MCLC: interview with Yiyun Li

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sophie Beach <snbeach at gmail.com>
Subject: interview with Yiyun Li
***********************************************************

Source: China Digital Times (5/18/14):
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/05/interview-with-yiyun-li/

Fiction as Detective Work: Interview with Yiyun Li
By Anne Henochowicz for China Digital Times:

Yiyun Li came to the US from Beijing in 1996 to do a PhD in immunology at
the University of Iowa, but found herself drawn inexorably to literature,
reading short stories while working in the lab. She switched gears,
studying at Iowa’s prestigious Writers Workshop. Writing in English, Li
explores the inner lives of characters against the backdrop of dramatic
political and social changes.

Li is the author of two short story collections, A Thousand Years of Good
Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her first novel, The Vagrants, won the
gold medal in the California Book Award for fiction. In her second novel,
Kinder Than Solitude, four young people drawn together, then pushed apart
from each other and from normal life by a mysterious poisoning, in the
summer of 1989. Their Beijing is tense in the aftermath of the crackdown
on protesters, but the city’s secret joys have not yet been destroyed by
overzealous development. The book begins two decades after that fateful
summer, when Shaoai finally dies after surviving for two decades with the
severe physical and mental impairments wrought by her poisoning. Boyang
has stayed in Beijing, while Ruyu and his childhood friend Moran left long
ago for the US, and have not since returned.

I recently interviewed Li about her latest work.

China Digital Times: In Kinder Than Solitude, Beijing is almost a
character itself. It loses what innocence it had in the summer of 1989,
then loses its spirit to commercialization in the ensuing decades. One
character, Boyang, reflects on the “masquerade party” that Houhai
<http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/nightlife-in-beijing-try-hou
hai-for-now-at-least/> has become, a playground for the rich and
foreigners, not at all the quiet, even mundane place he cherished as a
child. Could you talk about the role Beijing plays in this novel as a
shifting setting?

Yiyun Li: Indeed, Beijing is an important character in the novel. When I
was working on it, I wrote to a friend and said that part of the novel was
my love letter to Beijing—though not Beijing in its present incarnation.
The changes—good ones and bad ones—that the city has experienced in the
past two decades are not much different from those of the characters: in
place of lost dreams there are new dreams, though more realistic. The
idealism and innocence are replaced by a dependence on the busyness of a
surface life to avoid the scars from the past.

CDT: The mystery driving Kinder Than Solitude seems to be inspired by the
poisoning case of Zhu Ling, if not based on it. (The character Shaoai is
administered the same antidote as Zhu Ling was, Prussian blue.) How did
you formulate the plot, and what role did the Zhu Ling case play in your
process?

YL: Zhu Ling’s case feels as though it is an anchor for my generation—a
group decision of never forgetting her and her case, and never stopping
pursuing those responsible for her poisoning. I would say the novel is
inspired by the case because I began to research on why and how people
would poison other people. The psychological violence (and physical
violence) committed in such a passive-aggressive manner fascinated me. And
the evasiveness of a poisoning case—any poisoning—is a good start for a
novel, as there is a mystery in the center, and around it are all secrets
for a novel to uncover.

CDT: Your characters might be able to heal from their trauma if they would
only confront their pasts. Instead of speaking their minds to loved ones,
or even visiting a therapist, they cut ties of intimacy. Towards the end
of the novel, a young woman whom Boyang has been pursuing confesses a dark
secret to him. Do your protagonists feel that they must punish themselves
for their past mistakes? Why are they so afraid to reach out for help? How
much of their behavior was learned at a particular moment in China?

YL: Confronting the past or reaching out for help—these approaches, which
I would call therapeutic simplification of life’s messiness, are less of
interest to me as a novelist. I am more interested in how characters make
decisions and live with the outcomes of those decisions. I don’t think my
characters are alone in living with their secrets. In fact, many people
do, and it is for that reason literature is worth reading (and writing). I
don’t feel that my characters are punishing themselves—punishment would
mean that they have a certainty about their wrongdoings, and that
certainty is one thing they’ve been deprived of. Nor do I feel that they
have more fear of the past than others caught in their situations.
However, they have made decisions about their lives that are unwise or
perhaps even inexplicable to others and to themselves. Another set of
Boyang, Ruyu, and Moran might have made a different life, but that is
another book, not mine. I am unwilling to make a general statement about
how much my characters reflect a particular moment in history.

CDT: Solitude and isolation are major themes in your novel. How universal
is this sense of social isolation which the protagonists face? Would you
say that their solitude is particular to them, or indicative of the
conditions of modern life in China and beyond?

YL: Toward the end of the novel, Ruyu says, “I have not seen a single
person who’s not struggling.” I would say that’s the same about solitude
and isolation. These are human conditions that are not limited to one
country or one particular time in history. What is interesting to me is
how solitude and isolation are dealt with through different social norms.
For instance, a Jane Austen protagonist would ride or walk alone to
reflect her loneliness and isolation, while someone experiencing the same
sense of loneliness in China in 1960s might not have the luxury to even
excusing himself from participating the public life for a moment.

CDT: When you spoke at the Asia Society
<http://asiasociety.org/northern-california/events/yiyun-li-kinder-solitude
> in February, you said something to the effect that you “back your
>characters into a corner” in order to see how they will behave in extreme
>circumstances. Could you talk more about how you get to know your
>characters, and how you corner them? Are they fully formed before you
>start to write, or do you get to know them by pushing their boundaries?

YL: I believe characters are like people we meet in life: they don’t tell
us about themselves truthfully, and what they do tell us are oftentimes
lies; they resent being seen through easily, and prefer to be seen as a
version they feel comfortable with. None of the characters is truly
“formed” before I start to write; I write to find out who they are.
Writing fiction is like doing detective work; you have to take in every
little detail. For instance, Moran as a grownup is articulate about her
solitude, and she wants others, and most importantly, herself, to believe
that solitude is the best for her, and she has found peace in her
solitude. That is very eloquent of her, but I want to see how her
encounters with people, even the least important ones—an old woman walking
a dog, or a little girl banging on the piano—make her aware of the wall
she put up between herself and others, and let us see her conflicted
feeling in that isolation.

CDT: Like Ha Jin 
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/ha-jin-exiled-to-english-and-xujun-eb
erlein-do-i-still-love-china/>, you write in English instead of your
native language, Chinese. What challenges does writing in English present
to you? What opportunities?

YL: I don’t have the intimacy to English as a native speaker has, and I
will never have that intimacy. That could be a challenge, and perhaps the
only challenge for me. On the other hand, I write slowly because I want to
make sure every word means what I want it to mean. This may not be the
case necessarily for native speakers.

CDT: Would you consider writing in Chinese? Why or why not?

YL: No, I don’t think I’ll write in Chinese. I have never done so, and
don’t imagine that I could [write] fiction in it.
CDT: Do you consider yourself an American writer? A Chinese writer? Both?
Neither? How does the lens of the national boundary limit how a reader
approaches a novel?

YL: I would like to say a writer. I am aware, as you point out, where the
readers come make a difference on how they approach a novel, and sometimes
their background become a limit of how they would like to see me: for
instance, I have Chinese readers saying that I can’t stop writing about
the politics of recent Chinese history; I also have western audiences
commenting that I am not political enough. I find these arguments both
funny and irrelevant. My one and only goal is to be loyal and responsible
to my characters, and I don’t take other people’s agendas into
consideration when I write fiction.

CDT: There is a lot of talk among both “China-watchers” and Chinese people
themselves about the materialism of contemporary Chinese society, and a
corresponding sense that people lack a moral or spiritual underpinning. Is
China really any worse in this respect than other places? In which ways do
the US and China share the same social problems?

YL: I’m not an expert on this, but I do wonder if today’s China is
comparable to Theodore Dreiser’s America, or America of the Gilded Age.
China has only begun to adopt capitalism in the past twenty years, so the
obsession with materialism and the moral lacking may be understandable if
we look at America or Britain at a similar moment in history. Yet still
it’s shocking, isn’t it, to see how materialism takes over a country like
this?

CDT: What advice do you have for our readers when it comes to looking at
social change in China? What pitfalls are we falling into? What are we
neglecting?

YL: I am far from an expert on this one. I would say like any country,
China is complex, and like any people, Chinese people are complex, too. So
I would be cautious of making any conclusion or judgment too quickly.

Read more about Yiyun Li <http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/li-yiyun/>
from CDT.