Yiyun Li doesn’t mind being misunderstood by people. Rather, she takes delight in her duplicity. A curious observer by nature, she likes people and things that require you to “look again,” an act through which a previous impression is revised, the viewer’s bias removed, and a deeper layer of truth revealed. For a while, after the release of her latest novel, The Book of Goose, she showed up at promotional events touting a tote bag with a goose on its front, its yellow padded feet dangling haplessly off the edge. She is fond of geese, one of the most underestimated animals in both Chinese and English contexts. “They look silly, but they can be violent, and they’re complex too.” By associating herself with the goose, she plays the role of “a nice little Chinese lady” while quietly challenging the world to look again.

To prove oneself to be more than meets the eye is an imperative and lifelong drive for many immigrants, particularly for a writer practicing her trade in an adopted tongue. Not all immigrants share Li’s habit of and confidence in inviting misperception about themselves. Perhaps she no longer needs to fear being underestimated. At the age of fifty-one, she has breathed in English for twenty-seven years, with five novels, a memoir, and three story collections under her belt, and has won prestigious awards and recognitions such as the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has proved, over and over again, that she is more than meets the eye.

Yiyun Li was born in 1972 to an intellectual family in Beijing. Her father was a nuclear scientist, and her mother, a Chinese teacher at a primary school. Li’s early reading bore the mark of her time when publishing was very much part of the state’s five-year plans. Like others, she read whatever came her way, be it a series of comic strips of abridged autobiographies by Maxim Gorky, a serialized translation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a library copy of Turgenev’s Prose Poems, or a blurrily photocopied edition of Gone with the Wind. In 1989, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Li and her freshman peers at Peking University were sent to the army for a year to prevent future insubordination, an experience she later fictionalized in her short story, “Kindness.” In it, a pirated copy of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover circulates clandestinely among women cadets.

In 1996, Li came to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Immunology at the University of Iowa. She was having doubts about pursuing a predictable career as a scientist, when she came across Irish writer William Trevor’s short story, “Traditions.” She went on and sought out his collection, The Hill Bachelors. Through Trevor’s work, she felt as if a space that had been unknown to her was made possible. She decided to give it a shot at becoming a writer. A high school classmate told her that he didn’t think she’d make it, because how could someone who grew up in China write about the upper class and the mainstream in the U.S.? Her husband, whom she met in college, cautioned her that “writing would require more than a scientific career,” because “no real madness, no real art.” Li remained undeterred. She told him that she’d give it three years; if by then she hadn’t made any progress, she’d get an MBA or go to law school. Before the three years elapsed, her short story, “Extra,” was picked up from The New Yorker’s slush pile and published on December 14, 2003. The same year, she was admitted to Iowa’s renowned Creative Writing program.

“Extra” was the opposite of stories about “the upper class and the mainstream in the U.S.” Inspired by an anecdote Li heard from her mother, the story follows a fifty-year-old woman’s efforts to secure financial stability. The journey eventually leads her to a primary boarding school in suburban Beijing, where she befriends a six-year-old boy who has the habit of stealing girls’ socks. The story, later included in Li’s 2005 debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, captures the pulse of a society undergoing tremendous changes. By focusing on those left out of the system, Li illuminates the chaos, energy, and hidden pains of a rapidly changing society through the lens of a delicately depicted relationship. The book received five awards, including the 2005 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and Guardian First Book Award.

Not all stories in the collection age equally well. Characters quoting Chinese aphorisms risk sounding exotic, and to readers today, some stories might appear to flirt with cultural stereotypes: One story depicts a village known for producing eunuchs and a Mao impersonator, while another recounts how an oppressed peasant went rogue. But Li wasn’t tailoring her work to Western readers; she never wrote with a specific audience in mind – she only wrote for herself. It just so happened that concepts like eunuchs were commonplace during her upbringing; only later did she realize how unusual such a practice was, and she was always intrigued by what didn’t make sense. Ultimately, a writer doesn’t choose what to write. In The Book of Goose, Li reflects on her early publishing experience through the main character, Fabienne, a child prodigy from France who co-authored with her friend two collections of grotesque tales about life and death in their village. “(T)he press talked about the ferocious honesty on every page, and they called me a savage young chronicler of the postwar life with a mind drawn to morbidity. Me, savage? My mind, morbid? That would be like calling my chickens a band of robbers.”

When Yiyun Li was selected by the New Yorker as one of “20 under 40” fiction writers to watch in 2010, she stood as the only Chinese writer on the list. While she might have brought a valuable Chinese experience to the English world, to Brigid Hughes, Li’s former editor at Paris Review, there was always something original to Li as a writer – “an abiding interest in time, a desire to see oneself as an individual, a stubbornness to never conform to expectations, of others and herself.”

Not everyone understood what Li was doing. Stories, much like their author, are susceptible to misunderstanding. Li said that her workshop experience at Iowa was “not normal” – “half of the time I wasn’t listening.” Why? “Because I found what they were saying meaningless.” In her first workshop, the teacher, who had rejected Li the previous year, read a sentence from “Extra” and said, “This is a good sentence, but you don’t know how good it is.” To this Li muttered to herself, “I know exactly how good it is!” 

She knew the worth of her words and never hesitated to defend them. When working on her first novel, The Vagrants, her editor suggested changing the appearance of a character, a young woman whose face is deformed by a birthmark. Li refused. She would turn a deaf ear to all the suggestions from the editor. Later, the editor, whose better-known authors included Nancy Reagan, was heard remarking to others: “Yiyun is not someone you can direct.”

You might assume that such self-assuredness comes from a solid sense of self, and you could be right. But at the same time, Li also wrote that “I had the confidence to put up a seeming as my being. That confidence, however, is the void replacing I. The moment that I enters my narrative my confidence crumbles.”

Once you delve into Li’s writing, you’ll encounter glimmers of (self-) contradictions like this everywhere. For example, despite having penned some of the most singular characters in contemporary English literature, she insisted that she never “created” them, but merely “found” them. She took an active aversion to clichés but spent a great deal of time quoting and parsing them, flipping them around, relying on their banality. She was drawn to melodrama, but when asked which of her novels she considered the most melodramatic, she paused for a second, then whispered, “I don’t think I have melodrama.”

“What about Kinder than Solitude?”

A slight pause. “That one might be a little.”

Moving back and forth between the 90s Beijing and the 2000s America, Kinder than Solitude revolves around four childhood friends bound to each other by a half-hearted attempt at murder that takes years to claim the life of its victim. One chooses to stay, sacrificing his life to care for the victim; two move to the U.S.; all of them lead secluded, haunted lives. Death casts its gigantic shadow on this world, where love and kindness fall and melt like snowflakes against a gray sky. If melodrama “meets no one’s expectation but its internal need to feel,” this is a melodramatic book, with none of the main characters seeking an audience in others or the reader. The occasional moments of relief come from Li’s depiction of life in 90s Beijing – the teenagers biking around the city in the heat of summer days, their parents carrying on their lives in the shared grape-vine-shaded courtyard. In a way, Kinder than Solitude was Li’s love letter to Beijing. It would be her last novel set in China, although she didn’t know it back then.

The book wasn’t easy to write. “The novel had brought out of me unkindness against others and uncharitableness against myself,” Li wrote. During the time she was working on it, she had two failed suicide attempts and was hospitalized twice. When bleakness attacked, all she wished was “to be left alone, to curl up, and to stay still.” She was diagnosed with depression, although now, looking back, she said she obviously had been depressed since childhood. “I was an adult before I was a child,” she said, smiling.

Li found that she couldn’t write fiction anymore. “I’m a writer. If I can’t write fiction, I’m going to write nonfiction.” During and after her hospital stays, Brigid Hughes called her everyday. They talked about reading, writing, and everything else in life. Their conversations led to a collection of essays, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, published by Random House in 2017.

For Li’s readers, this was the first time this private writer wrote about her personal life, specifically her complicated relationship with her mother. Growing up with significant losses in her early life, Li’s mother was emotionally unstable and verbally abusive. A devoted teacher respected by generations of students and their parents, she was simultaneously “a family despot, unpredictable in both her callousness and her vulnerability.” As the favored child, Li was often assigned as “the one to smooth over her mood, to appease her anger, to bring her back to her childlike cheerful self so we could breathe again.” She wrote, “I had known, long before I could put that thought into words, that the only child in our family was my mother. More than her rage I feared her tears … My mother is a child I had to leave behind so as to have my own life.”

Under such circumstances, leaving home – one’s mother, motherland, mother tongue – was not an option but a necessity for self-preservation, a radical act to re-establish one’s boundary, where one’s self ends and others’ begin. Two types of characters recur in Li’s stories: the Old Woman and the Orphan. The Old Woman is single, either unmarried, divorced, or widowed; the Orphan is either orphaned biologically or emotionally. The two make a great literary duo, such as Granny Lin and the sock-stealing boy in “Extra,” the reclusive Professor Dai and her favorite student in “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” and the unhappy narrator Moyan and Professor Shan, who teaches her English in “Kindness.” The bond between them is never parental, its power dynamic closer to that of a love affair or a close friendship, where each trespass is carefully debated, dissected, and retaliated. In “Kindness,” Professor Shan told Moyan that she was adopted by her parents to save their unhappy marriage, while the girl, as she grew older, exerted her power by depriving her lonely tutor of her company. By building connections between childless women and motherless children, Li created a new narrative for relationships. By not allowing her work to be translated into Chinese, she extracted herself from her mother’s script. 

For years Li denied herself being an autobiographical writer. The concept puzzled her: To be autobiographical requires having “a solid and explicable self.” When she was growing up, her mother often said to her, “I don’t even need to lay my eyes on you to know everything about you because you came from my body.” Li’s resistance to such a claim of omniscience was to will herself into nonexistence. “A word I hate to use in English is I,” she wrote. She chose to study immunology because the working concept of the immune system appealed to her. “Its job is to detect and attack non-self; … its memories can go awry selectively, or, worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to eliminate.” Later, after she switched to writing, she drew solace from her characters’ indifference towards her. “They have no interest in interfering with my life; they have neither the time nor the curiosity to ask me questions; they do not preserve me in the amber of their memories. What else does one want from people but that kind of freedom – an existence closest to nonexistence?”

What prompted her unraveling, however, was not the void inside her but the desire to fill it. “Against my intuition I have formed attachments – to a few people, to a profession, to an adopted language – but I have yet to learn to live with them.” She wanted to have a real life, a solid self, as real as her characters’. She realized that when one says nothing matters, everything matters.

Towards the end of our second conversation, Li said with a confessional air, “When I was a child, all I wanted to do was to read. And some time ago, I thought, ‘Oh I actually got the life I wanted. I read everyday all the time! This is a good life. I got the life I wanted.’”

At first, I didn’t understand why this emphasis, which seemed genuine, on a statement that edged on being a cliché. After all, all writers began as voracious readers. Only later did it occur to me that she meant it in a more radical, literal way than I’d thought. You see, for Yiyun Li, reading means differently for her than for me or you. “Reading,” she once wrote, “I equate with real life.” It is one of the few trespasses she’d allow herself to conduct, probing into another person’s mind and memory without claiming a place in their life. It was what she did during her two years of unraveling: She read the letters, diaries, and work of writers including John McGahern, Stefan Zweig, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, James Alan McPherson, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield. As she read, her mind revisited days before and after she came to the U.S., stories she refused to tell and wanted to forget. It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the tonic effect of the words kicked in. But gradually, along with the help of medication, she lifted herself off the darkest bottom and re-emerged as a new writer.

At Li’s sunlit Princeton office, we had a friendly debate about plot. For her, a really good short story is where “nothing happens.” She told her students that if you say “the arch of the story” – the setup, the rising action, the crisis, the resolution – “you are saying the wrong thing.” “Because there’s no arch in stories. It’s an artificial concept. You don’t live by arch. You don’t live by plotting. There’s no plot in life. Life happens.”

“What about another workshop cliché – do you believe that characters should have purposes?”

“Oh no!”

I was at a stage where I was excited by plot, a series of carefully constructed causal links implying the builder’s confidence – and optimism – in the thought that what we do has consequences. Iris Murdoch, one of my favorite discoveries this year, was a novelist and philosopher that derived much joy from writing deeply serious yet seriously entertaining plot-driven stories.

“I just re-read a lot of Iris Murdoch,” Yiyun Li said. “I don’t love her … I read her once in a while just to remind myself that I don’t love her. I think she’s a moralist.”

Li, on the other hand, wasn’t. “I am largely a moral person, but I don’t think about morality at all.”

Writer Ada Zhang once attended a workshop led by Li, who “tore apart” Zhang’s short story, not “viciously,” but “with determination and wisdom.” She used three keywords to describe Li’s writing: subversive, risky, playful. “Yiyun likes to say, tell unless you have to show … she has transcended craft. In a sense, she is anti-craft.”

The new writer that has emerged with Dear Friend feels different from before. From the three novels that followed – Must I Go, Where Reasons End, The Book of Goose, to the latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, even Li’s fiercest characters are remarkably “passive” in the sense that they accept life as it is and endure the strain of time. They don’t expect a ton from the world and don’t impose their will on others (Li frowned at the word “hero”), but underneath such passivity now sounds a stronger, warmer heartbeat.

“I look at fiction a little differently now. More relaxed. Less rigid.”

I told her that now she seemed to “give” more to her characters. In the past, she claimed to be content with observing them. “I think now I’m more engaged with them. I’m more lenient with them, I’m much more patient.” She broke into a string of laughter.

Must I Go can be seen as a continuation of the conversation she began with Dear Friend. It is told by Lilia, a eighty-five-year old woman with five children, seventeen grandchildren, three husbands, and a lover. Despite having so many people in her life, she is most connected to her daughter, Lucy. When Lilia was forty-four, Lucy committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. At the senior care facility, Lilia close reads the newly published diaries of her ex-lover Roland Bouley, a deceased writer and Lucy’s biological father, trying to better understand her daughter and leave an account of her life to Lucy’s daughter. A descendant of early settlers in the American West, Lilia speaks in a no-nonsense voice that can be either harsh or wise, depending on its listener. “The most deadly natural disaster that can befall anyone is family.” “All mothers are failures.” 

While Li was working on it, life happened. Her older son committed suicide at the age of sixteen. She was forty-four.

Gently yet firmly, Li declined to talk about her children or her husband. “I respect other people’s privacy. I can talk about my feelings, but I won’t tell you about my husband’s or (my son’s) feelings. … I won’t tell you about them because that’s their life. Whatever I say, it’s not going to be enough.”

I was met with a similar reservation when I interviewed Brigid Hughes about her friendship with Li. “Brigid and I have quite similar personalities,” Li said. Both show great respect for the other’s ownership of stories and guard their shared past with an unyielding silence.

To live socially means forming relationships. To whom do the memories we share with others belong? How much of ourselves belong to us exclusively, and how much to others with whom we’ve built a life together? How to tell stories about a friend, a husband, a child without trespassing?

For Li, the answer lies in Where Reasons End. Written in the conversational style of an ancient philosophical work, it unfolds as a mother invites her son, Nikolai, who recently committed suicide, to converse with her in the liminal space between fiction and reality, life and death, “somewhere in yesterday” and “somewhere in tomorrow.”

Theirs is a most believable yet impossible conversation, going on intermittently over roughly three months. There are moments of reminiscences tender and sad, but most of the time the mother and son would engage in a tireless word play, dismantling old words and making up new ones (if there is noon and afternoon, math and aftermath, there might as well be time and “aftertime,” where Nikolai resides now). The most brilliant argument happens around adjectives and nouns, where the mother finds the adjectives judgmental and opinionated, while the son dislikes the nouns because they’re dull and cumbersome. Yet through all these seemingly frivolous debates, what they are really talking about is one thing: death, and the unfathomable reason behind Nikolai’s decision to take his own life.

At some point, the mother asks him what is outside his windows. 

“A garden of superlative nouns. A path paved with lively adverbs. … There are ways to live not as a noun, or inside a noun, or among other nouns.

Yet it’s all the nouns in the world that make room for the living, I thought. The living need the space within four walls.”

In a way, the book is an exertion of empathy as much as agency, both for the mother and the son. At the beginning of it, the mother asks, “Not knowing must be closest to what people call a wound. … Can one live … with a conclusion so fatally inconclusive?” Towards the end, she wonders, “What if an abyss can be made into a natural habitat? What if we accept suffering as we do our hair or eye colors?” “It’s crucial to avoid wishful thinking for the book’s ability to offer a convincing yes,” said novelist Garth Greenwell, who has read it over ten times. “(It is) a ‘yes’ that has passed through ‘no.’ It cannot just be a self-assuaging fantasy, but it is also not not that.”

I asked Li whether she had ever had doubts about motherhood. Unlike many of her fellow women writers – Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson – she never wrote about her decision to become a mother, and only mentioned briefly, in the afterword of Dear Friend, her struggle balancing the role of a mother and a writer (early in her career she had to write from midnight to four a.m.). “I didn’t struggle (about whether I wanted to become a mother),” she said. “Some people know what they want. I think people have different propensities.” Later, she added, “I don’t even think of myself as a woman writer.”

“For the last twenty years, women keep writing about having children or not having children as if those were the most important decisions. They are not. They are not! I don’t think so.”

“Then what are?”

“I think you just make a decision and you stay with it.”

“Are you afraid of pain, physical and mental ones?”

“I’m a little afraid of physical pain,” she smiled rather mischievously. “I used not to.”

“You seem very stoic to me.”

“I am. Probably the only thing I can claim, with some certainty, is that I’m stoic. Seneca, the whole Seneca letters, is all about stoicism. And I do like Seneca.”

The modern meaning of “stoic” – describing the quality of enduring pain with little or no display of feelings – has considerably strayed from its origin, the philosophy of Stoicism, which could be traced back to Socrates and was comprehensively expounded in the work of Seneca, a prominent Stoic philosopher in the early Roman Empire. His letters, written in the last two years of his life to his friend Lucilius, address a wide range of topics, including why we need to know ourselves, how to spend time wisely, the value of friendship, nature, and a simple lifestyle, and how to face loss and death. He encourages his readers to accept what’s beyond their control and cultivate a mental state of tranquility through rigorous self-examination. In the letter on grief for lost friends, he wrote, “Do you wish to know the reason for lamentations and excessive weeping? It is because we seek the proofs of our bereavement in our tears, and do not give way to sorrow, but merely parade it.” “We may weep,” he concluded, “but we must not wail.” 

In November 2017, two months after the death of her son, Li and her family moved into their Princeton house. In the yard, rain had made most of the plants leafless and unrecognizable. Unable to read fiction, she spent the winter with Shakespeare’s plays, Wallace Stevens’ poems, and two books on writers and gardening. Time passed – the punctuality of the arrival of spring, the factuality of the roses, the randomness of nature – all gave her solace. In the first year, she ordered twenty-five bulbs of hyacinth; last year, she planted eight hundred.

Rereading Must I Go, I hear an echo of Seneca’s voice in Lilia’s when she declares, “Crying is not my way. Arguing is.”

“I don’t think that things are knowable,” Li said. “People are not knowable.”

“How do you make peace with this?”

“I don’t ‘make peace.’ The funny thing is, I’ve never used the phrase ‘make peace with something,’ because I don’t. I refuse to make peace but I accept the reality. I think they’re two different things. I’ve heard this phrase – ‘radical acceptance.’ To me, it means, ‘I accept it’s going to be like this forever.’” 

“People are always finding an easy way out of things. I don’t like that. I’m not going to make things easy for myself, and certainly I’m not going to make things easy for other people! I rebel against any kind of clichés. Peace is a cliché to me.”  

Now, almost six years after the cold winter in 2017, with a few strands of silver in her short hair, cocooned in a gray cardigan that fell to her knees, her sturdy sneakers perched precariously on the handle of the bottom drawer of her desk, Yiyun Li looked tranquil, even peaceful, yet one could sense a universe of memories and thoughts and feelings inside her, pumping behind an invisible yet almost palpable fence. To guard this fence, she has chosen her own language to tell her story in her way. By fending off the invasions of the non-selves, she has reshaped herself.

“What others and the world has done should not define one as what one has done to oneself,” she said.