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Alumni Profile—Yiyun Li

Editor's update:

Award-winning writer Yiyun Li has been hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English at Mills College. She will teach fiction and creative nonfiction at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Among her accolades, Li was awarded the Plimpton Prize for New Writers and a Pushcart Prize, and the Los Angeles Times named her a “person to watch” in 2005. Author of a forthcoming collection of short stories titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, she is also under contract with Random House for her novel-in-progress. Her fiction and memoir writing have been published in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, and other magazines. This spring, she is completing two MFA degrees in writing—one in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and one in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Iowa. Mills College provides outstanding undergraduate studies in English, and graduate studies leading to the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in English and American Literature.

Profile of Yiyun Li
Written by Nicky Agate
Spring 2004

The University of Iowa boasts the top creative writing program in the country, and every year some fifty students – half of them poets, the others fiction writers – descend upon Iowa City in search of publishing contracts and the peace to write. In a town teeming with these young writers, often the best of a generation, rising above the crowd is hard to do.

Some manage it, however, and none so well as Yiyun Li. And she didn’t even mean to be a writer, not at first. In fact, when Li first came to Iowa City, it was to do a Ph.D. in Immunology. Somehow, that initial intention has led to two published pieces in the New Yorker, a $5000 promising new writer award, and a two-book deal with publishers of prestige, Random House. So what happened?

Li, a 31-year old native Chinese, first came to the United States in 1996. She could read in English – newspapers, some novels maybe – but she could neither speak nor write with confidence. In the Spring of 1997, however, she took a community writing class with a teacher who encouraged her so much that Li began to write in her spare time. She had never written seriously, even in her native Chinese, “except for journal writing,” she says, although she quickly adds, “but it was not writing at all. It was young people’s playing around with flowery language.” Her nascent English was incapable of such floweriness, and because of her lack of writing fiction in Chinese, Li soon found herself processing everything in English instead of translating back into her native tongue.

Li soon saw that she was dedicating more of her time and her mind to writing than Immunology. “Had I not come to Iowa City,” she says, “I would never have become a writer. Wouldn’t have thought of it at all.” But once the thought took seed, Li left Immunology with a Master’s, and decided to work for a couple of years, thinking this would allow her to write in the evenings. The arrival of a son, however, made Li realize that she couldn’t possibly balance motherhood and a full-time job and still find time to write. And since she was here at The University of Iowa, she decided to apply to not just one but two sterling writing programs: the MFA in Nonfiction, and that in Creative Writing. And she was promptly accepted to both.

With curricular requirements, teaching responsibilities, and a young son, one wonders when Li can possibly find time to write. Most important to her is that her son be happy -- “I want very much to be a good mother first,” she says. “So I spend most of my evening playing with him, and work in the middle of the night between 12 and 4.” Li’s commitment to all aspects of her life, professional and personal, is an admirable lesson to all. With such determination, and such selflessness, it is little wonder that she has risen above that crowd.

David Hamilton, director of the program in Nonfiction and editor of the Iowa Review, has nothing but praise for Li, lauding “warmth, a kind of tenderness for her characters whom she never treats meanly,” and “an unusual strength of abstract vision.” It was these qualities, among others, that attracted the eagle-eyed editors of magazines as celebrated as the Paris Review, the Gettysburg Review and, of course, the New Yorker. How did that feel? “I was just very happy about it,” grins Li. The New Yorker also accepted a nonfiction piece that appeared in X 2004. “I also had a lot of fun writing that essay,” she says, with refreshing honesty and a total lack of ego.

Perhaps it is because Li’s writing reflects her self, her many characters from each walk of life representing the many roles she has to play, that it is so likeable. Her forthcoming book of short stories has characters from every age group, nationality and sexual persuasion, what she calls “a little bit of everything so that it could be a book about life.” The novel will come later, and will focus on a small Chinese community in the 1970s; both will be published by Random House.

Having just graduated, Yiyun Li plans to continue her creative work. “More novels hopefully,” she says. “Or some translation work maybe. Or some nonfiction project. Another baby I hope!” Li is showing no signs of slowing down, but Iowa City residents would do well to try and see her read while they can. And watch out for her name in the future, for Yiyun Li will surely soon be in bright lights.

Links of interest

• What Has That to Do with Me?
  The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2003
   
• News release from Mills College