Dialogue: Author Yiyun Li

Dialogue host Marcia Franklin talks with author Yiyun Li about her works. The novelist and short story writer came to the United States from China in 1996 to study immunology, but fell in love with creative writing. She's gone on to win numerous awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and a MacArthur 'genius' grant. Li's works include Kinder than Solitude, Gold boy, Emerald Girl, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants.
Franklin talks with Li about her life, the themes in her works and her style of writing.

[@AlwaysLearning123]

I think it is normal or common that people don't say "I love you" in Chinese. I myself grow up in China. It more of a culture normal than anything else. My parents never said those words to me, but I deeply feel the love and never felt there is something missing (even to this day) I do say I love you a lot of my own children and husband. But deep down, I don't love them more or less just because of saying those words. Anyone else feel that way?

[@xw4371]

The question about Hemmingway is a bit odd. No disrespect to Hemmingway, but does the fact that the award is named after him have to mean that he indeed means something to Li as a writer? Personally I find the connection the interviewer clearly assumes between her and Hemmingway to be a bit forced and contrived, especially given Li's own ethnic, national, socio-economic and gender background--a first-generation immigrant Chinese woman--which is so fundamentally different from that of Hemmingway. Is it really so important for her to identify with Hemmingway in some deep way? I mean after all it's not like she chose the name of the award herself...Hemmingway was just the half-decent writer who happened to have gained enough public recognition and cultural clout to get an award named after him (it also didn't hurt that he was a white American male from a well-educated family). In short I find the interviewer's insistence that Li express some admiration or identification with Hemmingway to be pretty irritating and bewildering. The same could be said for interviews of Maxine Hong Kingston after she received the Fitzgerald award. Is it really so inconceivable or impermissible for the recipient of a prestigious literary award to not actually identify with the writer after whom it's named? After all, we don't assume that the recipients of the Nobel prize are deeply influenced by the work of Alfred Nobel, or that awardees of Marshall or Fulbright scholarships are each personally influenced by George Marshall or William Fulbright.

[@outragedamerican1149]

She said she was a fan of Hemmingway. She would read him on the toilet. Was she lying when she said he was an influence on her writing? I think you are getting irate about something insignificant. Hemmingway died in Idaho and had a connection to Idaho, so it only makes sense that a TV show from Idaho would ask about him to somebody who won a Hemmingway prize. It is a nice nod to the viewers. It is nothing to get worked up about. And let's be fair, Hemmingway was a lot better than 'decent.'

[@Grequierecafe]

I hope that, after 3 years, we are more relaxed about this. BTW, it's Hemingway.

[@lily336402]

She is well spoken.

[@yxl7788]

Imao her generation of immigrants' China is so different from today's China. Yet they are the established and vocal generation and their stories are the ones that Americans are interested in. I was born in late 90s and omg her time in China was tough alright.

[@eijimiyake5871]

But her stories still resonates today’s China if not more so.

[@garierbos]

I know that Yiyun LI will not read this comment, but I think Li is more interested in the human being and the interviewer in denounce the political situation in China.

[@lw4336]

Chinese treat children as precious! How about you？what did you do to your sons? 😡