Perfect and Complete Capsules

.

The Guardian first book prize has gone to Chinese-born author YiYun Li who has only recently learnt to write in English. This is very exciting. She won it for her short story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”. Her stories have been described as “perfect and complete capsules” and one of the judges of the prize speaks of her as “a writer of rare perceptiveness and originality”. She has already won the Frank O’Connor international short story prize and the PEN/Hemingway award. Wow!

You can read the full article in The Guardian here.

I was taken by the samples of Li’s writing that the Guardian article gives:

“Li’s stories, the longest of them 24 pages, exploit the ability of the short form to register fine shifts in everyday lives. The background events that shape the people she writes about are the imperial centuries of feudalism, Mao’s communism and cultural revolution, Tiananmen Square and the plunge into capitalism.

In their speech, new half-poetical sayings mix with old proverbs: “a dew-marriage before the sunrise” (a one-night stand); “There is always a road when you get into the mountain” [see extract]; and, poignantly, in the same story, “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor. The pain of love is the darkness following.” “

I wonder if the influence of her mother tongue, Chinese, has blurred over into her use of English thus creating these powerfully evocative images. I have been exploring the issue of identity and language and even dialect in this blog, with thought-provoking contributions from commentors and guest-bloggers. We’ve looked at how our core selves may be formed by whether we speak English or Japanese and how one might change like a chameleon depending on whether one speaks standard American or working-class / regional American. Now, these examples of Li’s writing make me curious as to how the writing of multi-lingual writers is enriched by their many tongues.

The dense, intense writing of Joseph Conrad comes to mind. He made fictions from his experiences in Malaya and the Far East and Africa, having served as a merchant seaman. He was Polish originally, I believe, but wrote in English and is studied as a major figure in English literature. The intensity and power of his writing can in part, I think, be attributed to his writing in a language that was not his mother tongue.

Do you have any personal experience of this question as a writer? Or perhaps as a reader, certain phrases from books strike you - could those idioms come from the book’s author’s multi-lingual life?

Please add a comment or email me. I will post the most relevant and interesting contributions as individual Guestblog writings for Fusion View.

You can find out more about Li at her homepage www.yiyunli.com

Photo: thanks from Li’s homepage