Words do not always just tell a story, even when they may appear to. They may, at times, not tell a story at all but offer reflections on life—and death, form concrete shapes of abstractions, dismantle beliefs and long-held certainties and cause one to doubt one’s very existence—why, the very idea of this universe itself. And in doing so, they tell stories…
Yiyun Li’s stories carry this often ephemeral, often substantially realistic quality within them; they wrap up the characters and their lives in the mists of introspection and recollection as well as the light of realization in moments of utter clarity; events and their aftermath cloud and illuminate by turns, the lives and perspectives of the people in the stories and those around them. That life is not a series of grand and dramatic incidents is brought out starkly in these stories where even the dramatic and the catastrophic can recede into the background of a life that is just led, or dare one say, a life that leads itself of its own volition or so it sometimes seems.