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Yiyun Li is a fascinating and unclassifiable writer, and brings insight and depth to a tale of two French girls spreading their wingsYiyun Li has made something miraculous out of choosing to write not in her mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, but in her adopted English. She moved to the US from Beijing with her husband in 1996, when she was 23, as a trainee immunologist, and has made her home there ever since. Her reasons for choosing English are intricate and personal as well as political and practical, and she has written about them eloquently. “It’s about making every word a word … I can never get every word to align perfectly. I cannot get the sentence to say exactly what I mean. I like that tension between myself and the language.” Inside the traditions of English prose, the writers she loves include Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor and John McGahern, and you can feel this in the plain music of her style, the rich surprises of her perception, her relish for the earthy solidity of words. And yet she isn’t quite a realist; or rather, her realism is always self-conscious and reflexive. Particular scenes in her fictions give way all the time to a restless speculative questioning.Even Li’s childhood memories play in English now, she says, inside her mind. Nabokov said that having to abandon his natural language was his private tragedy, and while Li celebrates the liberation English brought for her, she registers the losses too, and acknowledges that the rupture must play some part in episodes of suicidal sadness in her life. She has written with such perfect poise about the losses and the sadness – including the terrible loss of her 16-year-old son to suicide in 2017. A lot of her work in these last years has hovered on that borderline where autobiography shades into fiction, and she has made herself master of that ambivalent space, in her 2019 book Where Reasons End, and in a few superb short stories, including When We Were Happy We Had Other Names, All Will Be Well and Hello, Goodbye. It’s been Li’s twisted fate to become in some sense a confessional writer, although part of what she has to confess to is an extreme reticence, a lifelong performance of smiling and withholding. Continue reading...