SUSO

It took a journey across the world for this Chinese transplant to find her voice.

W / Matt Bochenski

As the world reluctantly tears its gaze from Beijing, China remains very much on its mind. The old stereotypes have been challenged – the ‘sleeping dragon’ is now very much awake – but nobody can be sure what the future holds. China is a country in search of articulation.

But who will provide it? Who can speak in the voice of a billion people flung far across the strata of geography, wealth and experience? Perhaps they should speak for themselves – but how do you speak for yourself when you’ve been conditioned to be voiceless?

Such were the questions that faced Yiyun Li as far back as her adolescence. Aged 16, she watched tanks roll across Tiananmen Square as the world whispered about democracy. But the whispers were drowned out by the coarse curses of the government, and at 18 she was drafted into military service, an exercise to re-establish the communist ideals of China’s next generation. And yet the white noise of parade ground discipline and communal sacrifice couldn’t silence the voices that had been stirred inside her. In a communist faith class she was caught reading Hemingway. She escaped punishment and later escaped China altogether.

At 26, Yiyun Li arrived in America. Unable to speak English, she bore mute witness to the tectonic shift that had taken place in her life. Throughout her childhood, the habit of silence had been ingrained – “As children we were constantly warned by our parents that certain things – like talking about an uncle who fought against the communist army in the civil war and later went to Taiwan – stayed within the family,” she says.

“There was always this hushed fear.”

But in America she was determined that she would break her silence, and reflect on her life in China through the prism of her new experiences.

She enrolled at a writers’ workshop in Iowa and discovered a voice that had been waiting to be unleashed. Though still mastering the language, Yiyun wrote a collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, that offers a moving, meditative insight into the Chinese soul. It is an unflinching document of social, economic and emotional oppression, but one that bears a lyrical sense of the beauty of life in China.

“I am not an angry person,” she says now, describing the tone of her work, “but I was disillusioned.” She writes of the petty absurdities of communist rule, the peasants’ faith in their leaders, and their sense of betrayal as they realised that the world these leaders described to them was a tissue of lies. “When I was growing up I thought most people in the Western world suffered, and I was so happy that we had been liberated,” remembers Yiyun. “That was the common idea at the time; that we were going to liberate the Western world.”

Two years into her career as an author, Yiyun is yet to write a single word in Chinese. This, she says, is because she has never used the language to discover emotions or beauty – she never had the chance. Now, she believes, “I think my Chinese got stuck somewhere.” In that sense her life story – repression, escape, discovery, uncertainty – stands as a metaphor for the China we look at in bewildered fascination today.

'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' is out now, published by HarperPerennial, £7.99