Customer Reviews

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories

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A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is Yiyun Li's highly acclaimed short story collection which won the inaugeral Frank O'Connor Short Story Award among others.

If proof were ever needed that US MFA programmes don't necessarily churn out writing clones, Li amply provides it. (She attended the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop). Her writing is fresh, lyrical - yet at times deeply disturbing. The short stories did precisely what short stories should do: illuminate small lives in telling snapshots, walk around in your head long after the few pages that contained them are read, shake you up.

It wasn't the best holiday reading - the collection made me feel weighted with melancholy for all the tangled lives Li depicts and the necessary makeshift compromises her characters are forced to make. I found it hard to snap out of the little worlds Li creates.

Most of the stories take place in a rural and small town China struggling with economic change and the move to a more free-market econonomy.

All human messiness is here. In Love in the Marketplace a schoolteacher obsessed with the film Casablanca, is the victim of a broken promise. A stranger who arrives in the market place offering to slash his arm with a knife for money is the only person who seems able to honour his word.

Extra is a hugely compassionate story about a middle-aged woman made redundant from her garment factory job. There's no way Granny Lin can survive on her dwindling savings and she reluctantly accepts a marriage of convenience to a sick old man. When he dies, she takes a job as a cleaner in a private school where she befriends a lonely little boy as much a reject as she is. Through both encounters, her eyes are opened for the first time in her life to the possibility and nature of love.

The Prince of Nebraska is the story of a complicated love triangle. Sasha, pregnant and on her way to an abortion clinic in Chicago seeks Boshen's help. Both of them are involved with the enigmatic Yang, a disgraced Chinese Opera singer. An unusual compromise is worked out between them for a love that does not fit neatly into the box of a conventional relationship.

But my favourite story - simply because I've come across a story narrated in this way before - was Persimmons. The slaying of local government officials puts a whole village under the curse of drought. The truth of what actually happened emerges gradually. Li writes the story in the first-person plural ("we") voice, as the whole doomed village speaks in one voice.

Would I recommend it?

I'd say it was a must-read, especially if you enjoy short-fiction or write it yourself. It deserved all the awards it received and is the best book I've read so far this year.

I finished this book and I have mixed feelings. Not because the stories are bad. On the contrary, they are quite good. What bothered me is that almost aggressive anti-communistic attitude. There is one sentence where old Iranian woman says "I love China. China a good country, very old" and that would be pretty much everything said positive about China (and that comes from the mouth of Iranian women who never visited the country she's talking about!).

I don't have doubts that communism in China was quite different than communism in ex Yugoslavia (where I grow up) and therefore all those rigidness Yiyun Li is talking about is unfamiliar for me. Indeed here there were blindness as well and rigidness and it possibly was dangerous to criticize regime but it was nothing like it has been described in this book.

I just couldn't get rid of the thoughts that author is living in USA is publishing book (which probably is in high percentage truth. An awful truth!) where is criticizing horribly something about huge majority of Americans (or Western world in general) don't have a clue but they "know" it's VERY bad; book about the country not very popular in USA; book with lot black/white comparison between China and America (of course China is always and only black while America is promised land and everything about it is absolutely fantastic). She used the language and topic that will find very fertile soil in America. She described China as a hell from which every thinking Chinese want to leave. Again that might be truth but there must be something good there; or at least some respect about the heritage the ones who fled in America brought with themselves. But then, she's not mentioning that. And that thought has had big influence in my general opinion about the book.

As I said the stories are very good but if I'm an immigrant and a writer I doubt I'd be able to write this type of book about my mother land. maybe that's not something I should be proud of but I simply couldn't neglect part I love.

I first found Ms. Li's short story, Immortality, in the Paris Review. She frames a story around a rural Chinese village's tradition of sending castrated young men (the euphemism she uses is "cleaned") to the imperial palace to serve as eunuchs. Fast forward to the Cultural Revolution, the story shifts focus to a young man with the likeness of the country's dictator (it can be inferred that she is speaking of Mao Tse-Tung). The surprise is how she weaves present with past to reveal stories of China.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is full of such beautifully rendered stories.

In Princess of Nebraska, a Chinese man and a Mongolian woman traverse time and space in a quiet Michigan cafe while pondering their past relationship to the same man, Yang, a blithe narcissistic Beijing youth with a gift for singing Beijing opera.

In Love in the Marketplace, an English teacher in a rural village ponders a promise broken by two of the most important people in her life - her childhood sweetheart and her best girlfriend.

In story after story, the reader finds disappointment and a trail of hearts broken by modern life's adversities, lies, and unfulfilled dreams. The language of the book adds to an unadorned tone that is at once mercilessly unforgiving in description of human life and deeply sentimental and non-judgmental of the characters. Highly recommended!

In the title story of this engaging short story collection by Yiyun Li, Mr. Shi comes to a Midwestern American town from China to visit his estranged and recently divorced daughter. In a local park, he meets and befriends an elderly Iranian woman whom he calls Madam, even though neither speak much English and they can hardly understand one another's speech. "That we get to meet and talk to each other...must have taken a long time of good prayers to get us here," he explains an old proverb to her in Chinese. "It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one's on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe." As Mr. Shi's story unfolds, we learn that he must have fallen well short of a thousand years, and that, in fact, most of his life as a rocket scientist has been a lie.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS is filled with tales of family conflict and intergenerational relationships, stories of tragic ancestors, divorced and suicidal parents, adopted children, gay sons, unfaithful spouses, jilted lovers, unborn babies, and loveless marriages. Ms. Li's China is an unhappy place where families struggle to survive, accepting their fate and just trying to get by until their life's sentence on Earth has been served. Happiness is mostly transitory, inevitably followed by a return to the harsh punishments of reality. Li's America is little better, a place where people may live more comfortably but still fail to connect in meaningful ways. In her world, no one seems to have amassed enough good prayers.

In her opening story, "After," Ms. Li presents the late-in-life story of Granny Lin, a spinster who is just leaving her bankrupt factory, carrying her "honorable retirement" certificate in her stainless steel lunch pail. She is persuaded to marry Old Tang, a 76-year-old Alzheimer's victim, but a tragic accident leads her to a maid's job in a boarding school for rich children where she unofficially adopts a young boy named Kang, her first and only true love. In the final scene, she is back on the street, jobless, her bag of clothing stolen, holding nothing more than her life's small fortune in her lunch pail.

Another story, "Immortality," ranges over the last century of Chinese history in the guise of a town whose claim to fame has been the main source of imperial eunuchs, ironically called "Great Papas." The imperial era has ended, but miraculously, a child has been born in the town (to a carpenter and his wife, no less) who is a virtual double of the (unnamed) "dictator," the country's new leader. It is impossible not to visualize a Mao look-alike here. The young man rises to national fame after the dictator's death, but a sexual misadventure (another irony) causes his downfall. In the final scene, we are left with the image of a crazed Mao look-alike who has castrated himself at his mother's tomb.

Most of Li's stories are conventional narratives, but one, "Persimmons," breaks modestly out of that mold. Told almost entirely through dialog, a group of villagers gradually reveal the tale of a young boy's drowning and his father's failed efforts to obtain justice that result in mass murder. The truth unfolds slowly, but the villagers' tones are fatalistic, as if no other outcome had ever been possible.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS presents an insightful look at life in China's present and recent past. Ms. Li proves herself an engaging and thoughtful storyteller with the welcomed promise of more to come.

I love this collection. It speaks to our shared humanity. The stories are as mentioned by a reviewer above not really 'feel good' material. However, you may find yourself, as I did at times, laughing at the absurdity of some of the characters situations. Many times my heart ached for the characters. This book is very well done.

This is the best collection of short stories I've read in a long time! I love the style of writing---very straightforward but also with so much meaning in every paragraph. Lately it seems every piece of fiction I read is gimmacky in some way--constantly changing perspectives, flowery phrases--but this is real writing, about people in tough situations interacting, about generations relating, about sad memories, but always with a firm grasp of reality. By the first paragraph of each story I know the main characters! I think this author will go far, and I look forward to reading more by her.

The writing in this book is truly beautiful, even poetic. The short stories are concise and deal with harsh subjects, representing a very "Chinese" state of mind - acceptance of "Destiny" or Fate, and an often cruel reality.

I loved these short stories. I don't usually finish a collection of stories; I get a bit bored before the last of them. But these are all so unique, each one marvelously different that it will be hard to put down. The give such a surprising picture of life in China and life of Chinese in America. Get it!

Warning: Begin reading "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" at the BEGINNING of a weekend. If you wait till Sunday afternoon, you may find yourself skipping work on Monday, because you can't put it down. Yiyun Lee is a gifted story teller and an artist of the written word. Each of the ten stories in this collection is a perfect jewel.

Yiyun Li's stories are anchored in the Chinese past as well as in the present.
The scars of the Cultural Revolution with its indiscriminate victimizing, its drastic priggishness, its denunciations and liquidations are still felt in nearly all families. It was a period of black and white, of for or against, of silence or lies.
Modern China is in a serious upheaval and ravaged by doubt: `once doubt starts, it runs rampant.' Now, `a bird is willing to die for a morsel of food. A man is willing to die for a penny of wealth.' The chasm between the haves and the have-nots is sharply widening.
The time of the arranged marriages and obedient children is replaced by a clash of generations. The parents are still looking for a `good' marriage, but many children are getting divorced or confess that they are gay.
Yiyun Li's naturally flowing short stories shine through their mostly dimmed, but heavy, emotions, their nostalgia of youth, their surprising revelations and their subdued, but dramatic ends.

At the end of the book, the author gives a shocking report of a bestial execution during the Cultural Revolution.
Not to be missed by all lovers of Chinese and world literature.