FROM THE PRL / ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN ENGLISH  / C21ST / ASIA / CHINA OR NORTH AMERICA / USA

Introduction

The debut collection of writer Yiyun Li (李翊雲 in Chinese), A Thousand Years of Good Prayer was published in 2005 and explores the lives, marriages, past loves, beliefs, and struggles of people caught between eastern and western cultures. Born in China during the Cultural Revolution, studying in Beijing, and moving to the United States to complete her degree in immunology, Yiyun Li is ideally placed to explore the effects of migration and political upheaval on individuals, parent-child relationships, and even on one’s own memories. Until recently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, Li is the author of five novels, a memoir and two collections of short stories.

From the hustle and bustle of Beijing, to the bleak and barren steppes of Inner Mongolia, to a tiny restaurant in Chicago, Yiyun Li’s stories take readers to places strange and familiar, comfortable and bewildering. Her characters are Chinese and Chinese Americans, immigrants and their families, all caught between countries and cultures, and having to adapt from communism to capitalism. Sometimes sad, sometimes moving, and always beautifully written, this collection will help you empathise with people caught between two worlds.

• Yiyun Li Biographical Introduction
• Interview with Yiyun Li (2022)

IB Student Learner Profile: caring

IB Lang and Lit Concept: communication

In the title story of this collection, Mr. Shi, his daughter Yilan, and his new friend Madam find challenges in communication across different barriers, whether emotional, cultural or linguistic. Through the difficult relationship between father and daughter, the story reveals how speaking a common language does not always guarantee understanding if two people cannot trust or listen to each other. At the same time, lack of a shared language doesn’t mean people cannot form close relationships, as shown when Mr. Shi and Madam become friends. Therefore, the stories in this collection explore how non-verbal communication can say more than words, and ultimately suggest that true understanding of other people transcends language itself. As you read the stories, ask whether the relationships in your life rely on a shared language, or whether obstacles such as culture and generation gaps prevent you from communicating with and understanding others.

1. Extra

I did not kill him, Granny Lin imagines herself telling every person there. He was dying before the fall. But she does not tell the truth to anyone…

When Granny Lin is made redundant from her factory job, her neighbour matchmakes her with an old, sick widower. In exchange for taking care of him in his infirmity, his family will cede Granny Lin a slice of their inheritance. However, when Old Tang suddenly dies, the family hold Granny Lin responsible and she is dismissed without receiving a penny. A younger son takes pity on her and recommends she take a new job as a laundry maid in a private boarding school. There she encounters Kang, a lonely boy from the countryside who is rejected by his newly rich family. Granny Lin takes Kang under her wing and strikes up a bond with him… until one day his secret obsession with stealing is discovered and he is bullied into running away.

Learner Portfolio: Character Motivations

Hold a debate between individuals or small groups in your class. Each person should present the case that ‘X is the driving force of the stories in Yiyun Li’s collection’, where X can be chosen from the list below. Once you’ve held your debate, tidy up or write up your notes and enter them into your Learner Portfolio:

2. Prisons of Shame

They have held on to the secret wish that after Beibei dies they will reclaim their lost son, though neither says anything to the other, both ashamed by the mere thought of the wish.

After a Life

The second story in Yiyun Li’s collection reveals the sad intertwined lives of the Su family and the Fong family. Mr and Mrs Su live in a tiny apartment with their severely handicapped daughter. Predicted to die in childhood by doctors, Beibei is now twenty-eight years old, but cannot walk, talk, or respond to her parents who try to keep her screams from disturbing the neighbours. Their son is away at college and rarely comes home to see them anymore. Mr Su, a retired teacher, spends time at the newly-opened stockbrokerage, dabbling with trading and dreaming of the money he might make. There he meets Mr Fong who gives him a loan, but also uses Mr Su as cover for his own extra-marital affair. Suspecting her husband’s infidelity, Mrs Fong phones Mrs Su and tries to recruit her into a scheme to catch out her husband.

Learner Portfolio: Non-Traditional Families

A persistent theme in Yiyun Li’s collection is the unpicking and remaking of traditional family structures. While the nuclear family (one husband, one wife, one or two children) is seen as an ideal social unit in many cultures, in communist China people were expected to prioritise the greater good over their own families. During the Reform Period in late twentieth century China, many families were divided by the demands of work, travel, and emigration. And now, as modernity, migration and globalisation expose people to new ideas about fidelity, sex and sexuality, family bonds between husbands and wives, daughters and sons are strained to breaking point.

Create a Learner Portfolio entry (a mind-map, poster, PPT presentation, or piece of writing) describing the presentation of family in the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayer. What do families look like on the outside? Contrastingly, what do they look like from the inside? What tensions exist between family members? Is there a persistent ‘generational divide’? What alternatives to the traditional ‘nuclear family’ are proposed? Use your notes and class discussions to draw together your ideas about this theme.

3. A Turbulent History

The day the dictator dies, we gather at the town center and cry like orphans.

Immortality

Immortality is a story told from an unusual first-person perspective: that of an entire village that recounts events as they occurred throughout China’s tumultuous twentieth century history. As the story opens, out unusual narator flashes back to the Qing dynasty, when members of the Imperial family were served by eunuchs who attended to their every needs. Serving in this way was considered an honour, and the town recalls its proud history of sending these so-called Great Papas into service. However, by the 1930s, this practice had fallen into obscurity.

During the 1940s, the communist government came to power and the country was ruled by a great dictator who promised prosperity for everyone. At this time, a young woman in the town becomes pregnant with a baby who is destined to have a great future. When the baby is born, he soon begins to resemble the dictator himself. The young man prospers from this resemblance, is given a job as an advisor to the Revolutionary Committee and is later selected to be an official impersonator who takes the dictator’s role on television and in movies. But what happens to the young man when the dictator’s time passes and the country modernises once more? Read this story to find out.

Learner Portfolio: Social Change

Many stories in this collection are set against the backdrop of social or political change. In some stories, such as Immortality, this change is placed front and centre. After a long civil war, China became a communist country in 1949. Over the next three decades, the country went through many upheavals as a result of the leader’s determination to become a modern Communist country. After the death of Chairman Mao, subsequent leaders loosened some of the strictest policies and even introduced capitalist ideas. Additionally, many Chinese people have emigrated around the world, seeking opportunities for work in countries like America where they are exposed to even newer and stranger ideas.

Not all change has disastrous consequences – but Yiyun Li reveals the effects of social and political change on people from various walks of life and different generations. Choose two characters from the story collection who’s lives are disrupted by change. What do their stories reveal about the impact of change – big or small – on ordinary people’s lives, loves, and dreams? What happens to people who find new values hard to reconcile with all they have been brought up to believe?

4. Daughters and Sons

Believe me, Ruolan, your parents are good people. They’ve tried all these years; they’ve tried very hard.

The Arrangement

In these two short stories, Li presents difficult relationships between parents and their children. In The Arrangement, Ruolan lives with her mother while her father is frequently away on long business trips. While he is gone, Uncle Bing comes to look after the family and the house. As she grows older, Ruolan starts to develop complex feelings for the man she knew as a stand-in father. In The Son, Han has been living and working in America. The story opens as he lands back in Beijing after seven years to visit his mother. She waits for him at the airport with an unwanted gift and the expectation that he should marry soon. But Han has long kept a secret from his mother – that he is gay and has no plans to marry, nor to explain himself to his mother any more.

Learner Portfolio: Practise for Paper 1 (Literature students only)

If you are a Language A: Literature student, at the end of your course you will sit Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis. This paper contains two previously unseen literary passages. SL students write a guided analysis of one of these passages; HL students write about both passages. The passages could be taken from any of four literary forms: prose, poetry, drama or literary non-fiction. Each of the passages will be from a different literary form.

Here are two passages taken from the short story collection: the literary form is ‘prose fiction’. Each passage is accompanied by a guiding question to provide a focus or ‘way in’ to your response. Choose one passage and complete this Learner Portfolio entry in the style of Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis.

5. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

He feels disappointed in his daughter, someone he shares a language with but with whom he can no longer share a dear moment.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

In the title story of the collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, widower and retiree Mr. Shi lives in Beijing while his daughter, Yilan, lives in a small town in mid-west US. When he learns she has divorced, he decides to visit America and stay with Yilan to help her recover. When he arrives in America, he meets people and enjoys their attention – he tells them he was a ‘rocket scientist’ in China. However, Yilan is not so comfortable with him around and tries to avoid his probing about the reasons for her divorce.

Not put off by his daughter’s reluctance, Mr. Shi explores the small town and meets an old woman, a refugee from the Iranian Revolution. Neither of them speak English well, but through mime, gesture, and simply talking at each other in different languages, they nevertheless strike up a friendship. It’s not long, though, before the comfort and stability they enjoy in each other’s company is threatened by the old lady’s son, who wants to send her away – and by the secrets and revelations hidden in Mr. Shi’s own past.

Learner Portfolio: Practise for Paper 2

Write this Learner Portfolio in the style of a practice Paper 2 response. You can use one of the prompts below, or another prompt given to you by your teacher. Although Paper 2 requires you to write about two literary works, for the sake of this exercise you could focus only on your response to A Thousand Years of Good Prayer (visit this post for more help with Paper 2 literary compare and contrast skills).

Choose one of the following prompts, talk with your teacher about how to approach and structure your writing, then complete your portfolio entry:

1. The time and place where a literary work is set are of crucial importance to understanding the work as a whole. Discuss with reference to the literary works you have studied.
2. Explore how women are represented as stronger than men in literary works you have studied.
3. There is no love without suffering. Discuss the extent to which the works you have studied support this view.
4. Judging by literary works you have studied, what would you say are the main causes of unhappiness?

Towards Assessment: Individual Oral

Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work (or two literary works if you are following the Literature-only course)students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)

The stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayer could be a rich source of Global Issues, including ideas such as how political systems impact individuals, and how one’s sense of self-worth can be defined by others. Once you have finished reading and studying Yiyun Li’s stories, spend a lesson working with the IB Fields of Inquiry: mind-map the collection, come up with ideas for Global Issues, make connections with other Literary Works or Body of Works that you have studied on your course and see if you can make a proposal you might use to write your Individual Oral.

Here are one or two suggestions to get you started, but consider your own programme of study before you make any firm decisions about your personal Global Issue. Whatever you choose, remember a Global Issue must have local relevance, wide impact and be trans-national:

Towards Assessment: Higher Level Essay

Students submit an essay on one non-literary text or a collection of non-literary texts by one same author, or a literary text or work studied during the course. The essay must be 1,200-1,500 words in length. (20 marks).

Once you’ve finished studying Yiyun Li’s story collection, you might be turning your mind to the HL essay and developing lines of inquiry. Whether you’re interested in fatalism, loneliness, non-traditional families, or the ways communication seems so difficult, you’re sure to find something you can develop into a meaningful and original piece of writing. You can begin by considering one of the questions below, although remember to follow the direction of your notes and class discussions where you can:

• How does the mediation of communication through objects reveal the fragility of intimate relationships in the story collection?
• To what extent does loneliness define the characters of the stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayer?
• How, and why, does Yiyun Li distort traditional representations of the family throughout the collection?
• How are characters impacted by social or political change in the stories of A Thousand Years of Good Prayer?