A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (Picador)

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American writer. She was born and raised in Beijing, China. She was born in 1972 when Mao Zedong was still the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a nuclear physicist. As a Freshman at Peking University, Li was required to spend one year in the military or as Li says in her own words, “to immunize students to the disease that was called freedom, all freshman were sent to the military for a year of brain-washing, or political re-education, as it was called.”

In the same year Li graduated from Peking University, she went to the United States and studied for four years at the University of Iowa receiving a Masters of Science degree in immunology in 2000. She continued to study at the same university and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction. 

Having grown up in Communist China inspired Li to write the short stories collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Some of the stories were previously published in magazines such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.  All the stories in the collection are set in contemporary China. The stories are heartbreaking and humorous, describing the lives of ordinary people in modern China. Two of the stories have been adapted into feature films, both directed by Wayne Wang. The films were based on “The Princess of Nebraska” and the title story of the collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”, both films being released in 2007. 

In “The Princess of Nebraska”, a young woman named Sasha is traveling by bus to Chicago to get an abortion. She is accompanied by an older Chinese gentleman named Boshen, who came to the U.S. by way of a false marriage. Boshen is a gay man and was put under house arrest in China when it was discovered that he had been exchanging mail with a Western reporter telling the reporter that there was a high risk of an AIDS epidemic in one of China’s rural province. A lesbian friend who had recently immigrated to the U.S. and had become a citizen offered to marry him. The man who got Sasha pregnant was a Chinese man named Yang. Yang was a Nam Dan, “a male actor who plays female roles on stage in the Peking Opera”. Yang was ousted from the opera after being discovered that he had a male lover and became a money boy, a male prostitute. Boshen was in love with Yang.

“A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” was made as a companion piece to “The Princess of Nebraska”. In this story, a retired Chinese man visits his recently divorced daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington. He wants to help his daughter in her time of need, but his daughter is totally uninterested in his assistance.  The father-daughter relationship is strained due to their different ideas of duty and honor. 

What really makes these stories special is the fact that Li only started to write in English six years prior to the publication of this book. She refuses to have her work translated into Chinese for fear that the Chinese authorities might consider her work “counter-revolutionary” or “would read like an indictment of the regime” and she knows what could happen if the government were to make that distinction and knowing Li feels that way makes you feel as if you’re reading illicit literature yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt