'Imagine a zipper on your mouth,' writer Yiyun Li was told as she entered the Chinese army aged 19. The line could just as easily apply to the characters in her unsettling stories, survivors of a China after Mao and after the massacre, writes Belinda McKeon
YIYUN LI IS coming to Ireland, and not before time. It's not as though the Beijing-born writer, who will read at the Kilkenny Arts Festival next weekend and the Frank O'Connor festival in Cork next month, hasn't had good reason to stop by this part of the world before now; in 2005, for her debut collection of stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, she won the inaugural Frank O'Connor Short Story Award.
That award had the literary world agog with its prize of €50,000 and its shortlist of heavy-hitters. Winning it was a colossal achievement for a writer at the beginning of her career, let alone a writer who had not long been speaking and writing in the English language, but it was an achievement Li was forced to celebrate far away from Cork and the excitement of the announcement and the prize-giving ceremony.
At the time, she was deep in the mire of bureaucracy surrounding her petition to become a permanent resident of the United States, where she had lived since 1996. Despite glowing endorsements of Li's talent from the likes of Salman Rushdie and the New Yorker editor David Remnick, her first application had been flatly rejected, and her lawyers advised her that a trip outside the country would not be a good idea.
There was an excruciating irony to the situation - the young writer who, according to the immigration authorities, showed insufficient signs of having risen to the top of her field, was unable, because of those same authorities, to collect the prize that stood as proof that she had so risen.
Her petition was eventually successful, and the arrival of her green card, which allowed her to settle in California with her Chinese husband and their two sons, was followed by the arrival of further literary endorsements, including the PEN/Hemingway and the Guardian First Book awards for her collection.
"Everything turned out for the best," Li says of that time now, with a carefulness and a lightness of touch that is familiar from the world of her fiction, a world where the things unsaid, the truths kept silent, press keenly on the underside of all words.
"Imagine a zipper on your mouth," Li's mother told her, as she entered the army at the age of 19, for the year of service forced on all Chinese students in the wake of the protests at Tiananmen Square, and to varying degrees Li's characters all wear zippers, sharing their stories and their realities with caution, bathing in the blurring waters of community, or lurking in the unreadable shadows of the self.
Her stories are effortlessly unsettling, often resolutely strange even as they are affectingly human. Her people are the survivors of a China after Mao and after Tiananmen, a people trying to make their way in - and outside of - a country that seems reluctant even to see them as people.
An old woman stumbles through a penniless retirement. An old man tries to connect with his Americanised daughter. A town gossips its way through the aftermath of a child's murder, through a cold comprehension of a father's reaction. And, in the extraordinary "immortality", the watching eyes of a small town are again turned with full force towards one of its residents, a young man whose uncanny likeness to Chairman Mao leads to an official career as a Mao impersonator and to a downfall that the reading mind finds difficult to shake.
"To me, I just feel that always the most interesting or exciting thing about a story is not the drama, but people who watch that drama happen," says Li. "So for me I'm always very much more interested in, I guess, the onlookers. I wanted to write about these people who watched everything without doing anything."
LI, WHO WAS born and raised on a Beijing compound built for the families of nuclear researchers and scientists, grew up in a world of watchfulness and of caution, deepened by a "paranoid" mother always fearful for the safety of her family.
"Every time my mother started to say something, she would go through the apartment and she would close every window before she would say ," Li says, able to laugh now at the memory. "'Behind every window,' she said, 'there is a pair of eyes watching'."
Her mother's unease was not helped by the presence in the house of Li's anti-communist grandfather, who had fought in the civil war on the nationalist side - something that had to be kept secret - and who was still capable of the sort of anti-Maoist statements (Mao as "the king of hell") for which he had been notorious in his youth.
As a child, Li shared a bedroom with this grandfather, listening to his stories as well as his grievances, and in turn her stories are now imbued with a knowledge and an understanding of a worldview and a generation long before her time.
They have a wisdom that is not borrowed but learned, and it was her conversations with her grandfather, Li says, that enabled her to step into that rich stream. "He was a very talkative person, and he was also very old when he lived with us. He was a very old-school intellectual, but he was over 80, he was near 90, when I started to know him, so I think in a way he was a child, talking about anything and everything that came to his mind. I was very close to him."
That she shared something of her grandfather's rebellious spirit became apparent during Li's year in the army, when she could not resist the temptation to open her squad mates' eyes to the realities of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
She and her sister had been locked in their room on the night the army crushed the protesting students, forbidden by their parents to leave the house, but upon themselves the Li parents had not imposed the same restraints, and both her mother and father returned home with horrifying tales of what they had seen - bodies piled in a garage, a mother screaming with the broken body of her small son in her arms.
"It was the starting point of my adulthood," she says of that time. "I was 16, and very emotional about the whole incident, and I consider that now as the last year of my childhood."
Li and her parents knew that the bodies they had seen likely represented only a fraction of the night's atrocities, but official reports denied that there had been any killings at all. Many of her squad mates were also from Beijing, and many of them believed the official line; Li could not keep her mouth zipped as her mother had warned, and found herself talking about what her parents and others had seen.
Strangely, she says she is "embarrassed" now when she remembers the anger that she felt then, as though her outrage at a massacre was little more than a moment of teenage angst, but she was that year, she says, "her most angry self".
Her squad leader reported her, and for a while Li lived in fear, but the report went no further, and, at the end of her obligatory year, she was able to leave the army and to think about leaving China.
THE US WAS the obvious escape route; she had known that from an early age. She took an undergraduate degree in biology at Peking University, her eye on American graduate school, and when she arrived at the University of Iowa it was to take a PhD in immunology.
She barely spoke English and she came from a house of scientists - a house in which the reading of any non-scientific literature was not encouraged. "My parents were very much against writing anything down, against keeping anything in words. They were even against the idea of a diary or a journal."
Fiction, she says, was especially abhorred. That the University of Iowa was more renowned for its fiction programmes, for its creative-writing degrees, than for its scientific schools, was something Li did not yet know. But it was something that was to make its mark on her, and that was to change entirely the direction of her career.
Enrolling in an eight-week community writing course, she discovered a hunger for writing stories, which began as a hobby but soon began to overtake her interest in the laboratory work for which, within a couple of years, she had earned a master's degree.
Her PhD was the next step, but instead, encouraged by a teacher, James McPherson, she found herself joining the famous Writers' Workshop at Iowa and going on to earn two Master of Fine Arts degrees, one in fiction and one in creative non-fiction. Immunology went by the wayside, much to the dismay and apprehension of her parents. But Li was determined. And part of that determination was born of her first encounter with the stories of William Trevor, from whom, Li says, she learned much of what she knows about writing.
"He is one of the most gentle people in the world," she says of Trevor, who is now a friend. "And if you look at his stories, they are often so sad. I think: how can one person live with so much sadness? But just the fact that he has been writing all these years, and that he is writing stories . . . I think for me, that gives me a lot of hope. Just that it's something I think I could do . . . "
Li will publish her first novel next year - it is set in a Chinese community in 1979, in the wake of the execution of a political prisoner, and she has almost completed a new collection of stories. She writes only in English, never in Chinese, and she finds that she is unable even to write when she visits China, as she and her family did earlier this year. "I said to my husband, 'I cannot live in this language'," she says. "I could not write a single sentence."
China makes her uneasy partly because - hearkening back to the embarrassment she still feels at her own teenage anger - she believes that there is too much "emotion" there, too much of a quickness to ignite that she would like to see dampened. "It's the communal thing again," she says. "If you light a little fire there, all of a sudden everything catches fire."
Beijing has changed much since Li's childhood - it is no longer the village she remembers. Yet within the city's small communities there is, she says, much that remains the same, and she suspects it will always be so. "I don't think that people change that much," she says. "Which is both comforting and saddening. But I think that's why literature endures."
• Yiyun Li will read with Deirdre Madden as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival at 1pm today in St Canice's Cathedral and will also take part in a public interview at the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival in Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, on Sep 17