Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Yiyun Li

The collection of stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals the every day lives of people in modern China.

Yiyun Li has written a group of stories about older people in China, the people who grew up under the strict Communist regime through the present, more capitalistic China. While the government has changed, much of the culture and traditions remains unchanged. I grew up in America with all that means in our cultural view of love, marriage, feminism, and personal freedoms. Li presents aspects of these people's lives that is counter to what I believe, yet I could have some understanding of the characters.

Things that impressed me about the culture presented:

• All adults had a career as well as a family. It is taken for granted that the older, often retired, women had jobs outside of the home just like the men.
• There is rarely more than one child in a family. I remember news reports from 20 years ago or so about combating the overpopulation in China. Obviously some impact was made. For a while I worked with a Chinese woman who had moved to the United States with her husband when they were first married. They have two sons about five years apart. She talked about the inner conflicts she and her husband had when they decided to have a second child.
• The atmosphere is quieter. Perhaps some of that is because of the people Li chooses to portray in these stories. Since they're older, often retired, and not involved in the government, their lives tend to be quieter.

The writing in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is understated. Some of the stories pick up and close without a special event that occurs during the story. The first one, "Kindness" is like that. It's the story of a single, 40-ish woman who is a teacher. The major event in her life was her mandatory year in the Chinese Army when she was 19. I found "Prison" interesting in its way of presenting a different kind of prison for these women's lives. Stories like "Sweeping Past" are poignant. It talks about a broken friendship and how blame is assigned.

Themes recur through Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Infidelity and divorce are the basis of the stories like "A Man Like Him" and "House Fire". "Number Three, Garden Row" and "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" look at odd relationships and the housing issues of Beijing. Prisons and prisoners repeat throughout, but are the predominant backdrop of "The Proprietress".

Li's stories are interesting - revealing a life style I don't know. If I were suddenly dropped in the middle of Beijing to live and had the magical power of being able to talk in and understand the language, I would still be out of place. I would be loud and bombastic in these settings - and I'm not bombastic at all.

This is an interesting book and one to show us Americans a lifestyle that is very different.