A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: mrs pang, mrs fong, good prayers, Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Uncle Bing, Old Tang (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A beautifully executed debut collection of 10 stories explores the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on modern Chinese, both in China and America. "Extra" portrays the grim plight of Granny Lin, an elderly widow without a pension, whose job as a maid at a boarding school outside Beijing leads to a surprising friendship with one of her young charges, Kang. Li deftly weaves a political message into her human portraits: young Kang, the son of a powerful man and his now "disfavored" first wife, is an "extra"—that is, as useless in the new society as Granny Lin has become. A hollowed-out recluse in the collective apartment block of "Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way," Mr. Pang—once denounced by his work colleagues as being "a dog son of the evil landlord class"—still appears daily at a job where he is no longer even paid, and spends his home life counting grains of rice on his chopsticks. Even the charmed fatherless boy of "Immortality," his face so like Chairman Mao's that he's chosen to be the dictator's impersonator after Mao's death, falls from favor eventually, ending his days as a self-castrated parasite. These are powerful stories that encapsulate tidily epic grief and longing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a remarkable debut -- as acute and authentic-sounding about the domestic effect of cross-cultural change in modern China as Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies was about India. Also like that book, it's one of those rare short story collections where you find yourself reading one perfectly realized gem after the next.

Li -- who grew up in Beijing, came to America to study medicine and entered the Iowa Writers' Workshop after taking a master's degree in immunology from the University of Iowa -- writes with the kind of brisk clarity you see in, say, the Japanese novelists Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima. She gets down to business quickly, sketching characters with swift, deft strokes, immediately setting them off on journeys that are as compelling as they are tragic. There's a strong streak of Flannery O'Connor here, too; metaphors for life, faith and desire are realized through violence, and the often bloody fate of these characters has a richly revelatory power.

These natives and exiles of post-Mao, post-Tiananmen China are victims of tradition and change, of old barbarities and recent upheavals. Some of them have grown up singing love songs to the Communist Party -- "The Party is dearer than my own mother," goes one; "My mother only gives me a body. It is the Party who gives me a soul" -- and now see the influences of capitalism everywhere. Elderly people play the stock market, and young people leave for America, where cultural norms against divorce, homosexuality and abortion are far more relaxed.

Tradition, however, is as strong as ever and has a way of hunting these characters down. Nowhere is this more true than with marriage, which serves as a kind of binding theme of these stories. Li contrasts the failed unions of the young with the domestic hells of their parents, both becoming so accustomed to unhappiness that they make a culture of their own misery.

That's certainly the case with Sansan, the schoolteacher in "Love in the Marketplace," who receives an offer of marriage from Tu, the man she lost earlier to her best friend. Sansan's mother urges her to forget the past, but she refuses; she has banked her entire life on the all-or-nothing proposition of being Tu's first and only, a point she makes with bloody emphasis in a horrifying and starkly effective final scene. In "The Arrangement," a man holds his marriage together by avoiding it as much as possible -- and leaving his sickly, frigid, vicious wife to the care of a long-suffering friend.

In the title story, a father tries to patch things up with his recently divorced, estranged daughter, whom he wants to see remarried. "Women in their marriageable twenties and early thirties are like lychees that have been picked from the tree," he advises her. "Each passing day makes them less fresh and less desirable, and only too soon will they lose their value, and have to be gotten rid of at a sale price." What he doesn't know is that his daughter sees through his illusions about his own life and knows what a sham his own marriage has been.

"After a Life" follows the dual stories of Mr. Su and Mr. Fong, elderly Chinese gents who meet each other at the "stockbrokerage" and are both mired in burdensome lives that go against prevailing convention. Mr. Fong uses Mr. Su to cover for an affair, which threatens to reveal the hidden secret of Mr. Su and his wife: an adult daughter with cerebral palsy, whom they keep locked away in a room for fear of revealing their shame to the neighbors. "Life is not much different from the stock market," Mr. Su thinks. "You invest in a stock and you stick, and are stuck, to the choice, despite all the possibilities of other mistakes."

"Son" vaguely calls to mind O'Connor's story "The Enduring Chill" and seems to have a touch of her faith as well; it's written with a cool objectivity that is just a shade short of openly devout. Han, living in California, returns home to China to visit his mother and discovers she has given up Marx for Jesus. Han tries to convince her that she has merely exchanged one false god for another -- an argument that will not only bring terrible consequences but will force Han, who is gay, to realize that his mother is living her convictions with far more courage than he can live his own.

Several stories directly address the human costs of life under a brutal dictatorship. The best, "Immortality," follows the fate of a child who looks like Mao, which becomes first his blessing and then his curse. The story captures 20th-century China in all of its false hopes, terrors and (speaking of violent metaphors) emasculation, and the narrative voice is perfect: It's told by an anonymous voice in the crowd -- a crowd that believes what everyone believes, which is also what it is ordered to believe from on high.

Each of these stories takes you to a different place, and each feels fresh, wise and alive, creating a fascinating, horrifying and heartbreaking picture of life in a country where the past never goes away.

Reviewed by Rodney Welch
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (September 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081297333X
• ISBN-13: 978-0812973334
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #67,903 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Prayers, Great Stories, August 23, 2006

By	Sharon Bakar "Sharon Bakar" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling short stories, September 17, 2006

By	literary bug (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

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!

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Short Story Collection from a Promising Writer, November 11, 2005

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (Hardcover)

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.