Yiyun Li

American author Yiyun Li has become a New Yorker favorite I suspect in large part because of her frighteningly competent resume - if I remember correctly she is a physician who emigrated to the us as an adult and didn't even speak English until her emigration and who now has written novels and memoirs in beautiful and sometimes delightfully quirky contemporary English(see the titles of any of her works or particularly odd phrasings or word choices such as referring to California as one of the younger states - about 170 years young?) so all other would-be writers what's you excuse?- as much as by the quality of her short fiction, but her piece All Will Be Well, in current NYer is the best I've seen from her by far. This excellent story told by an adult writer looking back on a period in her youth when she was "addicted" to solo she and visits one in a really rough neighborhood mainly to hear from the owner a narrative about a lost love from her native Vietnam. The salon narrative is the heart of this story but Li frames it beautifully by suggesting that this like all stories (like the one we're reading in fact) is a duplicity - we lie to each other all the time for various reasons- yet she also regrets her stubborn inability to lie so as to spare her children from fear (she refused to write down that she would be there for her children in the event of nuclear war - unwilling to state that lie); she looks back at these truths and untruths over a span of suffering, suggesting the death of one of her children (the subject of one of her books) with a certain cold light shed on these reflections when she recalls one of her students who scorned literature because the people in books are not "real" - true of course but the student is balking at Tolstoy and Chekhov- the two worst examples she could have summoned! Another part of the frame is that the salon owner pestered the narrator to see if she could get her story of lost love turned into a movie or into a book - which in a sense she did, it's what we're reading, even as Li undercuts the "reality" of all fiction including this one.

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