A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. By Yiyun Li. New York: Random House, 2006. Pp. 205. $13.95 paperback.

“Marx didn’t teach you bigamy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to have a concubine,” argues a woman to her adulterous, would-be polygamous husband in Yiyun Li’s short story, “After a Life.”

Li’s award-winning collection of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, proposes that the bedroom is not a refuge from political ideology, and that one’s everyday existence is consistently determined by actual political conditions and social and economic constraints, as well as by abstract notions of fate. While bedrooms may not feature in each of the stories, the stories convey the sense that one’s home or personal life always exists under the watchful presence of a larger community or governmental power.

As with the nonfiction pieces that Li has published, these stories provide a fond if bittersweet slice of life in contemporary China and offer glimpses of Chinese impressions of America. Here, America is a powerful trope, not just a geographical setting. It is not always a desirable land of plenty; instead it is the recipient of complex projections by characters who may refuse to simply idealize it. Similarly, China is more than a backward, fallen civilization, but has different nuances in each story. China and America themselves are both multidimensional characters. Thus the simple, Orientalist binary of China as the site of evil, and America as the site of good, refreshingly does not make an appearance in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Li’s short stories have received much well-deserved praise for their superb use of language. However, perhaps a somewhat off-base appraisal comes from O: The Oprah Magazine, when its reviewer states that the stories “. . . transcend history and geography, and are universal, timeless, and endlessly mysterious.” The domestic narratives that are so well-crafted in this collection are set in very specific contexts, with perceptible back stories of Chinese politics. Although this work is not necessarily overtly political, the invented worlds of these characters are very much dependent on external forces that include governmental policies and an identifiable historical moment. For example, the killing of sparrows in the story, “Immortality,” is an incident reminiscent of a known policy instituted in China during the Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao’s reign. This bird-killing policy is commonly used as an example of the disastrous effects of agricultural policies ordered during the Cultural Revolution. So, such a story would only be endlessly mysterious to a reader who has no access to Chinese history, and it would only transcend history and geography, and become timeless if one didn’t realize that it had happened in reality, in China.

Of course it is accurate to note that presumably “universal” themes regarding human behavior and interpersonal relationships are evident in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Such themes as a quest for intimacy, the dynamics between a parent and a child, a desire to find a measure of contentment in life, questions regarding the workings of evil, and ways of determining moral behavior, are important in this book. At the same time, all these subjects are informed by political dogma, as the angry wife of the man who wants to commit bigamy with a “concubine” demonstrates. In their exchange of harsh words, the non-monogamous husband does not claim that having a concubine is a Chinese tradition but instead tries to argue that it is a revolutionary idea. The wife’s citation of Marx and Mao meanwhile shows how non-universal politics dictate personal relationships.

Moreover, although one might say that Li’s stories are “universal” despite recognizable details that reveal, for example, historical specificity, it seems more reasonable to appreciate how this specificity augments these stories in an unusually organic manner. Historical and other details are not in these stories simply for their own sake or to add spice. These narratives include a keen awareness of the visual and the social, and this awareness is what brings these stories to life. Furthermore, must we consider a literary work to have a “universal” appeal in order to find it valuable? Let us answer: no. Specificity is a positive trait, especially when just enough details appear to provide and speak to a familiarity with, say, a metal lunchbox typical of a certain time in China. In “Extra,” the first story of the collection, this important object performs in a narrative twist and also serves as a possible inside joke regarding the iron rice bowl, a well-used metaphor for the promise of a lifetime of sufficiency from a Communist economy.

But why engage with a review from The Oprah Magazine, a source that one might expect to be less than intellectually substantial? Because such a reception is not unusual, and because it is used to help market the book. Furthermore, if we violate the precept and judge the book’s cover, we can better understand the book’s mainstream marketing aimed at the U.S. consumer. The American edition of the book presents a photograph of white fans arranged against a black background, with the title in red lettering. One might say this is rather cliché, the red letters hearkening to the ink of the chop, and the fans providing an “Oriental” touch. In contrast, the British edition of the book depicts a girl, dressed in what might be a high school uniform, straddling a wall and facing away from the viewer, gazing at a metropolis that has grown out of an architectural mélange. The paperback edition also has red lettering, but it is scrawled in a hand-written style with more reference to graffiti than chop suey, restaurants of the Chinese diaspora, or the mark of a seal. It’s not hard to guess that the designer of the American edition did not read the book, while the designer of the British edition has successfully captured an appropriate visual translation of these stories. Although the stories’ narrative voice is not always gendered female, the physical position of being astride a border speaks volumes, while the figure’s gaze toward a not too distant, non-Orientalized city illustrates the work of the book’s narrators.

The author and the narrators here employ various storytelling techniques, yet share a carefully measured cadence and tone. Characters frequently rely upon idiomatic phrases throughout the collection. One might say that these idioms exude an aura of authenticity; however, another way to consider them is not only as proof of the writer’s insider knowledge, but as evidence of how the characters are confined by language. Common sayings function as miniature master narratives, that is, to help enforce the status quo by conveying beliefs in easily comprehensible and consumable expressions. The characters’ reliance on common saws bespeaks their adherence to assumed norms. A wonderful example of a clash that is deeper than a simple conflict between tradition and modernity appears in “Extra,” when “The second line of Toyota’s commercial slips out before Granny realizes it.” Global capitalism has affected the colloquialisms of this Chinese subject, creating a hybrid form of speech and also enacting the insidiousness of economic change.

This hybridity occurs in a different form when one of the Song brothers in “Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way,” jokes that a neighbor’s orchids are “at most Japanese parts, Chinese assembled,” using a common phrase of the market to produce a clever remark. This character’s inventiveness with language allows him to question a system of belief that values Japanese goods. Such a play on words allows for the possibility of rejecting norms or ideologies that are supported by language. Yet it also demonstrates the invasive nature of transnational consumerism. We can see how a reformulated socialism is transforming the old when phrases of a global marketplace are interspersed with oft-repeated political slogans and apparently long-established folk sayings. A polyvocality has come into being.

A multiplicity of voices also includes what is left unsaid. The narrator of “Son” bluntly states, “Han is gay.” However, this outspokenness is not a constant. The potential dangers of speech are manifest in the story “Immortality,” when a father dies, and “What gets him killed is his comment about heroes and sows.” This story at times reads as a parable of no specific nation, and yet enough markers are laid out that the fact that the name of Chairman Mao remains unmentioned is noticeable. “Of course we never call him the dictator. We call him Our Father, Our Savior, the North Star of Our Lives, the Never Falling Sun of Our Era,” the narrator tells us.

For some readers, this book may seem to be overflowing with exotica, with its tales of eunuchs, cross-dressing actors, and unfamiliar sayings; nevertheless, certain narrative gestures help to rein in this kind of undisciplined reading. For example, the narrator of “Persimmons” is part of a collective “we” who is recounting the tragic death of a child, and the narrator of “Immortality,” who connects the impersonator of the unnamed leader to a long line of castrated men does so as a member of a communal “we.” This use of the first-person plural creates the possibility that readers might see that this “we” is a group and not an isolated individual or a bizarre group of individuals, and thus avoid a perception of these characters as alien others.

In an article written for Time magazine, Li stresses that, “Today, with China emerging as a more global power economically and diplomatically, Americans need to learn for the first time how Chinese view the world.” Although the astute reader will not view any text as a definitive ethnography, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is certainly an excellent place to start learning about how imaginary yet true-to-life characters living in a fictive but credible China might describe their realities.