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Rotting fruits of revolution Michel Faber applauds Yiyun Li’s collection of short stories, A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers Among the most poignant books I own is The Seeds, a 1972 anthology of stories by Chinese writers celebrating the achievements of Mao’s disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. With tales such as “Raiser of Sprouts” and “A Night In Potato Village”, the disciples of utopia did their best to produce a brave new literature – despite being forbidden, on pain of death, to write about anything but tractors, seeds and fertiliser. Three decades on, that China is gone. Capitalism has sown the same freedoms, fragmentations, hopes and resentments as in other former communist regimes. A younger generation of Chinese writers, many of them recent émigrés to the west, have emerged to document – freely, at last – what they’ve witnessed. Yiyun Li, whose debut collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers has won the Frank O’Connor International short story award, was born the same year The Seeds came out. What has she witnessed? A nation churned up yet still torpid, a people harassed by change yet haunted by the past. Granny Lin in “Extra” is honourably retired (ie, laid off) from a Beijing garment factory, only to become the wife-cum-nurse of a senile old man. Briskly disinherited after his death, she finds fleeting happiness as a laundry maid in a private school, before being cast adrift again. Mr Pang in “Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told In the Right Way” still goes to work each day at the office, despite having been stripped of his wage and his identity papers years ago. A parasite on his family, he sleeps and eats in a filthy room with a pet rooster. Mr Su in “After a Life” haunts internet cafés, puzzled by the reluctance of his much-studied stock-market investments to increase in vlue. At home, he and his wife care for their severely brain-damaged daughter, a secret from the authorities. Yiyun’s confidence as a storyteller lends her fiction a traditional air, but there’s nothing old-fashioned about her perspective. With deceptive ease, she fuses the personal, political and historical. Granny Lin, “dazed by all the choices she has” when her ancient little television with its “antenna made of two steel chopsticks” is supplanted by a multi-channel monster, loses interest in TV altogether. Elsewhere, a craze for imported orchids prompts would-be connoisseurs to plough fortunes into the black market, only to be humiliated when the flowers go out of fashion and “the price drops so fast that they are now cheaper than weeds”. Whereas communism whipped up feverish appetite for rewards that never came, the characters in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers are surrounded by the rotting fruits of their struggle. But Yiyun has much more to offer than post-Marxist confusion. When I’ve sampled other recent Chinese writing, I’ve had a sense of western publishers being seduced by the novelty of it all, snapping up authors with dramatic personal histories and slim talents. Yiyun is the real deal. In common with her contemporaries, she eschews self-consciously literary language and crafts simple, pared-down prose. Too often, in other hands, this amounts to fictionalised journalism, or else a crass oriental spin on chick-lit. Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries to be a truly fine writer. There is a strangeness at the heart of her fiction that comes from somewhere other than China – a world inside the author. “Immortality”, with its disquieting blend of realism and fable, is the most overtly artful piece here. It chronicles the life of a child “born with the dictator’s face”. (Mao’s name is not mentioned, and the story works equally well if you imagine Stalin.) The doppelganger’s career in propaganda movies is handled with deadpan humour, but we are kept off-balance by a piteous parallel narrative about imperial eunuchs and by the sheer horror of quotes from the tyrant’s speeches. Written only five years after Yiyun emigrated to the US to study medicine, “Immortality” won the Paris Review’s Plimpton prize for first fiction. The fact that Yiyun writes in English rather than in her mother tongue causes occasional oddities in her text. Closer collaboration with an editor or a sympathetic reader would have ironed out some needless glitches of syntax and grammar. But compared to some other US-based Chinese authors, whose prose reads as though it was rewritten wholesale by American editors, she retains a distinctive voice. “A foreign country gives one foreign thoughts,” reflects Mr Shi, the rootless, self-deluding protagonist of the collection’s title piece, but Yiyun has an impressive ability to write perceptively about lost people rather than being lost herself: a crucial difference. Impressive, too, is her instinct to avoid the obvious and facile. “Love In the Marketplace” at first seems a stoic portrait of Sansan, a dowdy schoolteacher, jilted by her fiancé many years before. Then, when Sansan is offered a bizarre opportunity to prove that promises need nt always be discarded “like used napkins”, the story takes a startling, erotic detour, slashing open the enigma of self-esteem. In “The Princess of Nebraska”, Boshen, a gay man, has smuggled himself to America via a sham marriage to a “newly naturalised” lesbian pal. This sensational set-up is barely touched upon: the real focus of the story is Boshen’s awkward alliance with the pregnant, bewildered Sasha, another displaced person. Each of them is burdened by stupid decisions and pitiless circumstances, but not yet immune to hope. Curious to see a street parade in Chicago, Sasha pushes through the crowd, noting: “They looked so young and carefree, these Americans, happy as a group of pupils on a field trip … They were born to be themselves, naïve and contented with their naivety.” In all these stories, potential clichés are dismantled as characters are granted depth, shrewdness and perverse individuality. The countless lives ruined by Chinese history cannot be unruined, but perhaps a book like A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is the best possible revenge against the insular simple-mindedness that once ruled Chinese literature. · Michel Faber’s most recent book is The Fahrenheit Twins (Canongate)
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