Biography
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Lannan Foundation and Whiting Foundation. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction; it was also shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize and Orange Prize for New Writers. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.
I gathered up all my serious students and told them she would change their lives. We sat and listened to her read from her new book. We sucked in our breath when she paused and got goosebumps. We heard her read a story we had all read before and walked away with a completely different impression than we had before. I nearly cried. I hugged her and she signed my book and misspelled my name and I asked about her kids and she told me about the call she got from J's kindergarden teacher and I told her about the time G said she had a sperm donor not a dad and we laughed and I missed school and workshop so, so much.
Then, a bunch of my students went out for dinner and we talked about the story and the amazing experience of hearing an author read (when it's a good reader) and our own struggles with our work and how inspiring it is to hold hands with this little writing community, how rare it is to talk over a plate of taquitos and enchilladas, and be able to explain your delight at the way two images speak when situated next to each other correctly, and the way certain words can pull you out of a story and others can push you right back in, and the way sometimes another voice entirely takes over, and it's impossible to go back and edit thoughtfully without thinking you might be just a little bit crazy. We laughed. The youngest of us was 17 and the oldest was 66. We shared our favorite stories, exercises, and classes. We compared battle scars. We collectively wondered why, of all the things we could be doing with our lives, we are so compelled to write.
It was an amazing night. After grad school, I lost such a huge sense of my community: everyone thinks they're a writer, and sometimes they are, but it's so nice to be able to exchange work with people who actually feel the same way about writing that I do: it's not fun, it's not therapeutic, it is simply necessary for my existence.
Last week was nuts. I had my thesis defense, which was surprisingly awesome, and so very helpful. It was also the first time I've ever had to write an aesthetic statement, which was a very weird thing for me to do. There's not a standard format or anything, so I just decided to wing it.
The English major in me wonders... what's the past tense of "wing it?" I "wung" it? "Winged" it?
Haha. Oh, the dilemmas of my life.
Aesthetic Statement
The story you will hear today is the most important thing I have ever written. Not because it’s the longest (it is, but more on that later), or even because it’s the best, but because it’s the story I’ve been trying to tell for so long. I’ve written versions and snippets of this story hundreds of times, in short stories, poems, and flash fiction pieces. Every time, it felt like there was too much going on. I wanted to tell the whole story, but I didn’t know how to get it all down in so few pages. I spent my first year in the program trying to tighten everything up, get my sentences to somersault across the decades, develop my characters in a paragraph or a handful of images.
I wasn’t always successful. The workshop developed a refrain: “Too many stories here!” “What’s this really about?” After getting the same feedback a few hundred times, I realized that, yes, there was too much going on in my stories. I grew up in two different homes, and I was so comfortable with change that I had no trouble flashing back and forth between scenes, having eight characters appear by page two, and having parallel worlds with separate sets of tensions. But, my readers weren’t as willing to rocket around the narrative as I was. I had not yet learned how to organize my unwieldy story, manage so many people, or balance the back-story with the present moment.
I kept at it, though. Finally, at the end of fall quarter this year, I realized that I couldn’t say everything I wanted to in twenty-five pages. I couldn’t say it in fifty. So, I called Pam, in a panic, and put this project on a wildly different course. And now, here we are.
Before I wrote The Real Sister, I had never written anything over thirty pages. My approach has been clumsy at best, but this time, it feels right. It feels far more honest, more real, than any of the other versions I tried to write. I feel like I’ve found the time and space to render my characters in all their complexity, as well as the disparate worlds that they inhabit. The Real Sister spans fifteen years, and tells the story of six characters in three radically different households. The novel form has allowed me to hone my aesthetic goals: to start to render the world in a way that feels right to me. I’m learning to render a world that is fractured and patched, where every minute of the past informs the present moment, where conversations with six people are the norm, not the exception.
To prepare myself for the task of writing a novel, I stood on the shoulders of giants. I read My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates, and learned the ways a narrator can toggle back and forth between telling a story in retrospect and then narrating again in the present moment. I read Ha Jin’s Waiting and learned about the ways that a story can operate in the past without losing its momentum. I re-read Toni Morrison’s Jazz and was reminded of the ways her long, lyric sentences can make the back of my neck itch. I read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and learned the meaning of “quiting,” a word which can mean both repaying a debt and taking revenge. I became particularly interested in the ways that Chaucer’s characters use story telling as a means to “quite” one another, and the way his repetition of words and images creates a continuous thread throughout the separate tales.
When I began my story, I was primarily interested in capturing the relationship between Jamie and her ‘stepsister,’ Alexis. When Jamie and Alexis meet as children, they already display markedly different temperaments: Jamie is stubborn, calculating, and reserved, where Alexis is spontaneous, indecisive, and exciting. As the girls mature, they become increasingly competitive, and their personalities become even more polarized: yet they remain deeply attached to one another. However, as I wrote, I discovered tensions and chemistry in places I hadn’t planned on: between Jamie and her brother, Luke, between Anne and Tina, even Walter and Sean.
Through their relationships, I explored issues of nature and nurture, the effects of place and micro-cultures on the people who live in them, and the malleability of time. While I thought I was writing a pretty traditional bildungsroman, now I think I’m reaching for larger themes: how people are simultaneously products of their environments and their genetics. I am interested in the degree of control that individuals can exert over their actions and desires, their emotions, and their destinies.
I am also interested in issues of loyalty, forgiveness, siblings defining themselves in opposition to each other, and what constitutes a “real” family. I am interested in the ways families redefine themselves, and the rifts they must negotiate around, the wounds that will either heal like bones, and always have a weak spot, or heal like muscles, and grow back stronger.
This novel is very much a work in progress. As I was writing, I did not take much time to revise, because it felt like I was rearranging furniture in a house that wasn’t yet built. However, now that it’s all on paper, I plan to do serious revision. I know there are several areas I need to address: primarily, the pacing, and Jamie’s father, who just drops out of the narrative without any explanation or fanfare. I need to examine the relationships in the story, and make sure I’m pushing all the tensions to the surface.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who stood by me during this whole process, and made this day possible. I want to thank my family, Mom and Donry and Laura and Terren and Adam, for giving me a place to start and filling my childhood with enough material to keep me writing into the next millennium. I want to thank Ed for cheering me on every morning, forcing me to read Russian writers, and making the best cappuccinos in Mountain View. I want to thank Pam for her unwavering faith and support, for the time she pulled me aside as an undergrad, took me to Ciocolat and said, You can do this, if you want to. I want to thank Joe for introducing me to Toni Morrison (way back in 2002), and Beth for helping me think more critically about my own work. I want to thank Carey Newman, who called me the day after I turned in a story for workshop, and said, Girl, you need to write a novel. Finally, I want to thank everyone who has ever read and reacted to one of my stories, I want to thank you a thousand times, because without you, none of this would have ever happened.
The wife is on a mission to re-organize the pantry. She lined up mason jars across the counter, tied key labels around them with twine, labeled things: Basmati. Black beans. Barley. She filled the jars with the contents of the twist-tied plastic bags heaped on the shelf and stacked them back in the cabinet, labels facing forward.
Now she opens the cupboard just to look at them, and smiles.
She is a young wife, and has not yet gotten used to the word. She has never been a wife before. She thinks being a wife has something to do with keeping fresh flowers in the house, shaving her legs every day, wearing nighties to bed instead of boxers and tank tops. Her married friends tell her this will change. They mean that she will go back to shaving her legs every other day. They tell her this is the “honeymoon phase.”
The husband is older than the wife, but not by much. He has never been a husband before either. He thinks being a husband has something to do with the car the wife drives, letting her pick the restaurant, listening to her talk on the phone with her mother without complaining. His friends tell him to not let the wife get fat.
The wife is a piano teacher. Her students come to the apartment and touch the keys with their fingers, ask if it is right. The wife smiles a closed lip smile when she is very pleased, and an open lip smile when she is just regular-pleased. She tells her older students to write their own songs and listens with narrowed eyes as they play them for her.
It’s good, she will say, but too predictable.
Alexis and the kids lived at my parent’s house for a year and a half. By the time Drew and I got back from our honeymoon, she had moved out into her own two bedroom apartment: bunk beds in one room, queen size bed in the other. She taught preschool at the YMCA and went on dates with men she met on Facebook.
One Friday, Drew and I drove up for Grace’s birthday. It was late, we hit traffic, and didn’t get to Donato until after eleven. I drove him downtown, showed him the old opera house, the hundred-year-old bank, the hotel everyone swears Buffalo Bill stayed in. We drove past my old Girl Scout cabin, the wall Luke and I threw dirt clods at to see if they would shatter, the high school.
“There’s my pool,” I said, “The place I got my first job.”
He asked if we could go inside and I said they used to hide the spare key in the drainpipe out back. We parked the car and tip toed around the building.
It was dark, and the pool was covered in blue plastic tarps that looked black under the faraway streetlights. Occasionally, a car drove by, and crickets strummed in the nearby soccer field. We crept around the stucco building and I poked my fingers into the opening of the drainpipe, felt the familiar brass key.
“You’re in luck,” I said.
We walked back toward the front entrance and I opened the lock on the chain link fence, the door whined on its hinges as we stepped onto the concrete. The lights were all off, but I could see the high dive silhouetted between the two diving boards, knew where the guard stands were chained to the fence, knew exactly how many paces it was to the starting blocks.
“I haven’t been here in years,” I said, “But I’d know that smell anywhere.”
The chlorine that burned the preschooler’s eyes in my swim class and made them refuse to count my fingers underwater, even with goggles. The bleach we glugged into the water after one of the kids pooped. The water that shredded my racing suits every six weeks like clockwork and streaked my hair and bleached the hair on my arms startlingly white and leaked out of my pores when I was on land and smelled exactly like that pool.
“I can picture you here,” he said, “It’s weird. Like the ghost of your high school self running around.”
“No running,” I said, “Pool rules.”
He laughed and started walking along the edge of the pool, peering down at it.
“Can I put my feet in?” he asked.
“Sure.”
We rolled up our jeans and sat side by side under the high dive, our ankles dangling in the water, pushing the tarps with our toes.
“We used to run across these every summer,” I said, flicking the tarp with my foot, “Right before State. We’d all come here at midnight and run across the tarps naked.”
“Naked?”
“Yeah. It was stupidly dangerous, actually. You can drown. The tarps can suck you under.”
“You guys were all lifeguards though.”
“Still stupid.”
He leaned back on the balls of his hands and looked up at the sky, at the outline of the diving board blocking out the stars.
“Did you ever do diving?”
I shook my head. “I dove off it, but just because I had to for my WSI. To teach swim lessons. But I just swam, I was kinda scared of the high dive.”
“But you did it?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you teach someone to go off the high dive?”
“Start them on the steps and the side of the pool. Then the low dive. Then you just tell them to go to the end of the board and do their flat hands and fall straight down.”
“Fall straight down?”
“Yeah. It’s not hard, it’s just scary.”
He asked what ‘flat hands’ were and I interlaced my fingers like I was saying a worried prayer, straightened my arms and flipped my hands so my palms faced away from me, forming a flat plane.
“Like this,” I said.
His teeth flashed in the darkness and he asked, “Can we try it?”
“The high dive?”
“Yeah!”
“You’re crazy,” I said, then jumped up and walked to the corner of the pool. I told him to go to the other end and we hooked the corners of the tarp to the metal reel, turned the handle until the tarp slid off the pool and wound around the giant cylinder, over and over itself like a jelly roll, and the water shimmered below us, dark and bottomless, though I knew that it was exactly twelve and a half feet deep. We shimmied out of our clothes and approached the high, narrow ladder.
“I’ve never gone off a high dive before,” Drew said.
“I’ll go first.”
“How high is it?”
“Seven and a half meters.”
“It looks a lot higher than that from down here.”
I kissed him and climbed up the ladder. At the top of the tower, I looked around, at Drew and Donato below me: the headlights on the cars, streetlights in the parking lot, the shine in Drew’s eyes and off the tips of his teeth. I felt like I did the first time I dove off that thing, the day the instructor said, I’m sure you guys already know how to do this, but we have to do it anyway, go ahead and dive off, and my mouth had gone cold because I had never once done it, had only jumped in feet first with Luke cannon-balling after me, Alexis tanning below us and scoring us with her fingers, 8, 8.5. I ground my toe into the sandpaper grit of the diving board, planted my back foot, blew out all the air in my lungs in one big rush, knowing that before I hit the water I’d suck it all back in without even trying, and took off running.
Prologue
*
That winter, Mom and Walter took us to Tahoe for a day of snowboarding. We loaded up the Soccer Mom Express the night before, laid our snow gear out on the floor, Denny and Luke did lunges around the living room to get the quads ready. Walter waxed all the boards and got us up while it was still dark, Alexis and I climbed in the back seats with our pillows and throw blankets, Denny and Luke took the pilot seats in front of us. We were all back asleep before Walter hit the freeway.
At one point, we heard a loud crack and snapped awake. The back window of the Odyssey shattered, with what we thought must have been a gunshot, and glass flew over Alexis and I, flew all the way up onto the dashboard. Mom screamed; if Walter had been anyone else in the world he would have steered us right off the road. But he kept us straight and steady on that windy mountain pass, Denny and Luke covered their ears, and Alexis threw her arms up and over me, pinned me to the seat, arms spreading over me like a snow angel, covering my head with hers. Her breath was hot against my skull, through my matted hair. Mom wheeled around and called back to us and asked if we were all okay, we each answered her at once, Yes, fine, then she unbuckled her seat belt and climbed in back with us. She looked at us each individually, hands brushing softly against our cheeks, said our names fast. Luke? Fine. Denny? Fine. Jamie? Fine. Lex? Fine.
It wasn’t until Walter pulled over and Mom helped Alexis and I pick the glass shards out of our hair that I saw how hard Alexis had been crying. She had faint scratches on her neck, on the backs of her arms, and on one cheek. She was hardly bleeding, but she was breathing in short, loud gasps, and her cries sounded like she was choking. Mom tried to hug her but she shook her off and said she didn’t want to be touched. Then she came over to me and dropped her forehead on my shoulder, let her arms hang limp at her sides, and cried. I raised my hands and smoothed them over her hair, she sobbed until I could feel her tears dripping down my back.
Later, when we took the Odyssey to the Honda dealer to replace the window, they explained that we had a defective window to begin with, and the drop in temperature caused it to splinter. The boys teased Alexis for crying, and gave up the search for the bullet that we had been so sure was somewhere in the car. I wanted to laugh with them, Like anyone would really shoot at a minivan, but I couldn’t, because I had been scared, really scared, and hadn’t even realized that Alexis threw herself over me until it was all over. And then we found out it wasn’t a bullet and the boys laughed and I forgot all about it. Until years later, once my senses did finally come to me, and I realized what it had all meant, that she had tried to protect me, that her split-second, natural reaction was to throw her body over mine and offer herself up for scratches, I called her up in the middle of the night blubbering so hard she thought I was drunk.
“Tahoe,” I explained, “Remember? When the parents took us. And the window broke?”
“Yeah… Jamie… what’s wrong?”
“I just wanted to thank you.”
“What? For what?”
“For what you did.”
“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I mean for what you did. When the window broke. I didn’t get it then. But I just wanted to thank you.”
She was silent for a while and I asked if she was still there.
“I’m here,” she said, “Sorry. I was just remembering.”
Then she started laughing and said I was crazy and that it was over ten years ago and neither of us were thinking and I said That’s the point, that’s the point! And she sighed and said not to read too much into it. Then I laughed with her and she asked if they ever found the bullet and I said yes, thinking she was joking, but then she said Really? Where? and I asked her if she was serious and she asked what I meant, then I told her there was never a bullet, that the window broke because it got too cold too fast.
“Really?” she said.
“Yes. Really.”
“You’re not messing with me?”
“No. Swear to God.” I shook my head and Drew rolled over in his sleep, clamped a pillow over his ear. I kissed his knuckle and lowered my voice to a whisper.
“Because all these years, I could have sworn it was a bullet.”
*
