Yiyun Li is a novelist, essayist, and professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She is the author of five novels, the most recent being the 2022 Book of Goose, a story about the friendship between two girls growing up in France post-World War II. Her collection of essays Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You In Your Life was published in 2017. Her newest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, was published in 2023. Her fiction has won the PEN/Hemingway award and the PEN/Faulkner award.
Li was born in Beijing, China, and earned a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996, after which she immigrated to the United States to continue her studies in immunology at the University of Iowa. A change of heart during her studies pushed her into fiction. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. Li has experienced explosive success from nearly the beginning of her career. Though she was born and raised in China, she writes exclusively in English.
We meet Li on Zoom in the Advocate building to learn more about bridging nonfiction and fiction, and how she approaches craft-level improvement. Li took the meeting from her own home, having finished with the morning’s classes. She was as precise with her words when speaking as she is in her writing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Two of the recurrent themes in your work are happiness and how much of someone we can know and not know. And one of the things that speaks to us about your work in particular is just how rich, like the interiority of your characters are. We were wondering: when you come to a piece of literature, do you end up converging to these kinds of themes or finding your way toward these ideas as you write?
Writers are drawn to certain topics. Hemingway wrote the same story all his life: different settings, different character, but the same story.
Sometimes there is a musician [whose] music is very good, but it doesn't speak to you. There are good works that don't speak to you. I know I'm not interested in, for instance, over-dramatic dramas, you know, external dramas. I think writing is all about the internal landscape of characters, and that internal landscape draws me. That's what I like to read, and that's what I like to write. I write [the] same books as the books I like.
I always say a book is like a person — you give birth to a little person. This little person goes out to the world. I'd write books that I want to see making friends with books I like to read.
You told Princeton, “A character should explore the world and herself. I’m only following her.” How much of that is authorial and how much of that do you leave up to the character?
Sometimes students ask, “How do you create a character?” And sometimes you go out to give a reading, and people say, “What inspires this character?” I really oppose those questions. Only God creates the world, if you are religious. I’m not God, and I’m not religious.
What I think is, I have no right to create a character. What I do is, I discover character. These characters are all in the world; my job as a writer is to find them.
People say, what inspires you? Not quite the right word either. I really think what I do is, I make sure my job is to find my characters at the most interesting moments of their life.
When I say I find a character, I [mean I] find something in life that I don’t understand, and I write the story to understand that character by the end of the story. I cannot say I know the character a hundred per cent, but I can say I captured the presence of something interesting. I tend to say I go out to look for characters that are a little bit different than me. They're not me, but I'm curious about them. So I write until I know them so well that I can forget myself.
Do you think this mode of discovery and making sense of things you don’t understand also translates into how you approached Dear Friend?
I think it’s the same. Sometimes you say to your friend, “I don't understand you.” It means a lot of different things. Sometimes you say “I don’t understand you” but [you] actually understand exactly how she feels, but either you don’t want to acknowledge the understanding, or you don’t want to have the discussion. Or sometimes understanding is too much: you prefer not to see. Not understanding is never just not understanding; it’s also not wanting to understand, not [being] brave enough to understand, or not affording to understand.
[For example,] give me a statement, any statement.
I like potato chips.
Perfect. So this is a statement. Okay, let me put some pressure on it. Do you like all sorts of potato chips, or one special kind of potato chips? And when was the first time you realized you liked potato chips?
You can ask these questions really any time. Any single statement, even the most straightforward statement, you actually can put a little pressure on. That’s how writing to me is. Anytime I write a sentence, I have 5 questions. Do I really mean it? Is that really true? Do you really like potato chips or do you like salt?
Writing is a way for us to understand the shortcuts that we use to navigate life. On a craft level, are the flavor of these questions different when you’re writing fiction versus nonfiction?
No, they’re the same questions. One of the best editors I’ve worked with is my editor at The New Yorker. She’s worked with me on my fiction for years and years, but she also edits my nonfiction. At one point we were working on a nonfiction piece about the death of my father and the death of my child, which was very personal, very painful.
She asked this question, like, “Is this the right verb? Do we need a semicolon or colon or a period here?” And then she caught herself. She said, “Oh, I'm so sorry. I should acknowledge this is a very painful piece. It's a very private, painful piece.” But then she said, “But that is acknowledged already. What we do in editing”—actually, I think what we do in writing is the same—“is, we put a piece under anesthesia so we can dissect the sentence. We can dissect the paragraph. It's not that I don’t acknowledge your pain.”
And I said, “well, that’s exactly how I treat writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.” The moment you start writing you’re a surgeon [and] your patient is under anesthesia. Your job is to be precise, but you also have to keep yourself at a distance. What matters is the work itself.
Life has a lot of shortcuts. I use the word “placeholder.” Sometimes my students would write a sentence. I say, “Well, that’s not a sentence, that’s a placeholder sentence. The sentence is not very good. It’s a placeholder sentence. You need to get the real thing in there.”
It’s a matter of precision, almost.
It is precision. It’s also just putting a lot of pressure on yourself to say the things as close as possible to what you want to say. We can never say what we mean; we can only get an approximation.
I started writing really when I was an adult. I was a scientist before. Two things from science are very good for writing. One is, in science, you can never say, “I know something.” You can say, “I know one step.” You know you have a hypothesis. You either prove it or you disprove it. That doesn’t mean you get everything. You only get one step, but you go forward deeper and deeper. That’s exactly how I treat writing. The other thing from science is just precision.
Do you think there are any fundamental differences between writing and editing?
No, but I do think editing should be at a very specific stage of the creation of the piece. If you write a sentence you start editing right away, you’ll never get to the second sentence. You’re just doing this erasing thing again and again.
I try not to over-edit when I write. Sometimes I know the sentences are not great. Sometimes I come back the next day to edit, or I will just say, “I’m sure I will come back to fix it.” But editing and writing are not different. They’re both about just getting things as precisely as possible onto the page.
Which writers have greatly influenced you?
I tend to read older writers and dead writers. I think I’m the one who said, “for every single living writer you read, you have to read a dead author.” There’s a reason, you know, why the dead authors are still read. There’s a reason because they're good. They’re also not trendy.
When I was younger, I read a lot of Russian writers. Turgenev. Tolstoy has always been a big influence, and Chekhov. Some other writers—William Trevor, the Irish writer. And then there are other writers, for instance, Mavis Gallant.
At this point, I can say there are tons of writers that have influenced me. But then, when you are at the beginning of your career, like when I [used to] say William Trevor is my major influence, I think I meant at one point [that] I wanted to write like him. I wanted to see the world as he saw it. I have moved beyond that; I've done different books. It’s not that I’m always writing like him, but I always acknowledge him as my biggest influence.
Do you think of that as an exercise: seeing the world as another writer sees it?
That’s sort of a wish. But what I did at the beginning of my career, I would choose a William Trevor story. When William Trevor wrote a story in 1980, he was done with the story. He would not think about that story again. But that story lives on in the reader's mind—in my imagination. A story is like a person, too. At the beginning of my career, I always chose a story by him, and I would say, “I want to write a story that can have a conversation with that story.”
So many of my earlier works were written as conversation with his stories. There was one story called “Three People.” It's about a father, a daughter, and the daughter’s boyfriend. The setting is Ireland. I wrote a story also about three people. It’s a mother, a son, and the girl who was sort of courting the son, but really was courting the mother. On the surface, his story and my story were different. My story was set in China, his story was set in Ireland. In his story there was a murder, in my story there was something else. But in my head, the two stories talked to each other. It’s like music talking to each other. There are echoes. My story’s movement sort of echoes his story’s movement, and that’s what I meant by having a conversation.
Did any Chinese literature or art influence your work?
I like the Dream of the Red Chamber. I read that novel probably a thousand times in my life. When I was younger, I used to be able to memorize part of it. I always say it’s my literary DNA. I grew up with it. It doesn’t mean I write like that, but it's always in my DNA.
There was a writer named Shen Congwen; he’s important for me in my thinking about writing. He was a very particular writer in history: he was writing before Communism took over China. His writing was criticized by both the left side and the right side. So basically nobody liked him when he was a great writer. But he was not political. The Kuomintang side really did not like him, so in Taiwan they would not read him. Of course, the Communist side didn’t like him either. So he was not taught for 40 years in China, after 1949. I think he really actually made a point to be independent. There’s no ideological stance with him.
I was also interested in his career choices. He stopped writing after 1949. I think his entire career was an absence. He knew he was a good writer. He thought about those books he was going to write, because he wrote in his letters to his wife about what he would have written, except he did not write. That always makes me think about the writer’s career and a writer’s choices.
We’re curious about your decision to write in English: specifically what you can access when you write in English, because you've described writing English as a private salvation. Has your relationship with English has changed as you've written more?
I wouldn’t say my relationship with English has changed, only because it’s increasingly becoming the only language I use to write. I still think in Chinese, very minimally.
I always teach my students: fiction is about alternatives of life. You could have a life in China. You could have a life in America, but the alternative is interesting. So for me, my writing in English is a fact. But there are alternatives. If I had left China for France I might have been a French writer, so the language itself becomes less interesting. I think it’s more interesting how you think with that language. English just happened to be mine.
We’re curious about this in relation to setting, too, because Book of Goose is set in France. A lot of your other stories are set in China, and a couple are set in the U.S. What made the story of Book of Goose necessary to have been told in postwar France?
V.S. Naipaul is of Indian descent, he grew up in Trinidad, so his first 3 novels were set in that island where his father and then his father’s father grew up. Very successful early novels. At some point he said, “I could go on writing about Trinidad, I could write to the end of my career about Trinidad, but I would get bored.” And he said, “I have said enough things about Trinidad — I want to find other things to say about other worlds.” So he started to travel, and he went to India. He went to Africa. He had nothing to do with Africa except that he wanted to know Africa.
That thinking is how I look at my career. I grew up in China, I knew China very well, so at some point I had things to say about China. But then I said my things. I didn’t want to repeat the story. I also would have been bored if I kept writing the same stories.
[Writing] is about making space for your own mind. And so Book of Goose — I wanted to move to a place I did not live in. I did not live in France, and I did not live through post-World War II, and I wanted to write about that so I could learn things. You don’t want to be claustrophobic. You don't want to be always confined by one place or one subject.
We were also interested in your refusal to be labeled as a political writer. To what extent do you believe literature has a didactic commitment?
I don't believe in that at all. When I grew up in China, literature was to educate people and to cleanse people’s minds, to brainwash.
Literature was always connected to politics when I grew up. And I don't think I like that. I have political thoughts about life as a person, but those thoughts don't necessarily have to come into my writing, or they're not my characters’ thoughts, unless my characters have those thoughts, or my characters are political. There are political characters in The Vagrants, but they are the characters. They’re not me.
Stendhal has a very nice quote — he said a writer is someone with a mirror on the shoulder. You shoulder a mirror. If you turn a mirror to the sky, you know people see the sky in that mirror. If you turn the mirror to the street, people see people, streets, shops in that mirror. And that’s how he defined a novelist: you are the person with the mirror, and how you turn the angle is your decision, but you are still reflecting the world. Your work reflects the world.
You cannot say I’m going to give you a mirror, and when you see what you see in this mirror is going to change the world. No, it only reflects.
[That being said,] I’m not quite autobiographical, except the longer you write, the more porous your life becomes. So my life bleeds into work, or sometimes work bleeds into my life. I think I used to keep the boundary very clear and clean. And now I don’t care about that boundary. However the bleeding happens, it happens.
Switching tacks, what do you find exciting in students’ work?
In my intro to fiction class, I teach them how to write sentences. Everybody turns in a piece of work, and I would take one sentence from each story, and we just have a sentence workshop. All the sentences are anonymous. I would say, “Are all the words needed here? Can you cut a few words? What is the inner logic between this part of the sentence and the other part of the sentence?”
I do this every week for six, seven weeks during the semester. Students very, very quickly realize their sentences are not well written. Sentences are put there just as place holders. And then all of sudden, they realize they actually have to think before they put things down.
I always say to my students, “You know, words are like money. You need to be a little stingy. You cannot just throw the money around, right?”
I do a lot of close reading, for the same reason. My students are very smart because they go to Princeton. But then I came in and I said, “How fast can you read?” A student of mine said, “I can read 100 pages an hour.” And I said, “OK, that's a disaster because you get nothing.”
I don't read a book in one sitting. I’m an advocate for slow reading, so even if it's a great book, I only spend half an hour a day on the book. At any time, I’m reading 10 books; if I read half an hour per book, I actually read five hours. Even a very short novel will take me maybe 3 weeks to finish. There’s a reason. If you think about the writer who writes that novel, the writer spent so much time setting up everything, you get to linger with the characters. When you read fast, you just know what happens, that’s it. You’re not paying attention. So I read very slowly, so I can pay a lot of attention to different things.
So I train them. I use Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. One chapter a week. You really have to read line by line, word by word. And we do a very detailed reading journal. And that's when they realize when you read slowly, you get different things. You really are looking at the sentence by sentence. How, why this adjective, not the other adjective. Why there’s a repetition in the sentence. I think those are the things that a writer needs to train from early on. If you are a musician, you don’t start music by playing a long piece. When you learn painting, you don't start painting a big painting. You start with line, start with color, and then you copy. You copy Monet, copy van Gogh, you copy these masterpieces, and then you can create. I think people forget in writing [that] we should do the same thing.
In teaching and in your own practice, how do you think about balancing the larger things in fiction, like plot and character, and with the smaller things, like sentence and line work?
Many of those things come with experience. I was talking to my students today, and I said, “One thing I cannot teach you is patience.” If I look at myself at twenty, I probably was impatient with a lot of things. You want to get there. You want to go fast.
You can write a good sentence. You can write a good paragraph. How do you write a 20-page story? The same thing as you when you learn painting. You did your lines and then copy a painting — you copy a story.
I do this copy cat exercise at an MFA program I used to teach at. I would ask the students to choose a story and [tell them to] copycat the story. Same setting, same kind of characters, a little different.
I'll give you an example. There is a Mavis Gallant story called “When We Were Nearly Young.” The story is about 4 characters when they were young they were doing things. My student, a grad student, wrote a story called “When We Were Almost Arabs.” Four Arab-American characters, the same age, the same setting. At some point, when we workshopped her story with the original story, her story stopped making sense, which meant she was copycatting and she did not catch up with Mavis Gallant. She fell behind.
If you’re running a marathon, you have a pacer. You need to run with the pacer. I think the same thing with copycatting stories: you are using the story as a pacer for yourself. I did [the copycatting] in my career only once, and then I knew exactly how to write stories.
So that’s related to putting your story in conversation with another?
No, even before that. So much more direct. It’s not plagiarizing, it’s just for exercise. For example, tell me one story you really like that recently you read.
“Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le.
Nam and I went to school together. And I was in that story. The narrator was fishing, and the father came to visit. And at one point the narrator said, There’s a Chinese writer who’s writing in English and got to a book deal, and then there was a Peruvian writer writing in English, that’s my friend Daniel Alarcón, and there’s a Russian writer writing in English, that’s my friend Sana Krasikov. We all went to school together. Well, we were a little upset about Nam putting us in.
What??
I’m joking. But if you like that story, you say, I’m going to write a story about a narrator, you know, with a mother visiting. (His is a father visiting.) You might say, I’m going to write a girl who is an aspiring writer, the mother was visiting — she might not be fishing, she might be doing something else. Set the pace in the dialogue and everything just matching. And see, you can learn a lot from that.
Now for our fun section. Soup or solid food?
Did you say soup or solid food? Are you asking me to choose one? Soup. It's cold. In winter I like to have soup.
Morning or night?
Morning. Before the sun rises.
You do write in twilight hours. Walking or driving?
Walking. I hate driving.
2025