Interview and portrait by Mia Funk
“There is a clear-cut: old life, that’s old country, and here’s there’s new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there’s always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”
–YIYUN LI
Prism international is honoured to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by faculty and students of University of British Columbia in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.
In the following interview, Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands – the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries…[she] is the real deal.”
Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
In the US, she discovered her love for literature and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with Marilynne Robinson, whom she credits for teaching her to read deeply, but the writers which Li says have been a deeper influence on her are William Trevor, Elisabeth Bowen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.
I met Li in Paris during the Festival des Écrivains du Monde and reconnected a few months later for this phone interview where she began by saying:
“I strongly believe reading is as important as writing. And I don’t mean my reading, but the reader’s reading. I think that, with Nabokov, the readers do have a job, the writers do have [a job], and they meet at the tip top of the mountain. And I think that requires a certain kind of reader. Not every reader has the patience; not every reader has the time to think or the willingness to imagine. But for me, I think I write for those readers who like to imagine with me and so I’m not sprouting up things for them. I think they have to lift to a certain moment and I think that might always be the case.”
In a way. Film, literature and television–these mediums are sort of pitted against each other, or that’s the way it’s represented, as though film is not good for literature—but in a way, storytelling has also been aided by film and television in that people have become accustomed to rapid cuts, concision and so on. And so now you can just suggest things, whereas in the past, in storytelling, you had to say everything, but I think it’s something that we’ve learned as well. Fiction writers.
Yes, that’s very true, I think. I was just thinking that sometimes when I read Shakespeare, even though the most dramatic Shakespeare moments do have a lot of backstory, you know there’s life beyond that stage. And I just think that’s the thing that a good writer does–if you can tell there’s life beyond that stage.
Yes, exactly. That’s the intrigue that makes us want to find out what they’re doing behind. I’m curious because I saw the film adaptation of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. You adapted that script yourself?
Yes, I did.
And I didn’t see The Princess of Nebraska, but what was your experience? Some writers have misgivings about that process?
I wasn’t really keen when I went in to adapt that story. I thought that story was not–basically nothing happens in that story. And I think it’s all internal. Everything is internal. And to me, it’s hard to imagine internal things, internal landscape. So I wasn’t very convinced that it could be done. And when you talk about storytelling, I did learn through writing that script a little bit more about storytelling. And I learned what I wanted to learn from writing that script, which makes me a little happier, I think.
Yes, I thought it was adapted well, but I understand what you mean because so many of your stories have this subtext or this internal psychology or repressed emotion, so that’s hard to bring to the screen.
One thing I learned from, I guess, just working with the director and the crew or whatever you call that, one thing I learned is when you write fiction, you really are in control, and you are in your pajamas, and you write and read–everything can be worked to the maximum. I know you can work on it forever. But film it’s always–you always have to reconcile, to resign to certain moments of imperfection. So that I learned. A lot of people work together on a film, and not everyone is the same. So I also think that was a good experience for me.
Can you imagine if novels were written that way? I mean, I know scriptwriters do that.
I know the Irish writers Ross and Somerville. They’re older generation. It’s Edith Somerville and Martin Ross. They’re Anglo-Irish, and they’re cousins. I think almost all the novels they wrote together–and they’re not in the same place. They live in two places, and they wrote novels by communicating with each other, corresponding in letters.
It’s hard to imagine because writers are so stubborn.
I know. I think these two are really fascinating. Maybe just by nature, they complemented each other very well. So, I agree with you. I don’t think books should be written that way.
I don’t know. It’s a strange thing. But it’s beautiful what happens in the theater, and I think that’s part of the magic of it, that it even gets made. There was a line in ” What Has That to Do with Me?” You wrote, “Anger made our lives meaningful.” And I just thought that was such an interesting observation, and I don’t know why I remember it now. But anyway, on another note, what do you think makes your writing meaningful for you, personally?
I think that—well, it’s interesting because that piece you quoted was very early. And I sort of felt maybe I lost that anger. And I think that anger, when I say anger, I think I really meant at a certain age that anger referred to—when you’re in your twenties, you looked at the world… so, in fact, I think I’m often quoted as not being angry enough, or at least when I go to panels people would say “You’re not angry enough.” It’s interesting. So what makes it meaningful is, I’m sure you get the impression when I talk about anger, I’m very ambivalent about anger. And I think it’s not anger, everything in life I feel ambivalent about. And if you ask me a question I can never say this or that, I can give you both answers. So I think the meaning sometimes of writing is really one place you can be ambivalent. You can be ambivalent about your characters, you don’t have to make any judgment, and I think it’s a very free way to express ambivalence.
Ah, that’s interesting, you can explore characters who are malevolent and not judge them. But it’s great. I do keep on thinking it is like acting. It is inhabiting another person’s skin without the consequences.
That’s exactly right. And I mean I do–it’s interesting because when we were traveling around Ireland early this summer, after a couple days, I started to talk with an Irish accent when I ordered food. And my children said, “You’re so rude, you cannot do that, that’s so rude, you’re mocking people.” And I knew that I shouldn’t do that, I didn’t do that intentionally or consciously, but sometimes you pick up things as a writer, you really actually put yourself into that position right away, so it’s easy to slip out of your mold and be somebody else.
Well, that’s part of–I imagine, as an actor prepares, I guess a writer prepares. You’re listening to sounds, you’re observing things, and part of it is just learning how people talk. I do that too all the time; it’s crazy. I meet someone who’s German or South African, and suddenly I come home with a South African accent, and my husband says, “Who are you?”
Isn’t that interesting. I think, I do that to British people. When I’m in London, I speak like British English. I know what you mean. It’s again, you’re keen to pick up these things because they don’t belong to you.
No, it’s okay. I think it’s good because then when the time comes to write a character from these backgrounds, it’s the ear. You’re training your ear and writing is musical. We don’t talk about it, but it is musical.
Absolutely.
Do you play any musical instruments?
[Laughs] Well, I mean, not seriously. When I was younger, I played the accordion, which I gave to one of my characters.
Writing is how you continue your music. And I’m thinking, you gave some of your memories to the characters in Kinder than Solitude. So was that a difficult book to write?
A little bit. I think if you look at stories, if you look at The Vagrants, The Vagrants was a bigger novel but time-wise, it’s contained to one to two months’ time in my head. And it’s easy to write those two months. So for twenty years, I think it’s just how to arrange the time in my head. I’ve been writing fiction—it’s always hard—you figure out how to treat time. So Kinder than Solitude it’s just how to treat that transition of time, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it.
It was interesting in both. They’re interesting because they both start with a death of kinds. It’s a very dramatic moment. And yet some of the themes, they share these subjects–how of one person who is a victim is, in a way, not the victim. Or how some violence committed on one person contaminates a whole community or several people.
Yes, and it’s so funny because someone asked me why does it start with a death? And I always think, death is not the end of the story. Death is always the starting point of the story. Death is such a—well, there’s no private death. You know, if you think about someone, in the newspaper someone died yesterday—in New York, she was murdered, that went really public. But even when a very unknown person dies all of a sudden, I think it’s no longer private: people would come to the memorial service, people would talk about the person. I think that really death moves people beyond their control of themselves. So I think for that reason, I like to think about death as the detail of a bigger story that no longer belongs to that person.
To continue reading:
https://www.r2ricereview.com/interview-yiyun-li-the-creative-process
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