A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories | Yiyun Li

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories | Yiyun Li | What we sacrifice makes life meaningful

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A Thousand Years o...

	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories Yiyun Li Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

?Immortality,? winner of The Paris Review?s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In ?The Princess of Nebraska,? a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.

?After a Life? illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in ?A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,? in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.

These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Ten Perfect Jewels

Warning: Begin reading "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" at the BEGINNING of a weekend. If you wait till Sunday afternoon, you may find yourself skipping work on Monday, because you can't put it down. Yiyun Lee is a gifted story teller and an artist of the written word. Each of the ten stories in this collection is a perfect jewel.

What we sacrifice makes life meaningful

Yiyun Li's stories are anchored in the Chinese past as well as in the present.
The scars of the Cultural Revolution with its indiscriminate victimizing, its drastic priggishness, its denunciations and liquidations are still felt in nearly all families. It was a period of black and white, of for or against, of silence or lies.
Modern China is in a serious upheaval and ravaged by doubt: `once doubt starts, it runs rampant.' Now, `a bird is willing to die for a morsel of food. A man is willing to die for a penny of wealth.' The chasm between the haves and the have-nots is sharply widening.
The time of the arranged marriages and obedient children is replaced by a clash of generations. The parents are still looking for a `good' marriage, but many children are getting divorced or confess that they are gay.
Yiyun Li's naturally flowing short stories shine through their mostly dimmed, but heavy, emotions, their nostalgia of youth, their surprising revelations and their subdued, but dramatic ends.

At the end of the book, the author gives a shocking report of a bestial execution during the Cultural Revolution.
Not to be missed by all lovers of Chinese and world literature.

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Engrossing Contemporary Chinese Literature

Contemporary Chinese short stories are rarely translated into English, and those written originally in English by a Chinese author are even more infrequent. The reader is rewarded by a series of 10 character pieces set in either China or the US. The author captures the look, feel, and emotions of modern China, which is a product of its ancient civilization, overlaid the tumultuous communist century. For those that take place in the US, one sees the intersection of 2 very different societies in a fascinating Venn diagram of cultures. Each story flows so well, that one is immersed into the story and emerges at the other end, sometimes not quite sure why you are, but having enjoyed the journey.

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Great, but nothing new

I admire and respect her writings very much. However, as a Chinese person who grew up in China and having read many contemporary Chinese authors, I have to say I find her stories copycats of some of the greatest writing ever written in the last ten years by Chinese authors that have not been translated into English. Her stories do have a lot of impact and force, but I can't help but see her as simply taking great Chinese writings and re-writing them in English with the exact same style, same kind of narratives, and same kind of plots. Maybe that's why she refuses to translate her stories into Chinese, because she knows that some Chinese will realize what she has done. It's like me taking Hemingway and Miller's writings and re-writing them in Chinese and publishing them as my own work in China.

I sent this collection to my Dad and he started laughing as soon as he finished the first story, because it's almost exactly like the writings by Cao and some of the greatest contemporary Chinese authors, whose works have not been picked up by major Chinese publishers because of pressures from the government and as a result have not yet been translated into English.

However, I do admire Li's writing very much since she is not a native speaker and only became fully immersed in English when she came here for grad school.

I think I would give her more respect if she can actually write something new. Because the way I see it, the only thing new about her stories is that they are written in Engish. What's more, they are writen for Americans, and Americans only.

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Black/White

I finished this book and I have mixed feelings. Not because the stories are bad. On the contrary, they are quite good. What bothered me is that almost aggressive anti-communistic attitude. There is one sentence where old Iranian woman says "I love China. China a good country, very old" and that would be pretty much everything said positive about China (and that comes from the mouth of Iranian women who never visited the country she's talking about!).

I don't have doubts that communism in China was quite different than communism in ex Yugoslavia (where I grow up) and therefore all those rigidness Yiyun Li is talking about is unfamiliar for me. Indeed here there were blindness as well and rigidness and it possibly was dangerous to criticize regime but it was nothing like it has been described in this book.

I just couldn't get rid of the thoughts that author is living in USA is publishing book (which probably is in high percentage truth. An awful truth!) where is criticizing horribly something about huge majority of Americans (or Western world in general) don't have a clue but they "know" it's VERY bad; book about the country not very popular in USA; book with lot black/white comparison between China and America (of course China is always and only black while America is promised land and everything about it is absolutely fantastic). She used the language and topic that will find very fertile soil in America. She described China as a hell from which every thinking Chinese want to leave. Again that might be truth but there must be something good there; or at least some respect about the heritage the ones who fled in America brought with themselves. But then, she's not mentioning that. And that thought has had big influence in my general opinion about the book.

As I said the stories are very good but if I'm an immigrant and a writer I doubt I'd be able to write this type of book about my mother land. maybe that's not something I should be proud of but I simply couldn't neglect part I love.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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