‘Definitely worth a look, but don’t expect to come up smiling’ – Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li’s second short story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, follows on from a first collection (A Thousand years of Good Prayers) that took home the Guardian First Book Award, amongst other prizes, and a début novel (The Vagrants) that grabbed her shout-outs from both Granta and the New Yorker as one of their Best Novelists/Writers under 35/40, respectively, and she’s a MacArthur Fellow – so I think it’s pretty fair to say that critical expectations for this book have been high. And I guess the fans weren’t disappointed – Gold Boy, Emerald Girl has already been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story prize (which A Thousand Years also snagged in 2005). Now, I haven’t read her earlier books, so I can’t do any kind of useful compare/contrast/development job here (Can you? Comments below, please!), and I don’t know if I’d react similarly to the rest of Li’s oeuvre, but having finished this volume I was left feeling impressed at her technical skills, rather intrigued by late 20^th / early 21^st Century Chinese mores, and, well, fairly ambivalent about Li as a writer. But I was impressed, right? I’ll readily admit I’m a contradictory beast. Let’s look at those stories.

There’s nine stories in the collection, though I think the first, ‘Kindness’, standing at almost eighty pages, probably qualifies as a novella. ‘Kindness’ tells the story of Moyan, a single, forty-one year-old woman who’s just heard that her old Army Lieutenant has died. Moyan was adopted as a baby (like several of Li’s protagonists) by a mismatched couple – an allegedly mentally-ill woman and her significantly older, unloved  husband. As a child, Moyan’s befriended by her brusque and formidable neighbour, Professor Shan, who reads her Dickens and Lawrence in English, and advises her to avoid love, because without love, according to Professor Shan, ‘one can be free’. Nevertheless, Moyan falls secretly in love with her neighbour, a grown man – a husband and father – who appears to return her affections, and whom Moyan only refers to as Nini’s Papa. The two never embark upon an affair, though, and Moyan soon leaves to join the army, where she spurns the friendly advances of Lieutenant Wei and her fellow squad members. Back home, clinging to the memory of a passion she is reticent to even acknowledge, she leads a solitary existence, until the news of Wei’s death causes her to assess her life and her relationships. In avoiding love, she realises, she hasn’t become free; rather, kindnesses, like those extended to her by Wei and Shan, ‘bind one to the past as obstinately as love does.’ Moyan may never have married, but she sees herself as the repository of memories of the kindnesses of others, and it’s this that gives her solace. It’s a quiet, understated tale of unhappiness, and though Moyan insists that she chose her own path, I felt desperately sorry for her – in much the same way as I mourned for the life of Ishiguru’s butler in Remains of the Day.

‘Kindness’ typifies the stories in Gold Boy, I think, in that it’s got several of Li’s recurrent themes – the unhappily married couple; the child brought up without sufficient affection; a love affair (even if it’s not consummated) between a young woman and an older man; and an inability to communicate emotions. Throughout the book, Li’s characters are almost uniformly isolated, silenced by their circumstances, and suffering as a result. The dissonance between their inner lives and their outer demeanours is what’s particularly striking. In ‘House Fire’, a gang of elderly lady private investigators specialises in catching adulterous husbands, in the interest of finding out the truth – yet each of them conceals a secret about their marriage of their past that consumes them, but which they refuse to reveal to their friends. Likewise, the eponymous ‘Proprietress’ advertises herself to a journalist as a selfless ‘reformer’ of the wives and children of executed convicts, when, in fact, the project is a failure and all she really wants is for her eldest inmate, Granny, to finally recognise her lifelong devotion. The façade is maintained at the expense of her own desires. In ‘A Man Like Him’, Teacher Fei refused to fight against an accusation of paedophilia, and ends up a bachelor, living with his mother and carrying on a double-life, online; when he finds a girl’s website condemning her father for his alleged adultery, he reacts with shocking fury, sending her venomous emails and tracking down her father to offer his condolences. Both men have co-operated ‘with a gentle willingness’ when their lives are ruined; neither of them – and few of Li’s other characters – are willing to struggle to redeem themselves. Their world is a trap from which there’s no escape. In contrast, in ‘Prison’, we meet Fusang, who has agreed to act as a surrogate mother for American emigrants, Yilan and Luo. Fusang’s own story (sold to a trader and again to a husband, and later selling on her own son in attempt to give him a better life) is the one nobody wants to hear or recognise. When she tries to fight for her son and speak out – to tell her own story – she’s stifled by those, like Luo, with more power, who don’t want to acknowledge the horrors around them.

Li’s style is simple and direct; in these stories and others, the matter-of-fact narration disguises some pretty horrible scenarios. The picture of China that she paints is that of a country emotionally strangled by its own social conditioning, where people – especially young women – have great difficulty in self-expression, particularly as regards love and sexual relationships. It’s also a place greatly bound up in the past; most of her characters are ageing, or have spent their youths amongst their elders. I didn’t get a strong sense of what 21^st Century China is like for its youth – or the portions of it that haven’t led a particularly miserable, repressed life. Of course, it’s not Li’s responsibility to paint me a picture of that society, so that’s not an especially valid criticism. What she does, she does extremely well. But her China leaves me with a bitter after-taste; it’s not a place I’d like to revisit again and again, and I guess that makes me reluctant to read her earlier work. Trapped by her own skill, eh? The other – and more valid, I hope – criticism that I’d level at Yiyun Li is that all the stories here sound alike – there’s little change in tone or register between each one. While the plots and characters were certainly distinct, the characters’ voices weren’t. Li’s found a style that works for her, but for me, the risk is that of a levelling out of her work, where, once the particular details of each piece have faded from the reader’s memory, there’s nothing that lingers – no startling tone or idiosyncrasies of style to make her work stand out from a multitude of equally talented short story writers and novelists. But, hey – Granta disagrees, and you might, too.

Any Cop? Li’s an excellent writer and she knows how to pack an emotional punch. There’s a couple of real heartbreaking numbers in here. I found the similarity of tone from story to story somewhat tiring, but you might dig it. Definitely worth a look, but don’t expect to come up smiling.

Valerie O’Riordan