By Yiyun Li
Stories of loneliness and connection
Subject
Themes
Nine interconnected stories explore the lives of solitary individuals navigating contemporary China's rapid transformation. Each narrative examines how people retreat into isolation, not as passive victims, but as active choosers of their own fates. The collection centres on characters who deliberately separate themselves from conventional social structures, finding precarious dignity in loneliness rather than surrendering to the sweeping forces of history and politics.
Nine interconnected stories explore the lives of solitary individuals navigating contemporary China's rapid transformation. Each narrative examines how people retreat into isolation, not as passive victims, but as active choosers of their own fates. The collection centres on characters who…
*Gold Boy, Emerald Girl* arrived in 2010 as Yiyun Li's second short story collection, following her acclaimed debut *A Thousand Years of Good Prayers* (2005) and her novel *The Vagrants* (2009). The collection solidified Li's reputation as one of contemporary literature's most distinctive voices,…
The characters in this collection embrace isolation not as a tragic fate imposed upon them, but as a deliberate strategy for survival. This active choice of loneliness represents a form of agency in a world where external forces, political upheaval, social expectations, historical trauma, threaten…
The collection explores how memory allows individuals to inhabit multiple temporal spaces simultaneously, living not just in the present but across various moments from their personal and collective histories. This layering of time creates rich, complex inner lives that often contrast sharply with…
The collection redefines love beyond romantic fulfilment, exploring how affection manifests through distance, silence, and unconventional relationships. Characters develop connections that society might not recognise as love, yet these bonds carry profound emotional weight. The stories challenge…
The stories unfold against China's rapid modernisation, where dizzying social change creates profound dislocation for individuals whose lives span multiple, incompatible eras. Characters navigate worlds that transform faster than human adaptation allows, creating cognitive and emotional dissonance.…
The collection explores how characters maintain dignity and self-worth despite circumstances that society might judge as failure or inadequacy. These individuals refuse to accept external measures of successful living, instead crafting private definitions of meaningful existence. Their resistance to…
Moyan, a forty-one-year-old mathematics teacher, lives alone in a deteriorating Beijing flat threatened by developers. Never married, with few friends, she has constructed a life of deliberate isolation informed by two formative relationships: Professor Shan, an elderly neighbour who became her…
Teacher Fei, a sixty-six-year-old retired art teacher, lives with his nearly ninety-year-old mother in Beijing. He discovers a magazine article about a nineteen-year-old girl who has launched a public campaign against her father, whom she accuses of adultery. The girl sued her father on her…
Yilan and Luo's sixteen-year-old daughter Jade dies in a car accident in America. Immigrants from China who sacrificed their careers for their daughter's education, they are devastated. The year following becomes a long tunnel of grief. Yilan, formerly an editor, and Luo, a doctor in China now…
Mrs. Jin, a sixty-eight-year-old widow, runs a general store across from the county jail in Clear Water Town. A reporter from Shanghai arrives to interview Susu, a young woman who petitioned to have a baby with her husband before his execution, a request the court denied. Mrs. Jin has taken Susu in…
Six women, aged mid-fifties to early seventies, call themselves saviors of burning houses. All recently retired from modest jobs (bank tellers, secretaries, a university dormitory guard) they initially met at a local park where anxious mothers sought marriage matches for their adult children.…
Mr. Chang and Meilan are the only residents of number three, Garden Road who remember moving in forty-five years earlier. He arrived as a young missile research recruit with his new wife. She came at age ten with her parents and siblings. On that hot July day, a toddler called him Uncle Fatty.…
Fifty years ago, three twelve-year-old girls became sworn sisters in Ailin's backyard. Ailin, the oldest, adapted a pledge from old novels where people chose bonds beyond blood. They bribed a neighbour's daughter to distract Ailin's younger siblings with sugar canes whilst they stole yam liquor,…
A widowed old man notices a young woman in a white floral smock moving cautiously from storefront to storefront, not glancing at shop windows. Her bare arms and ankles appear innocent, bony and smooth. He approaches her with a line he has used before but means more than ever: You remind me of my…
Siyu and Hanfeng meet for tea at the Summer Palace, an arranged introduction orchestrated by Hanfeng's mother, Professor Dai, who once taught Siyu zoology at university. Both are middle-aged and have been raised by single parents in near-identical circumstances. Siyu, thirty-eight, works as a…
Nine interconnected stories explore the lives of solitary individuals navigating contemporary China's rapid transformation. Each narrative examines how people retreat into isolation, not as passive victims, but as active choosers of their own fates. The collection centres on characters who deliberately separate themselves from conventional social structures, finding precarious dignity in loneliness rather than surrendering to the sweeping forces of history and politics.