Years of Poems and Spirits

Heard Diane Rehm interviewed Yiyun Li this morning. I first came across her short novel in the New Yorker. Didn’t quite get it:

He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that

I was like, WTF? Who is the second “she” here? Still, Li’s name stuck–she must be good at something to get picked out among 300 submissions for that week.

Diane’s interview is about her recent novel, The Vagrants. It was a pretty captivating conversation. So much so that at the end of the show I bought a copy on Amazon.

Couple of things stick out …

1. She finds English her first “writing language”, although she still struggles with proper tense in spoken English (与我心有戚戚焉)
2. Some of the callers to the show are apparently China dilettantes. I think they are more interested in her than her work, and a sense of bewilderment was brimming from their questions. How does she connect to those readers? Is she selling the exoticism of the “ugly” Chinese culture/recent history? The views she expresses and the framework she adopts in discussion are typical of that a Western liberal. Yet her story reminds me so much of the book 《活着》
3. She has a very engaging personal story (never written in Chinese before, wanted to improve her English, attended a creative writing’s class and fell in love with story telling. Got published in less than three years, etc.) She teaches in UC Davis, does she know 北岛？How would that couple think of her?

Are there cases where a social scientist becomes a novelist? What if he finds social theories or rational analysis so inept when it comes to being relevant? People like reading stories anyway. They particularly like to read into stories. That is why the Old Testement is full of stories, allegories and parables. That is why a good story teller–even if a liar–is always popular everywhere he/she goes. Isn’t it?