The story's ending is mysterious. It appears the daughter will not survive an overdose of sleeping tablets, and somehow the parents come back together on account of this. "Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, gray and thin now," the story concludes, "but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were playing in their grandparents' garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy."
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the title story, is the last one in the book. It's set in the US where an ageing immigrant tells people that back in China he worked as a rocket scientist. His recently divorced daughter has started a relationship with a Romanian, while the old man is getting to know a woman from Iran he meets in a park. It appears at first that it is the daughter whose US-style love-life is violating traditional Chinese expectations, but it transpires later that the father's former life was hardly what tradition required either.
Son deals with a man of 33 who returns to China from the US to visit his mother. He's gay, and expects to have to resist once again his mother's match-making activities. She's recently become a Christian, but to the son this is simply the replacement of one unthinking orthodoxy (her earlier Marxism) by another. Once again, though, things don't quite turn out as expected. This tale, though not quite as skillfully plotted as most of the others, nonetheless exhibits once again this author's avoidance of the predictable development.
There is much more in this fascinating collection -- an old woman who befriends an orphan boy in a school where she has been assigned as a cleaner, a boy drowned in a reservoir as the direct result of the self-importance of the authorities. Over and over again a strongly ironic attitude to Communism is blended with a humane insight into imagined individuals, the people the statistics conceal, their only lives blighted by what social commentators are all too prone to see as just the passing phases of social and political development.
Yiyun Li is a writer to watch. She could just come up with something wonderful, a novel, perhaps, in which her US and Chinese experiences and insights are woven together into something really memorable and important.
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