Short stories by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Listing 13 stories.
A middle-aged Asian-American woman uses silence to her advantage in navigating family dynamics and understanding the absence of love in her life.
An aging couple living in post-Mao Beijing hide their disabled daughter from the world, and help a man conceal his affair as their own marriage is eroded by a secret.
A young female aspiring writer goes to a salon and learns about the hair stylist's tragic love story. The hairstylist begs her to write the story, but the writer feels she doesn't have the skills to write such an unbelievable love story and feels jealousy toward the hair stylist.
A young Chinese woman has just been divorced by her husband and wonders what her next stage in life will be. However, her dark past makes her wonder if her life is worth living, until she meets an older gentleman.
In modern-day China, a man previously accused of being a pedophile sets out to meet and provide support for a man whose daughter has publicly accused him of being an adulterer.
A nanny for newborns takes care of a mother with postpartum depression and her child. Against her own rules, she finds herself getting attached to the baby.
An aging single woman's landlord has promised to butcher her beloved pet pig if she doesn't sell it in time, and her deadline is rapidly approaching.
Two longtime friends move in together during the COVID pandemic. When one friend's daughter starts to confide in the other friend, the mother becomes jealous.
A 62-year-old man has moved back to Oakland. After a confrontation with his neighbors about his aggressive dog, he reflects on his arrival to the neighborhood years ago, when his mother left him behind.
A mother struggles to understand her autistic son as she grapples with her own self-doubt.