A Chinese New Year

The parents of a mentally challenged young woman, cleaning her, feeding her, worrying about her every day, find8212;when they separately smooth the wisps of hair off her forehead8212;that it is all worthwhile, all for-gotten. The lonely old Granny Lin, who has been neither mother nor grandmother, finds happiness in caring for a child as lonely as she is8212;only to be tricked by destiny yet again. A Chinese woman nowliving in Amer-ica laughs and talks to her lover in the liberating idioms of English. A young man finds his call-ing in life when he becomes the 8220;face8221; of the dictator8212;until he is no longer required, be-cause another leader has taken the Great Man8217;s place. A drought-hit village watches time go by, reminding itself of the story of a man, his wife, their only son drowned in the village reservoir8212;and the determined way in which the boy8217;s father gets justice.

One of the fascinating features of Li8217;s sto-rytelling is her use of the collective voice of the village as narrator, most strikingly in 8216;Im-mortality8217; 8220;His story, as the story of every one of us, started long before we were born8221;. In 8216;Persimmons8217;, the peasant narrators tell the story of Lao Da and his drowned son in a musical. In other stories, Li writes in a spare, matter of fact style, from the point of view of one of the ordinary people who live in her stories. But the prose can take you unawares with sudden moments of feeling: 8220;Mrs Su strokes the hair, light brown and baby-soft, on Beibei8217;s forehead. Beibei is twenty-eight going on twenty-nine; she is so large it takes both her parents to turn her over and clean her; she screams for hours when she is awake, but for Mrs Su, it takes a wisp of hair to forget all the imperfections.8221;

The 34-year old Yiyun Li8217;s own story is as remarkable as any of the stories in her debut collection. Born in Beijing, Li went to the US in 1996, with a limited knowledge of English, to study medicine. She was studying im-munology but also decided, out of loneliness, to take a creative writing course. Encouraged by the course faculty, she began to publish short fiction in English, featuring in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review and other publications. Her debut collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the O8217;Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Hemingway award. Both awards are richly deserved.