Inner Worlds: Listening Is Believing | The New Yorker

Inner Worlds: Listening Is Believing | The New Yorker





Listening Is Believing
By Yiyun LiDecember 15, 2014
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Be content with what you have. Desire nothing and nothing will be lacking. By the time I entered high school, I could tell which of my classmates had been brought up, like me, on Tao Te Ching, the wisdom worn as an eggshell of pride. Privately, we desired all the things our other classmates, who had not been raised on defeatism, owned: Adidas sweatshirts, Sony Walkmen, cassette tapes of Karen Carpenter and Hong Kong pop singers, VCRs that played pirated movies from abroad. This was Beijing in 1988. Kentucky Fried Chicken had opened its first store in China, near Tiananmen Square, the previous year; a new classmate bragged about having tasted the famous Colonel’s recipe.

That fall, a group of well-connected girls got hold of a popular American miniseries, “The Thorn Birds.” They would regularly gather at one girl’s home and watch the saga, which was set in the Australian outback. Between classes, they discussed the lifelong love between Meggie and Father Ralph, the renegade priest she met when she was young, who later gave her a child but left her to pursue his ambition in the Vatican. The girls recited to one another the passage about the mythical bird that spends its life searching for the perfect thorn and then impales itself while singing the world’s most beautiful song.

Around that time, my father bought me the least expensive tape recorder he could find, and “Modern American English,” a textbook with four accompanying cassettes, designed for Chinese people planning to go to America. Every day, he woke me up at six and turned on the recorder. The taped conversations, between a man and a woman, became the soundtracks of my morning. From them, I learned that in a new place I should remember prominent landmarks (a McDonald’s or a Burger King, for instance, or a church spire); not to ask a woman’s age or a man’s income; to arrive half an hour late when invited to dinner and to always bring chocolates for the hostess.

The bits and pieces I picked up from the girls about “The Thorn Birds” fascinated and pained me: Father Ralph’s blue eyes and chiselled face; Meggie’s innocence, the seductive kind, which made a man lose his head; the elderly aunt, beautiful despite her wickedness. I was a good eavesdropper and decoder, but neither skill gave me claim to “The Thorn Birds.” What I’d pieced together felt as if it were something stolen from others. It would be inappropriate if I said Meggie’s name even to myself.

Then my luck changed. I was befriended by one of the girls, who described the story to me, scene by scene, shot by shot. But listening was a limited substitute for seeing. I could not envisage the red of Meggie’s hair, or the color of her dress—rose-gray, as my friend called it. (It was two years before I’d see real roses, in the first florist’s in my district.) Still, Meggie’s finger, pierced by a thorn, bled just as mine did when I punctured it with a needle while doing my least favorite chore, making quilts for the coming winter; poetically yet inadequately, I could imagine Father Ralph holding her injured hand.

I waited for an invitation from my new friend so that I could see Meggie and Ralph with my own eyes, but the invitation was never issued. I did not yet know that some people were assigned a fate that left them on the sidelines, listening. It was beyond a young person’s understanding that such a fate could also be one’s fortune.

Lao-tzu’s teaching did not mute the disappointment of being denied “The Thorn Birds,” but I still had “Modern American English.” The eggshell of pride had been replaced by the armor of dream. The McDonald’s and Burger Kings of the textbook were not so far from Meggie on the beach, Ralph in the garden, or the bird in the air flying ceaselessly from hatching to death. I had not seen these things, but I had listened to them being described to me. My future, I decided, was to be placed among them.

After my arrival in America, I decided not to watch “The Thorn Birds”; I’ve avoided the novel, by Colleen McCullough, on which the miniseries was based. Perhaps my dream, in the end, was not an American dream, and my fantasy not a teen-age girl’s fantasy of love. It’s the intensity of one’s imagination that creates a romance. Eavesdropping and decoding underscore only what does not belong to one. Inventing through listening—and inventing knows no abstinence—allows one to own a memory permanently. ♦




Published in the print edition of the December 22 & 29, 2014, issue.
Yiyun Li has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2003. Her books include the story collection “Wednesday’s Child,” which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and the memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow.”

Yiyun Li Latest Articles | The New Yorker

Yiyun Li Latest Articles | The New Yorker

Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2003. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the recipient of honors such as the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2020 Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction. Her books include the story collection “Wednesday’s Child,” which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and the memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” Li is a professor at Princeton, where she directs the Program in Creative Writing.

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The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker

The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker

The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons

The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died.

By Yiyun Li

March 23, 2025

A set of toys scattered on the floor.

Everywhere in the house there are objects: their meanings reside in the memories connected to them; the memories limn the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects.

“There is no good way to say this”—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence is not ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I already knew what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to an appropriate distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence—“there is no good way to say this”—struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation.

The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair in the living room where my husband should sit and took the other chair. My heart began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen stood.

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home; Vincent near Princeton Junction, James near Princeton Station.

The detectives in charge of the two cases belonged to two agencies—one associated with Amtrak and the other with New Jersey Transit. These facts would explain the confusion of the New Jersey Transit detective when he told me, on his second visit last year, that he couldn’t locate Vincent’s record in the files. He had an uneasy demeanor, perhaps feeling defeated by his inability to find the file or feeling the discomfort of having to face us again. On his first visit, he did all he could to avoid any reference to suicide, repeating the words “we can’t say more at the moment” and “active investigation” and “the crime scene.” Despite his fumbling, I knew that James had died by suicide. I was the one to tell him that James’s brother had died of suicide near Princeton Junction a little over six years ago.

My friend Elizabeth, who had arrived from Austin, Texas, just in time to be with us for the New Jersey Transit detective’s scheduled visit, shook her head afterward. I then told her about the earlier detective, who, on his second visit, had said that he had worked for Amtrak for more than twenty years, and every time he visited a family after a case of suicide he would go home and hug his two children, even after they had outgrown the age to be hugged. It’s an awkward truth that I cannot help observing and noticing things even in the most terrible moments.

It was the seventh day after James’s death, and the New Jersey Transit detective was visiting to return James’s backpack, just as the Amtrak detective had come back to return Vincent’s phone. A case involving life and death never miraculously closes itself at the time of the pronounced death.

Objects don’t die. Their journeys in this physical world, up to a certain point, are parallel to the trajectories of the humans to whom they belong. Then comes the moment when the separation happens. Vincent’s phone became a phone; James’s backpack, a backpack. They became objective objects, left behind in strangers’ hands.

Few objects speak. The phone and the backpack were reticent, so they could do little to illuminate the last moments of my children’s lives.

Many objects outlive people, this thought has often occurred to me—when I see in a museum an eighteenth-century pianoforte or a twelfth-century sword or a bowl from 500 B.C.E. All of Vincent’s belongings and all of James’s belongings have outlived them; not a single item has left our care. There are Vincent’s many paintings hung around the house. There is James’s collection of pocket watches on a shelf. Everywhere I turn in the house, there are objects: their meanings reside in the memories connected to them; the memories limn the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects.

Vincent’s copy of “Les Misérables,” with a bust of Victor Hugo placed on top of it; a circle of blue-and-white farm animals from Delft next to a cluster of origami animals that James folded; a giant stuffed lamb bought on a drive through west Ireland—which James named Marmalade and called his emotional-support animal during that prolonged trip (he often felt anxious when he had to leave home); a doorstop in the shape of a quietly amused elephant, bought in Kilkenny, which has been sitting next to his computer for years; another doorstop, an owl with a startled expression, which Vincent picked up in an Edinburgh shop for James; forty-seven stuffed penguins of all shapes and colors, from different cities and countries, sitting in the middle of which is a crystal penguin brought by one of Vincent’s childhood friends to his memorial service.

To think our former state a happy dream:

From which awaked, the truth of what we are

Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,

To grim Necessity.

Sometimes, walking around the house, surrounded by the objects I study closely or only glance at, I recite Richard II’s woeful words to myself. And yet I am not that dethroned king, our house is not a museum or a shrine, and our past is not merely a happy dream. I am not awakened, since I have stayed awake; I have been attentive and alert throughout all those years as the mother of my children. The necessity I face has no need of that adjective, “grim.” Necessity—my necessity—is an extremity: any adjective is an irrelevance when it comes to extremity.

After the New Jersey Transit detective expressed his surprise at not being able to find Vincent’s record, I only nodded, as though to say such things were expected: life is a muddle, bureaucratically, factually, metaphorically. I was eager for him to leave so that my husband and I could have the backpack to ourselves.

But sometimes—just sometimes—things make a little more sense upon revisiting. I wouldn’t have solved that small mystery about the police agencies had I not started writing this for James. “The book for James”—for months I have been talking about it with my friends Brigid and Elizabeth, calling it “the book for James,” just as once I was writing “the book for Vincent.”

That earlier book arrived without any conscious planning. One night, I was reading an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel in which a character addresses her mother as “Mother dear.” Mother dear—a phrase sounding archaic and yet ever lively and present—Vincent used to jokingly call me that when he wanted my attention. So the book arrived, opening with that phrase.

Vincent died at the end of September; by the end of November, the book was finished. Those who knew Vincent all said that he would have loved the book. He would have been proud and amused; he would have found fault with some of the sentences; he would have added a few adjectives and adverbs where I’d insisted on keeping sentences unadorned. The book, in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death, was as much written by Vincent as it was written for Vincent.

But in life James resisted metaphor and evaded attention. If Hamlet and Bartleby could merge into a single being, James might have occupied that space with some comfort. (“ ‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems’ ” and “I would prefer not to.”)

Brigid, quoting the opening line of a novel I had written some years ago—“Posterity, take notice!”—explained to me my difficulty. James, Brigid said, was the antithesis of attention. It would be nearly impossible to write for James, she said; it feels as though you have to learn a new alphabet before you can write anything this time.

Learning a new alphabet—for weeks and months I’ve held on to that notion. James was a different child than Vincent, and James’s death left us in a different place than Vincent’s had. And yet a new alphabet can only be symbolic, as I have but this old language to work with.

There is no good way to say this: words fall short.

Still, these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later, there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence.

There is no good way to say this. Facts are the harshest and the hardest part of life, and yet facts, unalterable, bring with them some order and logic.

Fiction, as I’ve learned from writing it and reading it, tends to be about the inexplicable and the illogical. Sometimes my students complain about what they read in fiction—“I don’t believe this would happen in life” or “I don’t believe any parent would do that to their children.” What can I say to a young person who has strong convictions but a lack of imagination? Not much, really. The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction, paltry imagination, and meagre understanding.

In eighth grade, Vincent quoted C. S. Lewis in his application to a highly selective prep school in California—“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years”—and went on to catalogue the thinking he had done. Sometimes I give the Lewis quote to my undergraduates, and more than half of them express disbelief. When are you going to start thinking?—I try very hard not to ask the students, whose faces are cloudlessly young.

I have no doubt that Vincent and James both did their share of thinking, which will remain a solace for me. And, yet, no one undertakes suicide unthinkingly.

A few weeks before Vincent’s death, we decided to purchase a house we all liked (we had just relocated that summer, from California to New Jersey). Vincent pointed out what would be his “suite”—a spacious bedroom, a bathroom, and a small study with a dormer window overlooking a tree, which appeared nondescript in the fall but would be blooming when spring came again: a dogwood tree.

Woman shows man her laptop while they sit on couch together.

“How relaxing a vacation can it be if we have to spend all our time pretending we’re not Americans?”

The suite could be separated, by shutting a door, from “the parents’ living quarters,” Vincent noted, a perfect setting for him. He also envisioned baking in the kitchen and helping me improve the garden, which did not look impressive: the couple who’d occupied the house before us, both economists, were not keen gardeners. Vincent died on the day we put down the deposit for the house. Deposit, death, in that order, four hours apart.

In this life of mine, which makes some fiction feel pale and feeble, there are other facts that I need to establish.

Vincent and James were born three years, four months, and six days apart. The gap between their deaths: six years, four months, and nineteen days. These numbers and dates are carved into my mind more deeply than they could be into stone, but they convey very little.

To travel from Princeton to New York City by train, we have the choice of departing from either Princeton Station or Princeton Junction. This is an astonishing fact, though minor in the scale of things. I don’t think that I’ve developed a preference between the two. I leave from one station or the other, depending on my schedule and also on how finicky the train service is on that day. My husband has a more consistent way of dealing with this small decision. So, at least in one specific aspect of life, he has certainty.

My feeling, not only about the departure stations but about almost everything in my life, is something else altogether. Call it a combination of keen attention and “a profound indifference” (borrowing Camus’s words), or a combination of intense emotion and an equally intense apathy. The fact is, there is no word for this state I’ve found myself in, in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same.

The day after James’s death, I said to Brigid, “One has to muddle through this life.”

That statement was not accurate. There was something stark and piercing in me that was much closer to clarity than to muddle, but calling it a muddle took less effort. It was as though I were averting my eyes from a mirror, which reflected my mind to me in such an unrelenting and sharp manner that I was startled by myself, frightened, even. By looking away, one could imagine a muddled image, vaguer, softer, less unsettling.

“But you’re not muddled,” Brigid said. For more than twenty years, she’s been the first reader of my writing, and she never lets a wrong word or a weak sentence slip past. “You’re the least muddled person at this moment.”

True, my mind was not—and is not—muddled. Only, language is limited. So here’s Exhibit A: a new alphabet and a new vocabulary cannot be found to describe how I feel.

Though I wouldn’t call myself a sworn sibling to grim necessity, necessity has nevertheless been in everything I do since James’s death. Gone are the days when I could afford some degree of automatic living in everyday life: shoes slipped on thoughtlessly (the pair of sneakers that used to be next to my shoes are in a different place now); a local detour taken without conscious thought (this road would lead to the corner where I last said goodbye to James); a quick stop at the university cafeteria (where my colleague and friend Ed and I both hid our faces when James, who was a freshman at Princeton, walked past one day; he didn’t notice us).

Necessity dictates that attention should be given to all details in this after-time: everything is relevant, everything has weight, and everything leads to a moment in the past, which becomes a memory, which in turn becomes a narrative. When a line of coral-colored hyacinths called Gipsy Queen bloomed next to the garden fence in March, I reminded myself, every time I walked past, to slow down and study them. James was the one who loved this particular hyacinth; I used to prefer Delft Blue.

Necessity also dictates that all the details should be noticed and filed away without any excessive feeling. After Vincent died, I read and reread “Grief Lessons,” a collection of Euripides’ plays translated by Anne Carson, and Constance’s monologue in Shakespeare’s “King John” after she loses young Arthur, who was robbed of his throne and then his life. Those ancient Greeks sing their grief at the highest pitch, which, as Carson points out, is rage. Their grief and their rage are nearly untranslatable, as though feelings in extremity can only be physical sensations—the language assails one with a blind and blunt force. Constance, when chastised by Cardinal Pandulph for her lack of composure (“Lady, you utter madness and not sorrow”), retorts:

I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;

My name is Constance: I was Geoffrey’s wife:

Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost.

I am not mad; I would to heaven I were,

For then, ’tis like I should forget myself.

O, if I could, what grief should I forget!

Preach some philosophy to make me mad,

And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal.

For, being not mad but sensible of grief,

My reasonable part produces reason

How I may be delivered of these woes,

And teaches me to kill or hang myself.

If I were mad, I should forget my son,

Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.

I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel

The different plague of each calamity.

The ancient Greeks and Constance might have said something I could not find words for after Vincent died, and yet this statement is not entirely accurate. Those mothers in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies voiced their sorrows at a higher pitch than mine. I did not lose my words, and I was not at a loss for words when Vincent died. I wrote a book for him.

I also, on one occasion, wept. A few weeks after Vincent’s death, Brigid and I went to see a production of “King Lear” in New York. By the time Lear finished his howling monologue, I was weeping; I went on weeping after we left the theatre, sitting on the edge of a stone planter, in the center of which a small tree was shedding its last leaves. When I stopped crying, I said to Brigid, “There’s no surprise left for me. No one will ever be able to surprise me after Vincent.”

How one misspeaks, and how one misspeaks in extremity. James surprised me more than Vincent did, but this time I know not to make any statement of finality.

This time, rereading Euripides and Shakespeare, I have a different reaction: make Constance’s words a hundred times shriller, make those Greek mothers’ cries a hundred times more piercing, and then I would say, This is close to how I could express myself, too; only, I would prefer not to.

The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died; through writing, I was able to conjure up a Vincent in the book written for him, but I will not be able to do this for James—I cannot conjure him up in any manner.

When Vincent was alive, we talked and we argued (sometimes affectionately and sometimes contentiously). It was only natural that our endless talking in life would extend itself to where reasons end, where across the border of life and death words retain their vivacity. The book for Vincent was published as fiction because it could be called only that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother.

Two years after Vincent died, his friend Joy visited us and told me that she had read the book. “It’s so uncanny,” she said. “All those things he said in the book were just the things he would’ve said. When I was reading it, I thought, Vincent is back!” She laughed and then burst into tears.

Vincent had many good friends, and many, when he died, said things along the lines that they would always remember him. Joy, however, uncannily prescient at sixteen, expressed her fear that, as years went by, she would not be able to remember Vincent as clearly as she wanted.

At least I’d given Joy a book to go by, I thought then.

I once edited a few adjectives out of Vincent’s writing when he was in sixth grade, which led him to protest: “Adjectives and adverbs are my guilty pleasure!”

James loved languages, though he was not a verbal child. He had been uncharacteristically talkative with Vincent, but with the rest of the world he had preferred silence. That silence became more pronounced after Vincent died.

The summer before James went to college, he confessed that he had done little in his senior year of high school besides reading five major works of Wittgenstein. I started to read “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” on James’s recommendation. A few weeks later, I told him that I had difficulty grasping what I was reading.

“Oh,” he replied. A single word that could mean, Not surprising, or, How could you not understand Wittgenstein, or, I don’t know what I can do to help you, or, simply, Read on. This morning, I reread the preface to “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which opens with this paragraph: “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure.”

It’s a solace to know that James found philosophical pleasure in language, different from the pleasure Vincent got from language—which was poetic, musical, and sensual.

It’s an impossible task to write for James. It will have to be done through thinking, rather than through feeling; that is how I will reach for an approximation of understanding him. Or of not understanding him—just as I might spend my days reading Wittgenstein, not knowing whether I’ve got anything right.

Afew months before James’s death, he told me that he had been rereading “Caligula,” a play by Camus, “a bit obsessively.” He had watched several productions of the play on the internet, including two in English, one in Japanese, and one in Spanish.

I had not read the play. I asked him whether I should, knowing already that I would. He said yes. The next time I saw him—he was living in the dorms at Princeton then, and would sometimes visit on Saturdays for his favorite meal, my husband’s steak dinner—I told him that I was affected by a line in it: “Men die; and they are not happy.”

James, in his usual understated manner, nodded with a gentle smile. (That smile, along with his quiet demeanor, was what his friends, classmates, and professors would remember in their letters to us and would mention to the reporters at one of the student newspapers who put together a stunningly beautiful tribute to him.)

“How does one ever recover from that line?” I asked James. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it for days.”

“It’s quite compelling,” he said.

Men die; and they are not happy. Half of the line is a fact; the other half, a conjecture. There is no cause-and-effect emphasized: Do men die because they are not happy, or are they not happy because they have to die someday? The two statements, existing together, are like two hands kept close, barely touching or with their fingers intertwined.

After James’s death, I found a picture I had taken when he was in kindergarten. One day, when I went to pick him up, he was wearing a sign that he had written out in large print, no doubt exasperated by grownups asking him why he wasn’t talking or telling him that he must talk:

IM NOt TaLKING Becuase I DON’t WaNT TO!

My husband, referring to the picture recently, commented that, as a family, what the four of us shared was our belief in, and our respect for, free will.

I thought for a moment and replied that, despite our not knowing enough of James’s thinking, what we could be certain of was this: he knew that we would respect his decision to take his own life, and he trusted that we would endure his death, for we had endured his brother’s death.

“Believe me when I say that I shall be all right. In the same strictly truthful sense that it’s true that the two angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. No fancy, no frill. Not symbolically, not mystically. Just all right.” Richard Quin, from Rebecca West’s “The Saga of the Century Trilogy,” says this to his family before going to France during the Great War, to be instantly killed, still a teen-ager.

“Just all right”—these words have been on my mind the past few months. Richard Quin shall be all right because he is crossing the English Channel to meet death, which requires nothing more of him than simply his being—being gone from this physical world, being remembered, being all right.

And yet, for those who go on living, few can afford simply to be, and very few can be all right. The border between “all right” and “all wrong,” like the border between life and death, is not solid. In recent months, I have replied to friends’ queries with this line: “Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right.”

Two whales swimming.

“Do you want the last piece of plankton? I’m stuffed.”

Perhaps I should revise that statement about our belief in and our respect for free will. In the realm of being, yes, we have little regret about respecting our children’s free will. But raising children is more than offering them the space to be; the world seems to care more about children’s doings than about their beings. When Vincent was five, I thought of signing him up for a soccer club, and he informed me, with utter seriousness, that I would be doing that not for his happiness but because I wanted him to be just like the other children. I instantly gave up the idea. And yet how many parents can say with confidence, when it comes to their children’s upbringing, that they have achieved a real understanding between being and doing?

There was a moment that we used to talk about with laughter. In seventh grade, when we were living in Oakland, Vincent decided one morning that he would go to school in a dress, and went to our bedroom to look for the perfect outfit. (I do not use the word “perfect” lightly: perfectionism was part of Vincent’s essence.)

My husband, with a worried look, kept offering him dark-colored dresses: This blue one? How about this black dress? This green one would look good on you.

Vincent, in his usual flamboyant manner, picked up a pink dress. “What’s the point of going to school in a dress if not a pink one?” he asked.

I explained to him that, as parents, it was natural for us to worry that a pink dress might lead to bullying by his schoolmates. Vincent laughed off my concern and said that, if there were idiots who dared tease him, that was all the more reason to wear pink. “Just so I can be in their face,” he said.

I was full of admiration for Vincent. I felt unease, too. We parents could only do so much for our children, to raise them to be bold and free, but the world outside this bubble we called our family was often not a kind place.

Around the same time, Vincent decided to walk home from school by himself. It was a two-mile walk to our house, up on the hill. Half of it was along a woodsy road just off the highway, with no sidewalks or houses on either side, and it was not the safest part of Oakland. I expressed my reservations, but Vincent was a stubborn child. He promised that he would stay alert; he would run fast, he said, if needed.

Vincent was proud of his androgynous looks: his long, shining black hair and his slender, cranelike physique. For two years, I lived in dread of that woodsy road, where cars drove without observing the speed limit. But a greater fear, which I never voiced to him, was that he might be abducted along that road: he might be mistaken for a pretty young girl, or there might be no mistake at all—he was a beautiful young boy.

Every semester, then and later, I would teach Grace Paley’s story “Friends,” and every time I would point out a particular passage to my students, though I doubt that many of them truly understood its weight. An older woman, reminiscing about her daughter’s death, says to her friends, “You know the night Abby died, when the police called me and told me? That was my first night’s sleep in two years. I knew where she was.”

For two years, Vincent walked with a tube of pepper spray clasped in his hand—which once led to James’s report that a classmate, having been told about Vincent’s pepper spray, thought that it was a condiment. That pepper spray is among the objects that have outlived Vincent. Sometimes I go into his room and look at it.

What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so that they can become more fully themselves?

And yet, despite the parents’ efforts, and despite all the beings and doings that occur as the children grow, some among them die before their time.

Children die, and they are not happy.

And their parents can never know whether those children died because they were not happy, or whether they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths.

For six years before Vincent’s death, I had lived with a dread that one day he might choose not to live. There were days of concern and nights of anxiety, and there were occasions for despair, but these feelings, I believed, were best kept under a calm surface. The prospect of a fire does not mean that one has to carry an extinguisher on one’s back around the clock.

A few times, though, I did slip into Vincent’s bedroom in the middle of the night, checking that he was still there. Seeing is believing, though only to a limited extent. For six years, I believed and disbelieved what I could not see at the time—but surely I was not alone in that? The ability to believe and disbelieve simultaneously seems a prerequisite for any parent. Is that rash a minor skin irritation or the first symptom of a deadly illness? Is a child’s preference for playing alone a developmental stage or a sign of serious trouble? There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end. “Just all right,” we say to ourselves, out of blind courage, out of wishful thinking, both indispensable for a parent.

Should a mother rely on her intuition? What’s the use of intuition in matters of life and death? A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long, a mother cannot follow a child’s every step in life, just so that she can make sure that he remains alive. A mind too reliant on intuition might easily leave reality behind. What would happen then? One mother feeds a lethal concoction of drugs to her own child to protect him from life’s threats. Another mother, plagued by postpartum depression, leaps out of the building with her infant. These stories in the news tend to be called tragedies, or even senseless tragedies, but only a careless writer would use those words so unthinkingly. Senseless? There is always some sense in a parent’s intuitions. The real tragedy is not just death itself but also a mother’s difficulty in knowing when to trust her intuition and when to let it go.

My most humiliating writing experience took place in fourth grade. For a school contest, instead of turning in a patriotic essay praising the glory and beauty of our mother China, I wrote a piece decrying the hypocrisy of such contests, and elaborating on the ugliness of life a child experienced while being forced to lie about it—“ugliness” was the word I used, more than once, in that essay.

The acts of writing the essay and of entering it in the contest were not done out of courage. I wasn’t brave; rather, I was ten, and I was feeling suicidal despair.

I recognized Vincent’s despair when he was in fourth grade; so did his teacher, who wrote me about the poems he turned in for schoolwork, which were astonishingly painful yet beautiful contemplations of life and death.

My entry in the writing contest caused a scandal among the schoolteachers. I was called to a conference room to be greeted by six or seven teachers jeering and laughing at me. An older woman, a friend of my mother’s (my mother was also a teacher at the school), walked over and pinched my cheeks, first one and then the other, as an adult might do to an infant. She said, “You’re a good student. You’re not too ugly. You look like a child with some potential, but who would’ve thought that you could be so stupid as to write such nonsense?”

The only good thing that came out of this episode: I learned not to take reviews and criticism of my future work to heart. I should add that my mother was in the conference room that day and laughed and jeered along with her colleagues. But her wrath, when I got home from school that evening, was a story that I prefer not to remember.

When Vincent was around the same age, he asked, pointedly, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.

All those books teaching parents how to take care of their children—the first year, the first eighteen months, the first five or ten years—none of them addresses this difficulty: for parents and for children, the border between reality and unreality is not always clearly marked.

What can a mother do, facing reality, facing unreality, but rely on her intuition while at the same time keeping her intuition at bay?

Intuitions are narratives. I have an intrinsic distrust of narratives, which are among the most misleading things in life. I have seen lives saved by narratives and lives derailed by narratives. That I’ve chosen to write narratives is an incongruity one has to acknowledge.

But intuitions are a tricky subset of narratives: incomplete, un-completable. I avoid putting my intuitions into words, which would be pinning a butterfly on a specimen board in order to claim the certainty of possession.

However, I did voice an intuition once. After Vincent died, Brigid reminded me that in a phone call, a few years earlier, I’d confessed to her that I would regard it as a triumph if I could see Vincent graduate high school. In the days immediately after his death, I had forgotten that conversation. When Brigid told me, I remembered that afternoon, making the call in my bedroom, hiding from the children because I was weeping.

Vincent had seen me cry no more than two or three times in his life; James, precisely once, a few months after Vincent died. These are facts.

Vincent did not live long enough to graduate high school. James did. These, too, are facts.

But intuitions are not facts. Intuitions, with shape-shifting qualities akin to those of paranoias or fantasies, are not always defensible, rarely unassailable.

Three days after James’s birth, while we waited for the elevator on the way out of the hospital, my husband placed the carrier on the floor and knelt down beside it, listening closely to detect the newborn’s breathing. Two older women walked past and admired the sight. “Now that’s a first-time dad,” said one to the other. We were not first-time parents. Only, like many young parents, we were beset by fears. Babies breathe on their own, but sometimes they stop breathing on their own, too.

After Vincent’s death, all those hows and whys and wherefores and what ifs, which I went through in my therapist’s office and in my own head, often returned me to that phone call Brigid had reminded me of. “You knew it back then,” she said.

And I was not the only one to have known it. My husband must have, too. And Vincent’s therapist in California, who explained that Vincent was not a child who would take a few pills and call all his friends to announce that he was planning to kill himself. “You must be prepared,” the therapist said on the phone. “If Vincent decided to do it, it would be so sudden that no one would expect it and no one could stop it.”

I was not surprised when the therapist said that, just as I was not surprised when Vincent’s fourth-grade teacher wrote to me about his poems. Vincent was my child; I knew—no, I felt—his despair and agitation.

I had parked the car by the roadside to pick up the therapist’s call—he was returning a message I had left on his voice mail, not an emergency, not because of a crisis, but to talk about an ongoing dread. After the call, I went to pick James up from school, and later Vincent from track-and-field practice. Knowing that something may or may not happen does not exempt one from the tasks of living.

Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are fiction, unless and until, confirmed by life, they become facts.

Those moments when intuitions remain unspoken and unspeakable are only part of life. There are other parts to be lived. A mother’s job is to provide a framework for living: things to do, places to go, days that never fail to break, and nights that always fall.

When we were living in California, every few months we would drive to a Berkeley music shop to choose a new batch of reeds for Vincent’s oboe. The shop was called Forrests, and the first time James heard that we were going to Forrests, his five-year-old face looked anxious. “What if we got lost in the forests?” he asked, and it took Vincent and me a few seconds to understand his fear. Then we all laughed because life was good at that moment, and we were not going to be lost in the forests. (And yet who among us is ever safe? “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost”—even Dante did not pay attention to children’s despair.)

I once found a series of numbers in the Notes app on my phone and remembered that Vincent had been deep in a knitting project, calling out numbers for me to write down. What are these numbers, and in what format do I record them, I asked, and he told me just to write them down, as he would need me to read them back to him later. To this day, I do not know what they were for, but the numbers seem reasonable, saved in perpetuity on my phone.

For some years, there were three different meals to be cooked for every dinner: one for Vincent, one for James, and one for my husband and me. A mother of a classmate of James’s told me that I must be crazy to go to those lengths, but I was not crazy—I simply understood the necessity of this task.

There were apples to be cored and then cut into geometrically and aesthetically pleasing slices. At a memorial service held by Vincent’s old schoolmates in California, his friends brought slices of apples to share and reminisced about the apple slices in his lunchbox, cut with absolute symmetry. That fact, in the days after Vincent’s death, seemed to have vanished from my memory, and I was glad it was saved from oblivion by his friends.

That apples must be sliced perfectly was an aesthetic need of Vincent’s that I grasped and agreed with, just as, when I made pancakes for James, I would be sure to make each piece different, forming it like a letter not found in the English alphabet. One must strive to live beyond the letter “Z,” and one must strive to go beyond one language. James would teach himself several: Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian, on top of Spanish, Italian, and Japanese—the languages he took at school. His phone, I once found out by accident, was set to Lithuanian.

It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.

Two women sitting and holding hands above a pentagram on the floor.

“He says he never texted you back because he had a lot going on.”

Things to do, places to go, a framework for living is a framework for memory.

James was given his first Gmail address at the age of three. After a quarrel with Vincent, he asked for my help in creating an e-mail account for himself. “Dear Vincent: You are a mini,” James wrote, mistyping “meanie” as “mini,” though observing the etiquette of proper correspondence. In those days, whenever I was out of town I would write a stack of cards ahead of time so that my husband could include a card on each day of my absence in James’s lunchbox. All those cards were signed “Love, Mommy.” Moments after Vincent received the e-mail, they reconciled, as Vincent was amused that James’s “hate e-mail” ended with “Love, James.”

My friend Edmund read me a poem he’d written recently, about three moments of happiness in his life. He said that somewhere he’d read that each person has only three real happy memories. Could that be true? Afterward, I started to record in my notebooks the moments I’d been happy with Vincent and James, and I quickly got past three.

If I train my mind on the happy moments, the framework for living seems sturdy enough. And yet it is not an indestructible shelter from catastrophes. A mother dedicating herself to the framework for living is like a shipbuilder building a vessel, not asking whether the voyage is to be through calm seas or tempests, not pondering whether there will be a tomorrow or not.

Seeing is believing, but a mother must restrain herself from foreseeing. To foresee is to give too much weight to intuition; foreseeing might be waving a white flag prematurely.

Vincent’s death did not come as a complete surprise, but it was a never-healing wound. It was not, however, a wound inflicted by him or his decision. Once, at an event for a mental-health institute in Los Angeles, a psychiatrist interviewing me pressed, asking whether I felt any anger toward Vincent. He said he could detect no anger in the book I had written for Vincent. He told me that earlier in his career he’d lost a teen-age patient to suicide, and he could still feel lingering anger years later.

He is not the only person who has asked me about anger: the question must be relevant and legitimate, but anger is not a major or even a minor emotion in my life.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, and not at life, either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”

After Vincent’s death, there were excruciating days, days of numbness, days of contentment and days of melancholy, days of reading and writing and days of not being able to read or write, days of holding on upside down (like the bat in Marianne Moore’s poem) and days of holding on right side up. But in all those days, where one is obliged to live (“Where can we live but days?” in Philip Larkin’s words), there remained that thought: every single day, for the rest of my life, I will be thinking of Vincent.

I had not lived with the same dread for James when he was alive. My parental anxiety about him was largely about his future. Then, one day, he walked out of the world in the same way that Vincent did.

“There is no good way to say this. We’re very sorry for your loss.” The police came and then left swiftly, as though they were actors coming onstage to deliver their lines and, having done so, exiting right away.

I texted Brigid and then texted my therapist, telling them that James had died by suicide. Later, they both told me their initial reactions, which were similar.

“I knew every one of those words in the message, but I didn’t understand what the words meant, put together,” Brigid said. Half an hour before I sent that text to her, I had been on the phone with her, and James had been mentioned in our lighthearted conversation.

My therapist said that when he read the message his first thought was that “it made no sense, it made no sense at all.”

James died on a Friday, and the Saturday before that was the last time Brigid had seen him (the last time for us, too). He was home from college for a meal on New Year’s Day of the lunar calendar, and Brigid noticed his good spirits and his composure. A week or two before his death, my therapist had asked me (not for the first time) whether I worried about James feeling suicidal, and I had enough confidence to say that, even though one could never say no to that possibility with certainty, I didn’t really think that he was suicidal.

So much for a mother’s intuition.

And yet one wonders, in retrospect, what prompted the conversation about the probability or improbability of James feeling suicidal, which had been a recurring topic in the therapist’s office. Was it intuition or paranoia that led to the discussion shortly before James died—a premonition I couldn’t explain? It doesn’t matter, as the facts remain irrefutable: I did not anticipate that James would choose suicide; I did not detect any sign. For six years before Vincent’s death, I lived in dread that he would. For the six years between the two boys’ deaths, James, too, was pondering suicide—Vincent’s, and then, at some point, his own. I did not know when that shift happened; I did not even think that shift would happen, as I worried only about James’s life, not about his death.

Two months after Vincent died, James asked for my copy of “Anna Karenina.” I hesitated, although I had never worried about what my children were reading. They were both precocious readers, and I let them explore all the literature available to them. I asked James, who was then in seventh grade, whether he knew that at the end of “Anna Karenina” Anna committed suicide. He said yes. I then asked him whether he wanted to read the novel because of that, and he only smiled his gentle smile.

I gave the book to him, and it became one of the books we talked about on and off for the next few years. Tolstoy’s characters are easily vexed, or maybe Russians are easily vexed, he told me a few days into his reading. That the words “vex” and “vexation” appear often in the text is an observation I will always remember and treasure. James saw himself in Levin, as I had expected, but I did point out that Levin was often vexed though he—James—was rarely vexed. He adored Kitty; he was fond of Anna’s brother, Stiva (because he was immoral and genuine); and he found Vronsky the most complex character in the novel. What about Anna, I said, and James thought for a while, then said that Anna brought tragedies onto herself and then complained about them. I now wish that I had asked him which he had found more troubling: that she brought tragedies onto herself or that she complained. We did not discuss her suicide.

I reread “Anna Karenina” recently. I had forgotten that, before Anna’s suicide, there is Vronsky’s attempt. He shoots himself, impulsively and perhaps not entirely wholeheartedly, out of desperate love for Anna. Overshadowed by Anna’s death, this episode had somehow retreated from my memory. I wish I had discussed this with James. A few weeks before his death, he told me that he was reading “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Camus, and I said that I’d read the book, too, when I was in college. After that conversation, I turned to its opening pages: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Did I have a fleeting thought that I should have checked in with James to see if he felt suicidal? I can’t answer that question now, because on this side of death no answer can be trusted.

When we dropped James off at his dorm after that last dinner with us, I asked him what he was reading, and he replied that he was rereading “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Then he stepped out of the car and raised a hand. James was a person of few words and even fewer gestures. That raised hand, like that versatile single word “oh” in his conversation, could mean many things: hello, or goodbye, or leave me alone, or thank you, or simply a reply to the words I said when he stepped out of the car, “I love you, James.”

Through their entire lives, at every school drop-off, every time they were leaving for a party or a playdate, every time I was leaving for a trip, and with each exchange of text, the last thing I said to Vincent and James was inevitably “I love you.”

No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of “I love you”s we can say to them. That, too, is a fact. ♦

This is drawn from “Things in Nature Merely Grow.”

Yiyun Li - Wikipedia 李翊云 李翊雲

Yiyun Li - Wikipedia

Yiyun Li

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The native form of this personal name is Li Yiyun. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Yiyun Li
Native name	李翊雲
Born	November 4, 1972 (age 52) Beijing, China
Occupation	Author, professor
Language	English
Education	Peking University (BS) University of Iowa (MS, MFA)
Notable works	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers The Vagrants The Book of Goose
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellow Guggenheim Fellowship
Children	2

Yiyun Li (Chinese: 李翊雲 - Li Yiyun) (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer and professor who has lived and worked in the United States since entering graduate school. She writes exclusively in English.^[1][2] Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,^[3][4] the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End,^[5] and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose.^[6] Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.^[7] She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.^[8]

Biography

Li was born and raised in Beijing, China.^[9][10] Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist.^[11] In Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li recounts moments from her early life, including abuse by her mother.^[12]

In 1991, Li fulfilled a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army^[9] in Xinyang as part of her obligations before pursuing her college education.^[13] After earning a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996, she moved to the U.S.^[3] In 2000, she earned a Master of Science in immunology at the University of Iowa.^[14] She left a PhD program in immunology to pursue writing.^[15] In 2005, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and fiction from The Nonfiction Writing Program and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.^[14]

Li's stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker,^[16] The Paris Review, Harper's, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into 2007 films directed by Wayne Wang: The Princess of Nebraska and the title story, which Li adapted herself.

From 2005 to 2008, Li lived in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College.^[17] In 2008, she moved from Oakland to join the faculty at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.^[17] Since 2017, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University.^[17]

Li had a breakdown in 2012 and attempted suicide twice.^[18][12] After recuperating and leaving the hospital, she lost interest in writing fiction. For a whole year, she focused on reading several biographies, memoirs, diaries and journals. According to her, reading about other people's lives "was a comfort".^[18]

As a result of her experiences with depression, she wrote her 2017 memoir Dear Friend.^[18] A few months after the book was published, her 16-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself.^[12][14] She explored this in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End.^[19][20]

In September 2022, Li published The Book of Goose, a tale of a literary hoax spun by two 13-year-old girls in postwar France. The New York Times called it "an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories."^[21] In April 2023, the novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.^[22]

Li has taught fiction at the University of California, Davis, and is a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.^[23]

Li was appointed the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University in 2022, succeeding Jhumpa Lahiri.^[24]

On February 16, 2024, Li's 19-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in Princeton.^[25] The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office ruled his death a suicide.^[26] In 2025, she published Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir about the deaths of both Vincent and James and an exploration of the ways in which words fail but are still necessary.^[15]

Award and honours

Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship;^[27][28] and a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[29]

In 2007, Granta included Li on its list of the 21 best young American novelists.^[30] In 2010, she was listed among The New Yorker's "20 Under 40".

In 2012, Li was selected as a judge for The Story Prize after having been a finalist for the award in 2010,^[31] and in 2013, she judged the Man Booker International Prize.^[32]

In 2014, Li won The American Academy of Arts and Letters's Benjamin H. Danks Award. In 2020, she won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction,^[33][34][35] and in 2022, she won the PEN/Malamud Award, which "recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form."^[36][37]

In 2023, Li was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.^[38]

In 2024, Li was named a finalist for The Story Prize.^[39]

Li was chosen to serve as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize, alongside Edmund de Waal (chair), Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, and Nitin Sawhney.^[40]

Awards for Li's writing 

Year	Title	Award	Result	Ref.
2005	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers	Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award	Winner	[41]
2006		California Book Award for Fiction	Winner
		Guardian First Book Award	Winner	[42]
		PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel	Winner	[3]
	—	Whiting Award for Fiction	Winner	[43][44]
2010	Gold Boy, Emerald Girl	The Story Prize	Finalist	[45][46]
	The Vagrants	RUSA Notable Books for Adults	Selection	[47][48]
2011	Gold Boy, Emerald Girl	Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award	Shortlist	[49][50]
		NCIBA Book of the Year Award for Fiction	Winner	[51]
		St. Francis College Literary Prize	Finalist	[52]
	The Vagrants	International Dublin Literary Award	Finalist	[53][54]
2015	"A Sheltered Woman"	Sunday Times Short Story Award	Winner	[55][56]
2020	Where Reasons End	PEN/Jean Stein Book Award	Winner	[5][57][58]
2023	The Book of Goose	Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction	Longlist	[59]
		PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction	Winner	[60][61]
2024	Wednesday's Child	Pulitzer Prize	Finalist	[62]

Publications

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (March 2015)

Novels

• — (2009). The Vagrants. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6313-0. LCCN 2008023467. OCLC 229028064.
• — (2014). Kinder Than Solitude. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6814-2. LCCN 2013017307. OCLC 842323189.
• — (2019). Where Reasons End. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-984817-37-2. LCCN 2018013429. OCLC 1030447783.
• — (2020). Must I Go. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-399-58912-6. LCCN 2019048747. OCLC 1125306132.
• — (2022). The Book of Goose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-60634-3. LCCN 2022022703. OCLC 1289234580.

Memoir

• Li, Yiyun (2017). Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Random House.
• — (2025). Things in Nature Merely Grow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-61731-8.

Short fiction

Collections

• Li, Yiyun (2005). A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Random House.
• — (2010). Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Random House.
• — (2023). Wednesday's Child. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Short stories

Title	Publication	Collected in
"Immortality"	The Paris Review (Fall 2003)	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
"Extra"	The New Yorker (December 22-29, 2003)
"Persimmons"	The Paris Review (Fall 2004)
"The Princess of Nebraska"	Ploughshares (Winter 2004)
"Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way"	Glimmer Train (Spring 2005)
"After a Life"	Prospect (April 2005)
"The Proprietress"	Zoetrope: All-Story 9.3 (Fall 2005)	Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
"Love in the Marketplace"	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Fall 2005)	A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
"Son"
"The Arrangement"
"A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"
"Prison"	Tin House 28 (Summer 2006)	Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
"Souvenir"	San Francisco Chronicle (July 9, 2006)
"House Fire"	Granta 97 (Spring 2007)
"Sweeping Past"	The Guardian (August 10, 2007)
"A Man Like Him"	The New Yorker (May 12, 2008)
"Gold Boy, Emerald Girl"	The New Yorker (October 13, 2008)
"Number Three, Garden Road"	Waving at the Gardener: The Asham Award Short-Story Collection (2009)
"Alone"	The New Yorker (November 16, 2009)	Wednesday's Child
"Kindness"	A Public Space 10 (2010)	Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
"The Science of Flight"	The New Yorker (August 30, 2010)	-
"The Reunion"	Washington Post Magazine (November 27, 2011)	-
"A Sheltered Woman"	The New Yorker (March 10, 2014)	Wednesday's Child
"On the Street Where You Live"	The New Yorker (January 9, 2017)
"A Small Flame"	The New Yorker (May 18, 2017)
"Do Not Yet Mother Dear Find Us"*	A Public Space 26 (2018)	* excerpt from Where Reasons End
"A Flawless Silence"	The New Yorker (April 23, 2018)	Wednesday's Child
"When We Were Happy We Had Other Names"	The New Yorker (October 1, 2018)
"All Will Be Well"	The New Yorker (March 11, 2019)
"Let Mothers Doubt"	Esquire UK (July/August 2020)
"Under the Magnolia"	The New York Times Magazine (July 12, 2020)	-
"If You Are Lonely and You Know It"	Amazon Original Stories (February 25, 2021)	-
"Hello, Goodbye"	The New Yorker (November 15, 2021)	Wednesday's Child
"Such Common Life" 1. Protein 2. Hypothesis 3. Contract	Zoetrope: All-Story 26.2 (Summer 2022) 26.3 (Fall 2022) 26.4 (Winter 2022)
"Wednesday's Child"	The New Yorker (January 23, 2023)
"The Particles of Order"	The New Yorker (September 2, 2024)	-
"Techniques and Idiosyncrasies"	The New Yorker (March 17, 2025)	-
"Any Human Heart"	The New Yorker (June 15, 2025)	-

Essays and reporting

• Li, Yiyun (December 22–29, 2014). "Listening is believing". Inner Worlds. The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 41. p. 88.
• — (January 2, 2017). "To speak is to blunder : choosing to renounce a mother tongue". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 43. pp. 30–33.
• Li, Yiyun (October 31, 2024). "The Seventy Percent". Harper's Magazine^[63]
• — (March 31, 2025). "The deaths—and lives—of two sons". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 101, no. 6. pp. 38–47. Printed under the title "A matter of facts".

References

1.  Ho, Rosemarie (October 21, 2019). "For Yiyun Li, All Writing Is Autobiographical". The Nation. Retrieved March 20, 2025.
2.  Rustin, Susanna (April 13, 2012). "Yiyun Li: a life in writing". The Guardian. Retrieved March 20, 2025.
3.  "Interview with Yiyun Li, 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award Winner". The Hemingway Society. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
4.  Guardian Staff (2006-12-06). "Interview with Guardian First Book Award winner Yiyun Li". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
5.  "Yiyun Li receives PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for originality, merit and impact". Princeton University. 2020-03-03. Retrieved 2020-03-09.
6.  "Yiyun Li's 'The Book of Goose' wins PEN/Faulkner award". AP News. April 4, 2023. Retrieved October 23, 2023.
7.  admin (2024-05-07). "2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalists include Yiyun Li and Ed Park". Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2024-07-04.
8.  A Public Space.
9.  Altmann, Jennifer. "Creative Writing: Life, By the Book". Princeton Alumni Weekly (June 6, 2018 ed.). Retrieved 31 July 2020.
10.  Thompson, Bob (28 December 2005). "Proving the extraordinary". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 31 July 2020.
11.  Laity, Paul (24 February 2017). "Yiyun Li: 'I used to say that I was not an autobiographical writer – that was a lie'". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 February 2017.
12.  Armitstead, Claire (2022-09-18). "Yiyun Li: 'I'm not that nice friendly Chinese lady who writes… Being subversive is important to me'". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
13.  admin (2022-06-08). "Yiyun Li Named Director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing". Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2024-10-26.
14.  Strong, Lynn Steger (2022-09-20). "How novelist Yiyun Li learned to capture shadows". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
15.  Alter, Alexandra (2025-05-16). "Yiyun Li's New Book Is No Ordinary Grief Memoir". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-05-16.
16.  "Yiyun Li". The New Yorker. Retrieved 26 February 2017.
17.  "Yiyun Li – The Oakland Artists Project". Retrieved 2024-01-15.
18.  Laity, Paul (2017-02-24). "Yiyun Li: 'I used to say that I was not an autobiographical writer – that was a lie'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-07-12.
19.  "Yiyun Li navigates the loss of a child in her heartbreaking new novel". CBC Radio. 2019-10-18. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
20.  Sehgal, Parul (2019-01-22). "A Mother Loses a Son to Suicide, but Their Dialogue Continues". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
21.  O'Grady, Megan (18 September 2022). "Why Write? Yiyun Li's New Novel Explores Our Urge to Invent". The New York Times. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
22.  "Announcing the Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction". PEN/Faulkner. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
23.  "Yiyun Li". Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2018-05-12.
24.  admin (2022-06-08). "Yiyun Li Named Director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing". Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2024-10-26.
25.  The Office of Communications of Princeton University (20 Feb 2024). "The University community mourns the loss of undergraduate James Li". Princeton University. Retrieved 2024-02-21.
26.  "Princeton Student Struck by Train Was Creative Writing Director's Son". Princeton Alumni Weekly. Retrieved 2024-05-22.
27.  "Awards: MacArthur Fellows; Independent Booksellers Book Prize". Shelf Awareness. 2010-09-28. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
28.  "Yiyun Li - Professor of English". University of California, Davis. Archived from the original on 10 July 2015. Retrieved 25 February 2017.
29.  "Yiyun Li". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
30.  Lea, Richard (2007-03-05). "Granta nominates best young US novelists". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
31.  "Story Prize Judges Named". Shelf Awareness. 2012-10-17. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
32.  "2013 Man Booker International Prize Finalists Announced". Publishers Weekly. 2013-01-24. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
33.  "Citation for Yiyun Li". Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes. Archived from the original on 2022-12-01. Retrieved 2023-01-06.
34.  "Awards: Rathbones Folio, Windham Campbell Winners". Shelf Awareness. 2020-03-24. Archived from the original on 2022-10-27. Retrieved 2023-03-14.
35.  Nawotka, Ed (2020-03-19). "Eight Writers Awarded $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prizes". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
36.  "Yiyun Li Wins the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story". PEN/Faulkner. 2022-05-16. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
37.  "Awards: PEN/Malamud, Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator Winners". Shelf Awareness. 2022-05-17. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
38.  "RSL International Writers | 2023 International Writers". Royal Society of Literature. 3 September 2023. Retrieved 3 December 2023.
39.  "Here are this year's finalists for The Story Prize". LitHub. 9 January 2024. Retrieved 9 January 2024.
40.  "Meet the Booker Prize 2024 judges: 'The Booker is the Olympic gold medal of book awards' | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com. 16 July 2024. Retrieved 30 July 2024.
41.  Crown, Sarah (26 September 2005). "Inaugural short story award goes to debut author". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 September 2011.
42.  "Guardian first book award: all the winners". The Guardian. 2016-04-07. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
43.  "Awards: The Whiting Writers' Awards". Shelf Awareness. 2006-10-26. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
44.  "Awards: The Whiting Writers' Awards". Shelf Awareness. 2006-10-26. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
45.  "TSP: Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall Wins The Story Prize". The Story Prize. 2011-03-03. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
46.  "Awards: Story Prize; American History Book; Believer Shortlist". Shelf Awareness. 2011-03-04. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
47.  "The Vagrants: A Novel | Awards & Grants". American Library Association. 2010-01-18. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
48.  Markel, Liz (2010-01-17). "Outstanding fiction, non-fiction and poetry titles named to 2010 Notable Books List for adult readers". American Library Association. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
49.  Flood, Alison (2011-07-12). "Strong showing for Irish writers on Frank O'Connor shortlist". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
50.  "Awards: Frank O'Connor Shortlist; COVR Visionary Winners". Shelf Awareness. 2011-07-13. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
51.  "Awards: NCIBA Books of the Year; Griffin Poetry Prize". Shelf Awareness. 2011-04-06. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
52.  "Awards: St. Francis College Literary Prize". Shelf Awareness. 2011-09-23. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
53.  Taylor, Charlie (15 June 2011). "Colum McCann wins Impac award". The Irish Times. Retrieved 26 February 2017.
54.  "Awards: Orange; Impac Dublin; Wodehouse Prize". Shelf Awareness. 2011-04-13. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
55.  "Yiyun Li Wins Sunday Times Short Story Award". Department of English. University of California Davis. 2015-05-26. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
56.  "Awards: Sunday Times EFG Short Story; James Beard; Encore". Shelf Awareness. 2015-04-28. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
57.  "PEN America Literary Award Winners Honored". Shelf Awareness. 2020-03-04. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
58.  Reid, Calvin (2020-03-04). "Writers Li, Lok, de Waal Win Big at PEN Lit Awards". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
59.  "2023 Winners". Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). 2022-10-03. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
60.  Schaub, Michael (2023-04-05). "Yiyun Li Wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for 2023". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
61.  "Awards: PEN/Faulkner for Fiction, Anisfield-Wolf, Windham-Campbell Winners". Shelf Awareness. 2023-04-05. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
62.  Fifer, Elizabeth (November 2023). "Wednesday's Child: Stories by Yiyun Li (review)". World Literature Today. 97 (6): 57. doi:10.1353/wlt.2023.a910269. ISSN 1945-8134.
63.  Li, Yiyun (October 2024). "The Seventy Percent". Harper's Magazine.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Yiyun Li.

• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• "The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li", January 14, 2009
• January 2009 interview with Yiyun Li Archived 2015-04-28 at the Wayback Machine
• "Executioner Songs", The Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 30, 2009
• "Interviews: Yiyun Li", Identity Theory
• Articles by Yuyun Li on her UK publisher's blog, 5th Estate
• Yiyun Li speaks about Gold Boy, Emerald Girl on KRUI's The Lit Show
• Video: The Story Prize reading^[usurped] with Anthony Doerr and Suzanne Rivecca. March 2, 2011.

Authority control databases

Categories: 

• 1972 births
• Living people
• 21st-century Chinese novelists
• 21st-century Chinese short story writers
• 21st-century Chinese women writers
• Chinese emigrants to the United States
• Exophonic writers
• University of Iowa alumni
• Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
• Peking University alumni
• MacArthur Fellows
• University of California, Davis faculty
• Princeton University faculty
• Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winners
• The New Yorker people
• Writers from Beijing
• O. Henry Award winners

==

이윤이

• 페이지
• 노트

• 브라우징
• 편집
• 기록 보기

도구

출처 : 무료 백과 사전 "Wikipedia (Wikipedia)"

Yiyun Li
현지어 이름	이순운
탄생	1972년 11월 4일 (52세) 중국・베이징시
직업	소설가
언어	중국어, 영어
국적	미국
민족	중국계 미국인
최종 학력	베이징 대학 아이오와 대학 대학원 석사 과정
공식 사이트	yiyunli.com​
위키 포털 문학
템플릿 보기

李翊云
각종 표기
번체 :	李翊云
간체 :	李翊云
늑대 소리 :	Lǐ Yìyún
화명 표기:	리 잘 응
템플릿 보기

이윤이 ( 중국어 : 이순정 , 영어 : Yiyun Li , 1972년 11월 4일 -)는 중국계 미국인 작가 .

인물

베이징 에서 핵 물리학 자의 아버지 와 교사 의 어머니 아래 에서 태어 났다 . 학의 석사 학위를 취득한 후, 본격적으로 작가를 뜻하고, 동 대학원 창작과에서 석사 학위를 취득 ^. 1 ] .

그녀는 문화대혁명이나 천안문 사건을 경험했지만, 흥미의 대상은 스스로의 경험에 회수될 수 있는 것보다는, 「아웃사이더」라는 존재의 존재 방식이며, 그것이 그녀의 작품에 깊게 영향을 주고 있다 ^[ 2 ] .

그녀는 모국어 중국어 가 아니라 영어 로 모든 작품을 그려내고 있어 '영어 모노 링갈 ^' 작가 이다 ^[ 3 ] .

그러나 작품 무대의 대부분은 중국이다. ' 뉴욕 타임즈 '에 그녀의 단편 소설을 최초로 게재한 브리지드 퓨즈는 다음과 같이 말했다.

"그녀는 자신의 언어에 의해 한 개인으로 정의되는 것을 고집하고 있으며, 사회나 역사, 그녀의 모국어에 의해서도 판단되는 것이 싫다고 생각하고 있다 ^[ 5 ] "

그녀는 중국을 무대로 하고 있지만, 그것이 현실을 강하게 반영한 현실적인 중국인지 여부에 무게를 두고 있지 않다. 하지만 나의 중국인, 내가 알고 있는 중국이라는 바람에. 나는 상황은 바뀌어가지만 사람은 변하지 않는다고 생각하고 있습니다 ^. 6 ] .

이의 머리 속에서는 소설끼리 서로 이야기하고 있으며, 그와 동시에 그녀의 문장 은 음악 과 ^이야기 하고 있다 . ^7 ] .

데뷔작은 『천년의 기도』에 소수된 「불멸」이며, 공동체 그 자체를 주인공으로 하는 참신함이 평가되었다 ^[ 8 ] 2005년에는 짧은 편집 『천년의 기도』에서 프랭크 오코너 국제 단편상, PEN/헤밍웨이상, 가디언 신인상 등을 수상. 사이에 소년이 두 ^명 있어, 모두 캘리포니아주 오클랜드에 사는 미국의 영주권(그린 카드)을 취득했다(07년) ^9 ] 문학상 전형위원 을 2010년 O·헨리상 ^, 2011년 전미 ^도서상 , 2013년 국제부커상 ^에서 맡고 있다 ^[ 9 ] . ^{2019 년 봄에 『이유 가} 없는 장소』를 ^발표 .

외로움에 대해

우울증을 앓고 자살 미수, 입원을 반복해 경험한 이.

• 무구하고 있을 때는 은폐를 할 때만큼 외로움을 느끼지 않아야 한다. 그러나 다른 사람을 멀리하고 그 가치를 부인한다 ^[ 12 ] .
• “일반적인 의미에서 저는 기본적으로 자신을 외로운 인간이라고 생각합니다. , 그것은 감정입니다.외로움(솔리튜드)과 외로움(론리네스)은 전혀 별개입니다. 를 보아도 어디에라도 사람이 있었다. 물론 중국에는 프라이버시라는 컨셉이 없기 때문에, 그때가 제일 외로웠다고 생각합니다. ^[ 13 ]
• "중국에서의 외로움은 너무 친밀해지려고 하는데도 그다지 신뢰할 수 없는 사람들에게서 오는 부분도 있어… (또한) 최근 역사가 끊임없이 재기록되거나 수정되고 있다는 사실에 의해 개인적인 기억과 함께 집합적인 기억까지 사람들의 기억이 닦아져 버리는 ^{것도 관계 4}

수상 경력

이하, wikidata에 의해 ^[ 15 ] .

• 맥아더 펠로우 상 (MacArthur Fellows Program)
• 헤밍웨이상(Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) - 2006
• 가디언 신인상 (Guardian First Book Award)
• 아시아계 미국인 문학상 (Asian American Literary Awards) - 2011
• 오헨리상 (O. 헨리 어워드) - 2012

이야기의 인터텍스트 성

^' 황금 소년, 에메랄드 소녀'의 인터뷰에서 그녀는 다음과 같이 말했다 ^. [ 16 ]

이야기를 쓰면, 그 이야기가 밖으로 나가서 다른 이야기와 이야기하는 식으로 생각하고 싶습니다.내 이야기는 끊임없이 토레버의 이야기와 이야기하고 있습니다. 미를 느끼는 상대와만 기분 좋게 사귀고 있는 것은 되지 않습니다.

• 엘리자베스 보웬
• 그레이엄 그린
• 존 맥가한
• J·M·쿠체 .

예를 들면 표제작 「황금의 소녀 에메랄드의 소년」은, 윌리엄 트레버의 「3명」[The people, 미방역.- 이윤이, '황금소년, 에메랄드 소녀' 인터뷰

또 리는 다른 인터뷰에서는 다음과 같이 말했다.

나는 한 책이 다른 책에 말한다고 생각하는 것을 좋아합니다.『혼자서 보다 상냥하고』를 썼을 때는, 근거나 설정은 전혀 다르지만,『마음의 죽음(엘리자베스・보웬)』을 염두에 있었습니다.- 이윤이, '아틀란틱' 잡지 게재 전화 인터뷰

연보

1972년	베이징에서 연구자의 아버지와 교사의 어머니 아래에서 태어난다.
1989년	천안문 사건(당시 17세)을 체험.
1990년	천안문 사건의 여파로 1년간 군에 입대된다.
1996년	베이징 대학 졸업.
1996년	미국과 아이오와 대학의 면역학 석사 과정으로 진행합니다.
2000년	작가가 되고 싶다는 것을 깨닫고 맥퍼슨의 창작 강좌를 수강한다.
2005년	단편 편집 「천년의 기도」로 프랭크 오코너 국제 단편 편집, PEN / 헤밍웨이상 기타 수상
2009년	『사슬라자들』을 발표 장편 소설
2010년	"황금 소년, 에메랄드 소녀"를 발표 장편 소설
2011년	『The Story of Gilgamesh』 발표(이탈리아어 번역판, 2016년 원서 영어판) 그림책
2014년	『혼자서 보다 상냥해』를 발표 장편 소설
2019년	「이유가 없는 장소」를 발표 장편 소설

• 『천년의 기도』=『A thousand years of good prayers』
• 『사슬러들』=『The vagrants』
• '황금 소년, 에메랄드 소녀' = 'Gold boy, Emerald girl'
• 『혼자서 보다 상냥하고』 = 『Kinder than solitude』
• '이유가 없는 장소' = 'Where reasons end'

일본어 번역 작품

단행본

• 『천년의 기도』 시노모리 유리코역 신시오샤 신 시오 크레스트・북스 2007년
• 『사스라우자들』 시노모리 유리코역 카와데 서방 신사 2020 년/ 가와데 분고 2016년 9월
• 「황금의 소년, 에메랄드의 소녀」시노모리 유리코 번역 가와데 서방 신사 2012년 / 가와데 분고 2016년 2월
• 『혼자서 보다 상냥해』 시노모리 유리코역 가와데 서방 신사 2015년
• 「이유가 없는 장소」시노모리 유리코역 카와데 서방 신사 2020년 5월

앤솔로지 수록

• 「 너무 것」(시노모리 유리코 번역) - 『신시오 크레스트 북스 단편 소설 베스트 콜렉션 기억에 남아 있는 것』
• 「감」(타바타 아야코역) - 『미국 신진 작가 걸작 선정 2007』
• 「동화는 언제나 행복한 결말을 준다」( 아사오 아츠 노리역 ) - '이 별의 잊을 수 없는 서점의 이야기'

잡지 게재

소설

• 「꿈에서 꿈으로」(시노모리 유리코 번역) - 『GRANTA JAPAN with 와세다 문학 03』( 하야카와 서방 , 2016년 2월)
• 「먹는 남자」(시노모리 유리코역) - 『분예』 2020년 춘계호

에세이

• 「친구, 제 인생에서, 당신의 인생을 사는 당신에게 써 보냅니다」(시노모리 유리코역) - 『문예』 2017년 동계호
• 「겐지의 꿈을 찾는다면」(시노모리 유리코역) - 『분예』 2020년 하계호

각주

영어판 위키쿼트에는 이 기사와 관련된 인용구집이 있습니다.

이윤이

[ 각주 사용법 ]

1. ^ 이윤이, 카와무라 미에이코 「「외로움으로 밖에 그릴 수 없는 것」 이윤이×카와무라 미에이코」 「문예」 제55권 추계호, 카와데 서방 신사, 2016년, 388페이지.
2. ↑ 「이향으로 쓰는 중국에의 사랑」 「Newsweek 일본」 제2권, 2009년 2월, p53.
3. ^ 하마다 마야(저), 아이치 대학 현대 중국 학회(편) “ 베이징에서 말하는 미국상 ─종선의 1949년, 이윤 이의 1989년─ 」 『중국 21』 제43권, 동방서점, 2015년 8월 20일, 207-229 9 ,  14 , ISB ISSN 13428241 , NAID 120006240983 .  
4. ^ 이윤이, 가와무라 미에이코 「「외로움으로 밖에 그릴 수 없는 것」 이윤이×가와카미 미에이코」 「문예」 제55권 추계호, 2016년, 388쪽.
5. ↑ Rohter, Larry (2014년 2월 24일). “New Land, New Tongue, New Fame” (영어). The New York Times . ISSN 0362-4331 2019년 11월 5일에 확인함. 
6. ^ 이윤이, 가와무라 미에이코 「「외로워서 밖에 그릴 수 없는 것」 이윤이×가와카미 미에이코」 「문예」 제55권 추계호, 카와데 서방 신사, 2016년, 389쪽.
7. ↑ 『황금 소년, 에메랄드 소녀』 가와데 서방 신사, 2012년.
8. ↑ 『천년의 기도』 신시오샤, 2007년 7월 30일.
9. ↑ ^a b 『이유가 없는 장소』 가와데 서방 신사, 2020년 5월 19일, 208쪽.
10. ↑ 『사슬라자들』 가와데 서방 신사, 2010년 3월 10일.
11. ↑ “ Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li – review ”. 2020년 1월 19일에 확인함.
12. ^ 이윤이 「친구, 내 인생에서, 당신의 인생을 사는 당신에게 써 보냅니다」 「문예」 제56권 4호 겨울, 카와데 서방 신사, 2017년, 316쪽.
13. ^ 이윤이, 가와무라 미에이코 「「외로움으로 밖에 그릴 수 없는 것」 이윤이×가와카미 미에이코」 「문예」 제55권 추계호, 카와데 서방 신사, 2016년, 392쪽.
14. ^ 「혼자서 가는 것보다 부드럽고」 가와데 서방 신사, 2015년.
15. ↑ wikidata Q460088
16. ↑ 『황금 소년, 에메랄드 소녀』 가와데 서방 신사, 2012년.
17. ↑ “ Hughes, Brigid. “An interview with Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl." Randomhouse.com.28 Sept.2011. 11 Nov. 2011. ”. 2020 년 1 월 18 브라우징 오류 : 브라우징 날짜가 제대로 작성되지 않았습니다.

이 항목은, 문인 ( 소설가 · 시인 · 가인 · 작가 · 작사가 · 각본가 · 작가 · 극작가 · 방송 작가 · 수필가 /칼럼니스트 · 문예 평론가 )에 관련한 쓰기의 항목 입니다. 이 항목을 가필·정정 등 해 주시는 협력자를 요구하고 있습니다 ( P:문학 / PJ 작가

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카테고리 :

• 미국 작가
• 맥아더 펠로우
• 구겐하임 펠로우
• 캘리포니아 대학 데이비스 교수
• 미국 예술과학 아카데미 회원
• 중국계 미국인
• 아이오와 대학 출신 인물
• 베이징 출신 인물
• 1972년생
• 생명 인물

==

리 이윤 

• 기입
• 논의하다

변환하지 마십시오

• 읽다
• 편집하다
• 기록 보기

도구

우리 모두의 백과사전, 위키피디아

리 이윤
태어나다	1972년 11월 4일 (52세) 중화 인민공화국 베이징
시민권 국가	미국
언어	영어
모교	베이징 대학교 와 아이오와 대학교 의 아이오와 작가 워크숍
직업	작가
어린이들	2
수상	맥아더 펠로우십 구겐하임 펠로우십
웹사이트	이윤리닷컴

이윤 리 ( 1972년 11월 4일 출생 )는 베이징에서 태어난 중국계 미국인 여성 작가로, 영어로 글을 쓰고 있습니다. 현재 프린스턴 대학교 루이스 예술 센터에서 창작문학 교수로 재직 중입니다.

전기

리이윈은 베이징에서 태어났다. 그의 아버지는 핵물리학자이고 그의 어머니는 교사이다 . ^[ 1 ]

1991년 리이윈은 베이징 4중학교 를 졸업하고 , 1996년 베이징대 생물학과를 졸업한 후 아이오와 대 에서 면역학 박사 학위를 취득했습니다. 1997년 커뮤니티 글쓰기 훈련반 ^[ 1 ] 에 참여하여 글쓰기에 대한 열정을 느껴 면역학 전공을 포기하고 2000년 면역학 석사 학위를 취득했습니다. 2년간 병원에서 근무한 후 2002년 아이오와대 작가 워크숍에 참여하여 작품을 발표하기 시작했고, 2005 년 창작 글쓰기 석사 학위를 취득했습니다 ^[ 2 ] .

그녀의 초기 작품은 모두 뉴요커 와 파리 리뷰에 발표된 영어 단편 소설 이었습니다 . 2005년 단편집 "천년의 기도(A Thousand Years of Prayer)"에는 중화인민공화국의 개혁 이후 시대를 배경으로 한 10편의 단편이 수록되어 있습니다 . 이 단편 들은 귀족 학교의 청소부, 주식 시장에 좌절한 은퇴 교사, 졸업 후 고향으로 발령받은 영어 교사, 내몽골의 시골로 파견된 교육받은 젊은이들의 후손 등 평범한 사람들의 기쁨과 슬픔을 탐구합니다. 이 중 "네브래스카 공주(A Nebraska Princess)"와 동명의 단편 소설 두 편은 왕잉 감독이 2007년 영화 "천년의 기도(A Thousand Years of Prayer)"로 각색했습니다.

2012년, 리이윈은 정신적 쇠약을 겪으며 두 차례 자살을 시도했습니다 . 회복 후, 소설 쓰기에 대한 흥미를 잃고 1년 동안 전기, 회고록, 일기, 잡지를 읽는 데 전념했습니다. 그녀는 다른 사람들의 삶에 대한 글을 읽는 것을 "위안의 원천"이라고 묘사했습니다. 그녀는 2017년 회고록 『친애하는 친구』에서 우울증 경험을 회고했습니다.

책이 출간된 지 몇 달 후, 그녀의 열여섯 살 장남 빈센트가 자살했고, 이 이야기는 그녀가 2019년 소설 『Where Reasons End』에서 다루었습니다. 2024년 2월 16일, 그녀의 열아홉 살 둘째 아들 제임스는 프린스턴 대학교 정문에서 열차 사고로 사망했습니다. 열차가 역에 접근하면서 기적 소리가 너무 커서 제임스가 자살한 것으로 의심되었습니다. ^[ 3 ]

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