Muchacho de oro, muchacha esmeralda

by Yiyun Li, Laura Martín de Dios (Translator)

Yiyun Li nos presenta en este volumen nueve historias de delicada belleza sobre la China actual, donde historia, política y el peso de la cultura tradicional se entremezclan con la esencia de la condición humana. El libro rebela al lector occidental la intimidad de un mundo que parece ajeno.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, China, Asia, Contemporary, Chinese Literature, Literary Fiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2010

About the author

Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

This is a collection of short stories set in China but written in English for an English speaking readership. They are all fine enough stories technically but for me something was missing, it was a bit like sitting on a bench in autumn watching the leaves fall from the trees, sometimes you are in the mood for it and sometimes not. So I find myself in the position of writing that the stories are all capable, coherent and consistent but that I would not particularly recommend them, and I don't expect to remember them or have any hankering to return to them to read again.

The stories are set in China, they are contemporary-ish, the narration or reminiscences of characters roll back in time as far as the 1920s. The first story I felt made the strongest impression, but then it was the longest too, so that may be the simple effect of spending so long with one character and in her mind.

This is a collection with common themes, loneliness, isolation and marginal figures (the elderly, the retired, emigrants, failed relationships, adopted people, the chronically disappointed), but it is not a particularly miserable collection, far from it, the stories all treat their characters in a dignified way - this is even achieved cleverly in the tale of the man who suspects that his father and wife are having an affair by moving the viewpoint to the elderly women hearing the husband's fears and their reaction to it, there is a persistent air of acceptance and resignation, but a resignation that has a certain nobility to it even though the author doesn't hint at the philosophy or belief that may support or have shaped the characters to carry their burdens in the way that they do. By implication this is simply the essence of being Chinese, and not by implication the American way. It is very much a vision of China packaged for western eyes - for instance children are dutiful and care for elderly parents without a second thought, one would not guess from such stories that the Chinese government passed a law to mandate that children do so.

Read and release.

[Katerina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Очень интересный взгляд на современный Китай: уже через западноевропейский бинокль, но с четким знанием, куда его направлять. При этом темы общечеловеческие: любовь, работа, семья, дети, деньги, как выжить, когда уже совсем нет сил. Много невероятных деталей, вот уж точно совсем другая цивилизация.

[Patrizia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambientati nella Cina contemporanea, in cui le tradizioni resistono a fianco del nuovo, questi racconti colpiscono per la naturale semplicità della prosa e per la profondità con cui indagano sul senso della vita. Amori vissuti o solo sognati, la scelta della solitudine, il rispetto per le persone anziane che vivono confuse nel passato, sono declinati in tutte le sfumature con l’apparente distacco di frasi brevi, che contribuiscono a rendere veri e credibili i protagonisti delle storie, a creare empatia e, in alcuni casi, immedesimazione. Lo scorrere del tempo, che divora progetti e aspettative, riducendoci all’improvviso in creature ben diverse dalle foto che immortalano la nostra giovinezza; l’aggrapparsi a momenti precisi del passato quando la mente si va sgretolando; l’insoddisfazione nei confronti di una vita diversa da quella che avremmo voluto; il dolore di fronte alla morte, non hanno patria, per cui alla fine l’ambientazione passa in secondo piano, uno sfondo sfocato dietro le vicissitudini di uomini e donne che, in alcuni casi, sembra non abbiano mai imparato a vivere. Come dice la protagonista dell’ultimo, bellissimo racconto:
“Non ho mai dimenticato una persona che sia entrata nella mia vita, e forse è proprio questo il motivo per cui non riesco ad avere una vita soddisfacente. Le persone che mi porto dentro hanno vissuto appieno non solo la loro larte, ma anche la mia, sebbene siano usurpatori innocenti della mia vita, e io non posso fare altro che prendermela con me stessa”.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 and 1/2 stars

Nuggets and gems (in keeping with the title of this collection) are scattered throughout these stories -- in some it is the culminating line; in others a sentence that at first glance seems like a throwaway. Though the stories are set in China, these are more stories of character, not place, though the changes from an 'old' to a 'new' China and the resulting transitions do inform them.

The opening novella, "Kindness" -- the only story told in the first person -- sets the tone for the characters in the rest of the stories, all populated with lonely, prickly people trying to make a connection with others, though many of them would deny that is what they are doing, even insisting that they are self-sufficient in their aloneness.

My favorite story may be "Number Three, Garden Road" -- about a woman who, 45 years after developing a crush on a 24-year-old man when she was 10, returns to the building they both lived in. "The Proprietress," who bossily houses the wives and girlfriends of executed men and condemned prisoners in the prison across from her shop, is another unforgettable character: you will be surprised at the motivation for her altruistic actions.

Though Dickens is referenced as reading material for two of the characters in two different stories, I couldn't help thinking of E.M. Forster in regard to the themes.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the loneliest collections of stories I've ever read. It's also remarkably beautiful, if only because it manages to never fall into despair. The will to go on, to keep living, even when all love is gone, even after realising that love was only a word one never could believe in or that one could no longer believe in. But there is so much more here than that.

--I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs. You may say that we too evict people from our hearts while we continue living in theirs, and that may very well be true for some people, but I wonder if I am an anomaly in that respect. I have never forgotten a person who has come into my life, and perhaps it is for that reason I cannot have much of a life myself. The people I carry with me have lived out not only their own rations but mine too, though they are innocent usurpers of my life, and I have only myself to blame.--

--In one of these revelatory moments she could have said, Moyan, you were not born to us; we only picked you up from a garbage dump--but no, my mother had never, even in her most uncharitable moment, said that to me, and in fact she kept the secret until her death, and for that alone I loved her, and love her still.--

--But animosity is easier to live with than sympathy and indifference leaves less damage in the long run.--

All from the first story in the collection and it sets the tone for the rest. But, maybe most important about these, is that this sentence lies within as well:

--I wished this life could go on forever.--

And I think, with that, this following sentence contain the whole of the book:

--One's fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses--

There is so much sadness here, but none of the characters give up. They are women battered in the many ways that life can ravage a person. Many of them are old or ageing, stepping through middle age or closer to the grave, and all of them have felt life go by, with its many regrets, its many battles, its endless wars, and I think, too, that it's fitting that much of the first story in the collection takes place during military service.

Though it's sad and lonesome, it manages to not destroy you, crush you under its weight. For this is a book that weighs heavy on the heart and may break one, if you have one to break, but there's this stillness within them, this calming poise, where, even though the world is falling apart or was falling apart or has fallen apart, one can still breath and take that next step, wake up to that next unlikely dawn.

There is a strong sense of fatality, too, as in the first line of the story that the collection takes its name from:

--He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father.--

That sense of fatality is the current beneath the surface of these stories, where the generational gaps of Chinese society meet and react with one another, where the elders cannot understand the youth and the youth do not even care.

It's a great collection, though at times a bit slow and less engaging, and some of the stories miss more than others. They attempt to lighten the mood, I think, but never go far enough, so they tend to wallow more, are somehow less direct and feel maybe out of place.

Anycase, I recommend it.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I began reading these nine stories, I thought: "I can't really like this book; it's going to be woeful, and I need something to uplift my spirits." I am glad I continued to read. Because the writing was honest and well-crafted, I steadily grew fond and respectful of the ensemble of plain, sorrowful, seemingly unheroic people whose stories are told.

You know the sensation of taking a well-deserved vacation that is too short?---the way it takes a few days to get the hang of no longer obeying your usual routine/and just when you're getting the hang of enjoying your liberation, it is time to return to your daily grind? That's how this book hit me. I was under its spell and wished for another two days worth of characters and their stories to absorb.

[Faye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read: April 2018

Kindness - 5/5 stars
A Man Like Him - 3.5/5 stars
Prison - 3/5 stars
The Proprietress - 3.5/5 stars
House Fire - 4/5 stars
Number Three, Garden Road - 3/5 stars
Sweeping Past - 4/5 stars
Souvenir - 2/5 stars
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - 4/5 stars

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Unique Voice

The first story, ‘Kindness’, is about a young girl serving her required army stint the year before starting college. She’s led an isolated childhood as an only child of a depressed, unengaged mother and a loving but much older and more tired father who works as a janitor. The child has an odd talent for gaining the interest of influential people such as an aging, lonely literary woman who teaches her to read and appreciate English literature including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. In the army her commanding officer attempts to form a close relationship with her but our protagonist eludes her and though the girl is an expert observer of the other soldiers around her she holds herself separate. The story is told at a distance from the stance of the middle aged teacher the girl becomes. As an adult she continues her solitary sojourn with her deft people watching skills. She has a longing to be a part of other’s lives but an even stronger longing to remain separate where she feels safe and free to observe.

In ‘A Man like Him’ a retired art teacher spends his days caring for his elderly widowed mother. He has no companions in his old age except his internet chat room friends. He hires a woman to sit with his mother and slinks off to the corner internet café sitting among young giggling, courting kids. On one site he encounters a bitter young female blogger whose story gets under his skin so much that he steps out from behind his keyboard to confront his feelings. The blogger is obsessed with letting everyone know how badly her father has treated her and her mother through his infidelity and desertion. The art teacher feels an affinity with the slandered father. He reaches out to the blogger’s victim and they meet in person but it only gets sadder when he comes out from behind his protective computer screen. There’s something dark and tragic and inevitable in his story.

One of the most affective stories was about a Chinese couple who immigrate to the US they have successful careers and a child. They’re happy until the daughter is killed in a horrible car accident right before she graduates from high school. The middle aged couple decides to have a biological child by implanting their embryo into a surrogate. They decide the wife will go back to China, find a surrogate and stay with her until their child is born. Of course nothing is quite that easy. The surrogate has a tragic past of her own and dreams of a better future life. The wife and the surrogate get closer than they’d planned.

There is a pervading sadness in all Li’s stories but they also have a stark beauty. All emotions are kept in a tight box and the tension comes with the reader’s fear and even desire that all heck is about to break loose. I felt like I’d been given a glimpse in to a uniquely Chinese point of view but at the same time it felt universal. I’m not sure how she achieved this seeming contradiction but I came away feeling emotionally richer.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an 80 page novella and 8 short stories, all concerning lonely people, and mostly set in present day China.

The final line of the book, and of the eponymous story, sums them all up, "They were lonely and sad people... and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness", and that glimmer of hope is what ensure this is not a depressing collection.

KINDNESS
The novella is about a 40 year old single woman in Beijing, alternating between her young adulthood (including a stint in the army) and her present life as a teacher of maths - despite her love of literature. In fact this is one of three stories in the collection that has a character who loves Dickens. The elderly neighbour who triggers this interest has some similarities with Miss Havisham in Great Expectation and seems to treat Muyan as an Estella figure. She believes that without love, one can be free and tells her, "The moment you admit someone into your heart, you make yourself a fool" and "Love leaves one in debt... best if you can start free from all that". Muyan thinks she has never experienced love and yet reading her account of her life, the reader is likely to think otherwise.

A MAN LIKE HIM
This is about a bachelor and retired teacher, living with his aged and ailing mother. It explores the enduring ramifications of public accusations, and the bond they can create.

PRISON
This was the weakest story, because I found too much of it implausible. It concerns a Chinese American couple who, when their teenage daughter dies, return to China in search of a surrogate, even though it's the woman's eggs, rather than womb that are the problem.

Aphorisms on the general theme include the observation that at a funeral "one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people"; "animosity is easier to live with than sympathy, and indifference leaves less damage in the long run"; "It is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return";

THE PROPRIETRESS
She is an oldish shop keeper who takes in needy women and children to help them start new lives. It fell a little flat at the end.

HOUSE FIRE
This is the most amusing. A group of retired old women set up a detective agency to investigate alleged affairs, as part of a moral crusade. The different backgrounds and personalities of each woman are carefully and interestingly contrasted, including "the most harmlessly nosy person one could meet in life, [who] seemed to have a talent for turning even the most offensive question into an invitation" [to talk].

NUMBER 3, GARDEN ROAD
A simple will they/won't they story of two lonely neighbours.

SWEEPING PAST
Focused on teenagers. An old widow reminisces to her 14 year old granddaughter about her two "sworn sisters" (a bond made when they were ~13) and the tragedy that tore them apart when their own children were teenagers.

SOUVENIR
About a harmless old man, with stalkerish tendencies.

GOLD BOY, EMERALD GIRL
About a single woman raised by a single father who befriends her older female tutor. The tutor tries to set her up with her own son, whom she raised alone.


Overall, they are good stories, well written, with a running theme. However, there are two slightly weaker ones, so that overall I don't think it as good as her previous collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly, I've read quite a lot about the author but other than some stories in the New Yorker, I haven't read much by her. I'm remedying that now. This collection of one novella and eight shorter stories is set in contemporary China, which I found fascinating, and though the stories are highly specific, in terms of time and place and morals and other aspects of life that would be utterly foreign to most American readers without great knowledge of China, they also contain multitudes of universality, the melancholy of characters stuck, locked into predicaments, into lives, sometimes by their families, their lack of will, or feeling, or ambition, sometimes by the state, still wanting and often failing to connect.

[shubiektywnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

Nie jest to mój ulubiony zbiór, ale i tak można wyczuć w nim typową prozę Li: wrażliwą, spokojną, a mimo wszystko uderzającą.

Wydaje mi się, że zbiór ma nieco szkatułkową formę. Opowiadania nie nawiązują do siebie znacząco, ale jednak przewijają się przez nie podobne imiona i motywy.

Bardzo dużo miejsca Li poświęca tutaj spełnionej i niespełnionej miłości kochanków, których dzieli duża różnica wieku.

[Joanna Luloff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully quiet and restrained collection of stories. Many of them deal with loneliness (often stubbornly self-imposed) as a way to maintain a sense of self. There is nothing showy about these stories, but at the end of almost every one, I wanted to flip back to the beginning and start again to see how they had managed to build up so much psychological punch and complexity. The final story (and title story) is stunning.

[Edzia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
Pełna skupienia melancholia, oswajanie się z samotnością, piękne tkanie historii z subtelności i niuansów.

[esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
i have the weirdest feeling of still, not quite knowing what this book is about. well, it is a collection of short stories. this book takes the small things-- the real things-- in life and amplifies them. in doing so, it brings out the truths of human nature, and sometimes that is the thing that hits harder than any fantasy story. sometimes, you just need stories about a group of matchmaking old ladies, childhood sworn sisters who have grown apart as they grew old, a middle aged man and middle aged lady getting married for companionship, a mother and her grandson separated by cultural barriers. it's melancholic and depressing but also somewhat (somehow) satisfying.

anyways, i'm glad i picked this up from that SAT practice test :))

I'll maybe write a longer review when i reread, but for now, here's a quote (from an author interview): "If books are like people, mine are not the prettiest ones, or the loudest ones, or the quirkiest ones one meets at a party, nor are they, I hope, too frivolous or too scared of truths to matter to the readers." ~Yiyun Li

[Pragya · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Kamalia Kamalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 bintang.
ada sembilan buah cerita (novela/cerpen) dalam buku ini dengan pelbagai konflik manusia. Namun, aku membacanya dengan penuh ketenangan dek kerana langgam bahasanya yang juga tenang. Watak, perwatakan dan latar cerita diterangkan dengan terperinci namun masih tidak serabut.

[Saleh MoonWalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Onvan : Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - Nevisande : Yiyun Li - ISBN : 1400068134 - ISBN13 : 9781400068135 - Dar 221 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2010

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sad but hopeful. Kindness cannot make loneliness go away but it can make it more bearable.

[Emilie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hallelujah ik heb het eindelijk uit. Deze had mij wel effe in een reading slump geduwd hoor amai 👎 Like oké. Het is niet slecht slecht en het had zijn goede momenten of goede zinnetjes, maar saaier dan dit kan bijna niet. Heeel beschrijvende schrijfstijl en het voelt allemaal heel onpersoonlijk aan. Is misschien de bedoeling maar ik las het alleszins niet graag. I mean ik heb littekenliteratuur gelezen die wel goed en interessant is, dus het kan toch e. Maar dit is hem niet neenee
Edit: ik ben reviews aan het lezen van de Engelstalige editie en misschien ligt het gewoon aan de vertaling. If not, dan is Li Yiyuns schrijfstijl gewoon niet voor mij denk ik lol

[Anurag Pratap · Rating 4 out of 5]

"They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accomodate their loneliness"

Not all stories hit, but god do i love the last story everytime i have read it (...perhaps bc i imagine my future in such a way...)!!!! Also fan of "A Man Like Him"....lowkey unappreciated study on such gentle queerness which i feel only poc queer ppl would deeply relate to

Wish all stories in it could be like this

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is the book I have enjoyed reading the most this year, and it is also one of the best books I have read this year, in terms of opening a new world open to me. I have read several other Chinese authors, but this is probably my favorite. I felt that the characters were both universal and specific, and that the book was a strong insight into "real" (although it is fiction), human lives in China... and would be interested to know of course what people who know more about real life in China think. My praise is not necessarily in her crafting of sympathetic characters. The characters are well crafted and complicated figures, but you do not really "sympathize" in any serious way. But their lives are interesting, and I wanted to read more.

I realize that nothing about this review is really explaining why I liked it so much. I just did. Bleak, inspiring writing, if those words can go together. I guess to me, the best way to sum it up is the last quote I liked, the last line of the book (don't worry - not really a spoiler):


"They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness." (162)


--- QUOTES ---

"It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else's life." (6)

"I have learned, since then, that life is like that, each day ending up like a chick refusing to be returned to the eggshell." (7)

"I had learned that if one remained unresponsive in those situations one could become transparent; when my mother's eyes peeled off my clothes piece by piece they would meet nothing underneath but air." (8)

"People who think they know their own stories do not appreciate other people's mysteries, Professor Shan explained; that is why people like you and me will always find each other." (14)

"I waved back once, thinking perhaps we were the loneliest family in the world because we were meant to be that way." (40)

"Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places we can never return." (43)

"There are people, I now know, who have been granted happiness as their birthright, and who, believing that every mystery in life can be solved and every pain salved, reach out with a savior's hand." (49)

"the loneliness I had learned to live with all of a sudden unbearable. I did not know the driver's name, nor had I gotten a close look at his face -- but for years to come I would think of his salute, a stranger's kindness always remembered because a stranger's kindness, like time itself, heals our wounds in the end." (53)

"Professor Shan must have suspected all this talk but, as always, she refused to let the mundane into her flat. Instead, we read other people's stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were not match for those masters. ... My mother fell in love at an early age, my father late; they both fell for someone who would not return their love, yet in the end their story is the only love story I can claim, and I live as proof of that story, of one man's offering to a woman from is meager existence, and of her returning it with her entire adult life." (55-56)

"One day, if they were fortunate enough to survive all the disappointments life had in store for them, they would have to settle into their no longer young bodies." (63)

"'One should never hope for the unseeing to see the truth,' Teacher Fei said now." (72)

"Perhaps that was what they needed, the unhurried life of a dormant town, where big tragedies and small losses could all be part of a timeless dream." (78)

"The world was intolerant of men with sensitive hearts, but how many people would bother to look deeper into their souls, lonely for unspeakable reasons?" (117)

"The first time Meilan watched a hundred old people slow-dance to the song, she was overwhelmed by a bleakness that she had never known existed." (124)

"An old donkey who loved to chew on the fresh grass, they must have been saying behind his back. He'd better watch out for his stomach, some of them would perhaps say, but they forgot it was the heart that would kill a man; a man never died from indigestion." (127)

"Perhaps she blended in with the furniture well, but even a piece of good furniture might save someone's life by miracle." (146)

"... although she knew it was not the students that his mother missed but the white skulls of mammals and birds on her office shelves, the drawers filled with scalpels and clamps and tweezers that she had cleaned and maintained with care, and the fact that she could mask her indifference to the human species with her devotion to animals." (149)

"Freedom is like restaurant food, he once told an old friend in the States, and one can lose one's appetite for even the best restaurants." (152)

"There were snapshots of him when he had first arrived in America, with his bright-colored T-shirt, long and flying hair, and broad smile, as picturesque and unreal as the Statue of Liberty in the background." (154)

"They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness." (162)

[Joan Kerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

"My father, on the way home, warned me gently that the chickens were too young to last more than a day or two. I built a nest for the chicks out of a shoebox and ripped newspaper, and fed them water-softened millet grains and a day later, when they looked ill, aspirin dissolved in water. Two days later they died, the one I named Dot and marked with ink on his forehead the first one to go, followed by Mushroom. I stole two eggs from the kitchen when my father went to help a neighbour fix a leaking sink – my mother was not often around in those days – and cracked them carefully, and washed away the yolks and whites; but no matter how hard I tried I could not fit the chicks back into the shells, and I can see, to this day, the half shell on Dot’s head, covering the ink spot like a funny little hat." (5)

Yiyun Li’s characters don’t die, like the chicks, but they do exist in shells that are never quite big enough or tough enough. Even her brash characters, like the philanthropic Mrs Jin who blooms on the miseries of others, or the blundering Meilan, trying to force a grieving widower into a relationship, are occasionally seen slantwise. In many different ways, some with infinite care and some with brusque shoving, the people in these stories are making a world "that would accommodate their loneliness." (221) The parents and grandparents of her characters grew up in Mao’s China; much has changed with the introduction of a crude capitalism and the spread of the internet, but still they are shackled by social opinion, custom and political control. An adulterous father can be publicly shamed by his daughter on her blog; unmarried girls still face the contempt of married women when they buy condoms; shamed women think themselves lucky to find a much older man to marry; poor mothers hand their children over to someone richer.

The long opening story, a novella really, "Kindness", is a wonderfully rich and subtle, many-layered piece of work. The title story "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl", is another that will stay with me. Interestingly, like "Kindness", it deals with a charismatic older woman, a kind of Snow Queen who lays a frost on the life of the young girl she befriends.

Yiyun Li lives in the US, writes in English and apparently doesn’t allow her books to be translated into Chinese. This has resulted in criticism of her style and her attitude, she says, from Chinese immigrants of her own generation in America.
"A compatriot emailed, pointing out how my language is neither lavish nor lyrical, as a real writer’s language should be; you only write simple things in simple English, you should be ashamed of yourself, he wrote in a fury…" (London Review of Books, 39:12, p. 34)

No, she shouldn’t.

[Annika Park · Rating 5 out of 5]

YiYun Li was my gateway to Contemporary Asian Literature - well not Asian literature because they were originally written and published in English. But I think there is something special about asian writers - they have an edge to their writing that you cannot find anywhere else. Their succinct yet all-encompassing prose and distinctly cultural undertones can easily come across as rudimentary and second-rate, but Li's literary craftsmenship and thematic ideas really make her stand out among the crowd. Her shrewd observations about post-industrialist China and the people's spiritual disintegration really make out her writings to be a very critical yet literarily prominent account of Modern day China.

"Gold Boy Emerald Girl" is a collection of short stories, or vignettes. My favorite story was "Prison" - a story of an emigrated Chinese Couple (now Chinese Americans) returning to China in search for a surrogate mother. With the recent loss of their beloved daughter Jade, the couple sees a new child as a symbol for a new beginning, a fresh start. Yilan, the middle-aged wife, believes that she is no longer fit for pregnancy and sets out to find a good surrogate mother. Along comes Fusang, an uneducated Chinese valley girl who needs the money. Fusang is quite a character - she's pretty scary. There was something...off about her from the beginning. This is where Li's prose really comes into play - when Yilan asks of Fusang's schooling, she nonchalantly replies that she went to elementary school for 3 years. Yilan naturally believes that she had only completed the third grade, and asks why she could not complete her education. Fusang, pondering the question, replies with a smile as if she was "happy to surprise Yilan" - that she repeated the first grade 3 times. Although this may seem quite unimpressive here, when complete with the whole prose from just these two lines Li fully summarizes Fusang's character - spontaneous, ignorant, beautiful, and dangerous.

The cultural undertone comes from the ideological difference that we are exposed to straight out from the start - Yilan is a "reformed" American housewife now. Fusang has suffered a traumatic past and is an oppressed woman in an oppressive society. But this is not your run-of-the-mill story where the two women heal each other's pain through their company. From the title itself- they serve to become each others' "Prisons". Li is extremely fatalistic - and I think that's what I love about all her stories. They're all so haunting - it's almost as though you're transported into the gray, stuffy landscape of Beijing, under the fumes and pollution of China's modernization.

[Teleseparatist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okładka porównuje prozę Yiyun Li do Nabokowa i Czechowa, ale spokojnie widać tu też podobieństwa do opowiadań Alice Munro. Światy zamieszkiwane przez postaci są pełne niedopowiedzień, niespełnionych namiętności (albo i żyć) i kompromisów. Części tekstów brakowało - w moim odczuciu - tego ostatecznego sznytu, zgrabnej pointy (lub braku pointy) jak to u Munro, które tak zupełnie do mnie trafia, ale nawet bez tej doskonałości, sporo tekstów czytało się znakomicie. Niemniej jednak, niezmiernie ciekawe winiety dotyczące mieszkańców Chin i osadzone w czasie i miejscu.

(Język trochę wydawał mi się miejscami niezgrabny, być może z winy tłumaczenia, a może po prostu proza trudno przekładalna; za to idiosynkratycznie nieregularne i częste zmiany perspektywy bardzo do mnie z jakiegoś powodu trafiły).

(Ulubione teksty: Dobroć, Płonący dom i tytułowe opowiadanie.)

[Professor Weasel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the short stories in this book. I thought it was interesting how all of them involved an older character who was nostalgic or regretful about their past in some way. I like Yiyun Li's writing style. I like the simplicity of her sentences (like when one character compares freedom to a restaurant you get tired of eating at), or how violence always pops up in her plots in ways that really shock you. I like how most of her characters are lonely. Her stories are sad, but somehow not depressing. I read this book (almost) straight through over a period of two days. Not even the blaring Superbowl could interrupt me--I even had to keep my index finger on the page to keep track of where I was at times! (So many car commercials... aah!)

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

SUBTLE AMBIGUITIES.

"As innocent as new blossoms, unaware of the time sweeping past like a river."—page 134

Subtlety and futility seem to suffuse the eight short stories of Yiyun Li's nuanced collection, GOLDEN BOY, EMERALD GIRL.

Recommendation: Not a comfortable read for the linear-minded (nothing ever seems to be resolved), but poetically lyrical if you can abide a touch of ambiguity.

"The one to show up at the right time beats the earlier risers."—page 135

"But animosity is easier to live with than sympathy, and indifference leaves less damage in the long run"—page 42

NOOKbook edition, 174 pages.

[Søren · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best collections of stories I have ever read. This one I'd buy and keep to re-read!
Yiyun Li's tales have a different perspective; a quiet, wise outlook on the passage of time and humans events. I really enjoyed this one.

[Zaphoddent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This woman has a remarkable ability to write haunting stories that stay with you for a considerable time.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Li is the sort of writer who will be remembered for a long time to come, if there is any justice in this life. As with most fiction by Chinese or Chinese-American writers, the publishers have decided to market it as a selection of snapshots from "the China of the 21st century, where economic development has led to situations unknown to previous decades" (to quote the jacket description). I suppose the idea is to rope in a few business students looking for something current, that gives them the "feel" of China. Anyone who has read Yiyun Li knows how funny this is, because she is a stalwartly non-topical writer, always focused on the inward lives of her very inward characters. This gives her an advantage when depicting topically atypical lives, like the title story's gay and lesbian husband and wife, because they are subject to the same humane, Tolstoyan eye as the balding-banker types.

This is a novella followed by eight short stories. One commonality between them is the lonesomeness, in most cases loneliness, of their characters, the meaning of whose lives as they themselves see them are often bundled up in asymmetrical relationships. People are never fully aware of the nature or scale of their significance to each other. One of Li's teachers, Marilynne Robinson, has a character who believes that all people are inescapably lonesome in the sense that the manifold and ceaseless volutions of the most staid inner life propel each self toward ever-deeper idiosyncrasy with age; the uniqueness of our experience makes meaningful contact between selves scarce in a normal life, and this contact is always mediated by language and the body. This distance, as between planets, is felt throughout this masterful book.

"They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness."

[Sephreadstoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raccolta di racconti delicati come foglie di gingko che narrano di una Cina dove tradizioni e modernità sono fortemente intrecciate tra loro.

Non vi è un unico fil rouge, quanto più declinazioni diverse della solitudine, delle delusioni, degli amori, il tutto narrato con una semplicità di stile che accentua la profondità del non detto.
Questa precisa scelta stilista esalta le sfumature, funge da cassa di risonanza per la percezione individuale del lettore e alla fine di ogni racconto lascia una sensazione di calda malinconia, come se avessimo appena condiviso i segreti dei protagonisti di ciascun racconto.

Li Yiyun è una scrittrice cinese che vive negli Stati Uniti e per personale scelta, scrive in inglese. I temi toccati sono materia della nostra contemporaneità - omossessualità, gravidanza surrogata, autodeterminazione, malattia, solitudine - ma trattati in una società fortemente attaccata ai valori tradizionali.

Si legge in un zufolo di vento, ma rimane dentro molto più a lungo.