Only the Lonely: Reading Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Author Yiyun Li has had a good year. This summer, The New Yorker named her one of their Top Twenty Writers Under Forty; and, just last month, she received the MacArthur Fellowship.

Impressive for someone who never intended to be a professional writer. When she emigrated from China in 1996 her initial interests lay in immunology. After receiving two MFAs at the University of Iowa, Li’s first collection of stories was published in 2006. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers received numerous accolades, saw two film adaptations and earned her the PEN/Hemingway award.

Her follow-up collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (published by Random House) was released last month.

Li, currently 38, writes as if she is twice her age. She is, by far, an extremely talented writer and detailed storyteller, and the landscapes of her collection, set in both rural China and urban Beijing, are reminiscent of the modern pastoral that made Flannery O’Conner’s settings so wonderful.

Prose aside, Li also writes as if she is actually approaching eighty years old. Of those years, it seems few were lived to satisfaction.

If there is one thing we learn in Gold Boy, it is that age makes so much unreachable, whether this is forgiveness (as in “Sweeping Past”), fertility (“Prison”) or chances for liberation, as in the titular story.

The years don’t leave any of these characters unscathed. Gold Boy presents a landscape of death, disease and missed opportunities that ravage aging or elderly Chinese families.

There is twinge of bitterness in each story, best demonstrated in “A Man Like Him,” where the lead character and his mother repeat the mantra: “I have nothing to say about this world.”

The book’s longest story “Kindness” offers it’s own share of platitudes: “Love leaves one in debt” and “Disappointment can only occur where there is something to hope for in the first place.”

However, amidst so much resignation (and listing of terminal cancers) the stories’ characters, pulled apart by time and death, attempt to assemble new families as best they can.

Read the full review after the jump.

“A Man Like Him” shows a teacher accused of sexual deviancy aligning himself with a man accused of adultery; “House Fire” is a story of six elderly women, who form a detective agency for routing out adulterous husbands; and in “The Proprietress,” an aging and wealthy storekeeper takes in almost any women she finds in need.

Like biological familes, these relationships are not always pleasant, nor are they necessarily formed by choice. In “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” a gay man is arranged to marry an admirer and ex-student of his mother. It’s not the best connection, but it serves a purpose of relieving loneliness, if only a little.

It’s within these surrogate families that all the melancholy of Li’s stories is redeemed. Without families at all, the people of Li’s collection would be truly and absolutely alone.

Despite the sadness reading these stories can bring, Gold Boy tries to find some place where loneliness, however present, doesn’t necessarily have to endure.

Yiyun Li reads at Elliott Bay Book Company on Monday October 25 at 7:00pm.