"After a Life" by Yiyun Li (2005)

A short story by the Winner of 2005 Frank O'Connor Prize

My Posts on Yiyun Li

I have read both of Yiyun Li's novels and several of her short stories.  Most of her fiction focuses on life in China or on recent Chinese immigrants to America.  

"After a Life" centers on two middle aged married couples in living in China.  The time is not specified but it is shortly after the Chinese stock market open and in the words of one of the characters, "The Chinese went money mad". Some  older  Chinese see this as a betrayal of the teachings of Mao.

One of the two couples have two children, one is a severly learning disabled and deformed daughter of twenty five.  When she was born the attending physician recommended she be euthanatized and kept in a jar for teaching purposes.  Care for her dominates their life.  They also have a ten year old son.  They have always kept pretty much to themselves but now the husband is retired and he has taken to going to a stock brokerage house for something to do.  He has struck up a friendship with another man.  The other man's wife is scheduled to get out of prison, doing seven years for corruption, but her husband has found another woman.  Once the woman gets out she takes to calling the wife of the first man as when her husband goes out he tells his wife he is with her husband.  Things get complicated from this point and I will leave the rest of the very well plotted story untold.  

I read this story in this very high value anthology 

From author's web page.

Biography

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.