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David Evans

Yiyun Li believes she may have been among the last of a generation of writers born into a different China to the economic powerhouse we all know today.
Now 36, the author can still recall a country gripped by the aftermath of the fear, paranoia and deprivation of the Cultural Revolution.  She remembers being  forced to squat in a schoolyard with her classmates and shout 'Death to the counter-revolutionary hooligans!' as four heavily bound men were paraded before them in the back of a truck on their way  to execution.
Afterwards, a day-care worker known as 'Aunty Wang', a constant tormentor of the young Li, came up to her and pointed gun-shaped fingers at  her head. 'You see that? If you have too much of your own will, you will become a criminal one day. Bang!' she told the child. 'And you are done.'
Fortunately Li's strong will took her in an altogether different direction to that predicted by Aunty Wang. Having dropped out of the immunology doctorate she had begun in 1997 at the University of Iowa in the US,  she instead enrolled at the university's prestigious Writers' Workshop. It was there, under the tutelage of author Marilynne Robinson,  that she wrote the short stories that comprise her award-winning first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
When we meet, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, at which Li will read from her forthcoming first novel The Vagrants, is in full swing, as is the Beijing Olympics.  It is the patriotic fervour surrounding this event and China's growing presence on the world stage that has Li questioning the impartiality of the country's next generation of authors.
'Someone reviewed my book on a Chinese website,' she explains. 'He said  I was more interested in the grey areas of China. He said he thought the main theme for our generation should be heroics, such as the Olympics, or the rescues during the Sichuan earthquake - and you know, it was very interesting because that was not from an official. It was from someone living in China who thinks literature should be about great, heroic events.'
Reading Li's stories it is easy to see why many of her characters and plots would make those trying to portray China as a modern, forward-thinking nation squirm. There is Mrs Fong, a jailed party official who suspects her husband of having an affair; Sasha, the young woman who turns to Aids-awareness activist Boshen for help in terminating a pregnancy, the father of the baby being his gay lover; and the man born with a great dictator's face who castrates himself when his livelihood as a film double ends.
Li's simple prose and ability to describe characters through their actions rather than adjectives makes them all the more believable. Most of her stories are edged with sadness and a reader can't help being left with the feeling   the mainland is a bleak, colourless country where struggle and sacrifice are the norm.
Li grew up  in a middle-class family. Her father was a nuclear physicist and her mother worked as a primary-school teacher. She attended an elite secondary school, then  Peking University before leaving for the US in 1997 with the computer engineer who became her husband. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award,  the PEN/Hemingway Award  and the Guardian First Book Award,  all for A Thousand Years, she now lives in California and has two sons.
Her life is a far cry from those of the characters in her book and the China she writes about is not that to which she returned in March. Owing partly to green card application rules and partly to concerns about the reaction to comments she made in a newspaper regarding the Tiananmen  Square protests, she had been in exile for 10 years.
'I'm not interested in heroes,' she says, laughing. 'I'm interested in small people and small people live in grey areas. Everyday life is grey; it's not bright, or dark. I don't think I'm bleak because I don't have a bleak view of life, but I do think I'm interested in the grey areas of human beings.
'If I write about America it's going to be the same thing. I'm not going to write about how sunny and modern America is as a country, I'll still be writing about  people that suffer.'
One might be forgiven for thinking Li and her publishers are ready to exploit her background and a potentially huge market by unveiling a Chinese version of the book. Yet it is with a mixture of modesty and creative acumen that she explains her refusal to have her book translated into Chinese. She says there are many works with greater literary merit than hers that have yet to be translated, and a translated A Thousand Years would require many more cultural and historical references for its Chinese readers. She is equally adamant about not writing in Chinese, instead preferring English, the language she really began to grasp only eight or so years ago.
In   The Vagrants, to be published in February, Li explores the reaction of villagers to the execution of a young woman in their midst after she is denounced by her boyfriend as a counter-revolutionary. While the book is based on fact, as with many of her stories, the characters are drawn from overheard snippets of conversation or from stories told to her by others.
She says her decade's exile from China has not hindered her ability to create characters or build stories; and she believes that while circumstances may change, attitudes do not. Li will take a person or story from 20 years ago and adapt it to the modern world.
Despite her recent return to the family home in Beijing and the chance to catch up with old friends,  the granting of permanent US residency last year  seems to have put Li  at odds with where her own identity lies. Is she still a Chinese citizen in exile, or is she ready to embrace her chosen homeland?
'Writing-wise I feel more American than Chinese,' she says, before, after a moment's thought, changing her mind. 'I feel international. There's a good term for people like me in America and it's resident alien. I think I'm a resident alien.'
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li, HarperCollins, HK$120



Shades of grey