement, but no entry for the word we needed.

Lee loves to disentangle words, to trace the branches back to the trunk, but also loves aberrations like conundrum, which was said to have been cooked up by Oxford undergraduates who wanted to create a knowledgeable-sounding word that in actuality signified nonsense. One story places the origins of the Western concept of privacy in the Middle Ages, when most homes had few interior walls and doors to separate cohabitants from one another, and life was lived in the gaze of family, neighbors, and the public square. The wealthy began to build walls within their homes to create specialized spaces for reading and study, as expanded literacy made it possible for individuals to read stories by themselves, rather than gathering to hear them read out loud.

Thus, it became possible to keep others out, and also to invite them even deeper within. to keep others out, and also to invite them even deeper within. Many of Lee's characters are recluses of a sort. Driven by the urge to escape their circumstances or to reclaim their consciousness from the influence of others, they end up withdrawing, alone with their stories and in some ways more directly in confrontation with them. It strikes me as an interesting sort of subterfuge. Within the space of narrative, one can be masked and unmasked at the same time, bared in places that others might never notice. You could say that the presence of a barrier

creates the conditions under which disclosure might be possible, for how can something be revealed if it has never been hidden, never been contained? In the Book of Goose, a much older Agnes, who has married and resettled in a quiet American town, wonders about how she is seen by her new acquaintances, who assume that she's passive and unambitious. My chickens, with their small brains, never seem

to tire of walking around, pecking, cooing, clawing. The geese are much more tranquil. They do not flap their wings at the slightest disturbance, and when they float in the pond, they stay still for so long that you know they would not mind spending the rest of their lives suspended in their watery dreams. Yet geese are never called passive. Above all, Lee loves the way that Agnes embodies skills, talents, strengths that are hidden even to her. She looks malleable. She looks compliant. She does everything they say, Lee said, smiling.

But she knows who she is. She hides in plain sight. She asked me if I knew the proverb about the hermit, and I asked her to tell me. The lower hermit, the little one, hides from people in the fields, in the countryside, she began. The better hermits, they hide in the marketplace. We laughed, and she turned to face me with a mischievous look on her face.

I am the hermit that hides in the marketplace.