Gold Boy, Emerald Girl KINDLE MOBI by Yiyun Li H.A.

BONUS: This edition contains a reader's guide.

In these spellbinding stories--Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner and acclaimed author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, gives us exquisite fiction filled with suspense, depth, and beauty, in which history, politics, and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition.

In the title story, a professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. In "A Man Like Him," a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. In "The Proprietress," a reporter from Shanghai travels to a small town to write an article about the local prison, only to discover a far more intriguing story involving a shopkeeper who offers refuge to the wives and children of inmates. In "House Fire," a young man who suspects his father of sleeping with the young man's wife seeks the help of a detective agency run by a group of feisty old women.

Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and modern, to create a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

Excerpts

From the book...
KindnessChapter One

i am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one- bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers. Apart from a trip to a cheap seaside resort, taken with my parents the summer I turned five, I have not traveled much; I spent a year in an army camp in central China, but other than that I have never lived away from home. In college, after a few failed attempts to convince me of the importance of being a community member, my adviser stopped acknowledging my presence, and the bed assigned to me was taken over by the five other girls in the dorm and their trunks.

I have not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends, though as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting; never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.

I teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else's life.

I have no hobby that takes me outside my flat during my spare time. I do not own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a century older than I am. I have never in my life hurt a soul, or, if I have done any harm unintentionally the pain I inflicted was the most trivial kind, forgotten the moment it was felt-if indeed it could be felt in any way. But that cannot be a happy life, or much of a life at all, you might say. That may very well be true. "Why are you unhappy?" To this day, if I close my eyes I can feel Lieutenant Wei's finger under my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. "Tell me, how can we make you happy?"

The questions, put to me twenty-three years ago, have remained unanswerable, though it no longer matters, as, you see, Lieutenant Wei died three weeks ago, at age forty-six, mother of a teenage daughter, wife of a stationery merchant, veteran of Unit 20256, People's Liberation Army, from which she retired at age forty-three, already afflicted with a malignant tumor. She was Major Wei in the funeral announcement. I do not know why the news of her death was mailed to me except perhaps that the funeral committee-it was from such a committee that the letter had come, befitting her status- thought I was one of her long-lost friends, my name scribbled in an old address book. I wonder if the announcement was sent to the other girls, though not many of them would still be at the same address. I remember the day Lieutenant Wei's wedding invitation arrived, in a distant past, and thinking then that it would be the last time I would hear from her.

I did not go to the funeral, as I had not gone to her wedding, both of which took place two hours by train from Beijing. It is a hassle to travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face strangers' tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people.

When I was five, a peddler came to our neighborhood one Sunday with a bamboo basket full of spring chicks. I was trailing behind my father for our weekly shopping of rationed food, and when the peddler put a chick in my palm, its small body soft and warm and shivering constantly, I cried before I could...

Reviews

Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice...
"A literary voice that brings to mind Nabokov's description of Chekhov's narrative style: 'The story is told in the most natural way possible...the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice.' As in reading Chekhov, one is struck by how profoundly important the lives or ordinary people are made to seem, and by what a sizable chunk of existence -- an entire life or several lives -- has been compressed into a few pages....[Yiyun Li] succeeds in making the details of a very particular (and very sharply drawn) time and place express something broader and more universal....[Li's stories] have the power to create hushed intervals that resonate with emotion....Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is an example of the treasure an artist can fashion from the raw materials of ordinary existence."

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Cover Review...
"Li's collection well deserves a celebration with its sophistication and honesty, which often derive from a deep understanding of the history, culture and politics of China, and of their impact on ordinary people. . . . Yes, sorrows may arise during times of reflection, but it's impossible not to fall in love with the privacy and tranquility of the time and place."
Marie Claire...
"With their quiet authority, exquisite control, and illumination of those quicksilver moments on which entire lives pivot, Li's tales lodge in your rib cage long after you've finished reading....[Li will] remind you of what it's like to be human in today's increasingly fragmented world."
Cleveland Plain Dealer...
"Breathtaking....starkly wondrous....gorgeous fiction....Yiyun Li writes in simple, penetrating prose....[Li] is an impresario of our essential loneliness. Still, these nine stories are not sad, but astringently beautiful."
Junot Díaz...
"Li is extraordinary . . . a storyteller of the first order . . . each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart. . . Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel at her remarkable talents."
Vogue...
"Masterly....nuanced....Li conjures a bewildering new economy China, but her eloquent understanding of people struggling to help one another 'make a world that would accommodate their loneliness' feels universal."
Elle...
"Delectable....subtle and assured....[Li] finds the pulse points in the lives of her Chinese and Chinese-American characters and renders her findings with empathy and exactitude."
Time Out New York...
"Li displays a staggering poise and grace in her latest collection of short stories....the yarns spun in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl prove to be as varied as humanity itself."
New York Observer...
"[Li's] writing is minimal, yet packed with detail. At times, it feels like she is reporting in the manner of a journalist; at others she teeters on the verge of lyricism, often walking this line within a single paragraph."
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)...
"A stellar assortment of stories...further proof that Li deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)...
"Brilliant...a frighteningly lucid vision of human fate."
About the Author

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.