Yiyun Li’s golden trove of emerald gems
Loneliness beyond words, pain beyond understanding, sadness beyond control. Their “beyond-ness” is what makes them challenging to write and to read. And yet, in her short story collection titled Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li was able to reveal lonely characters in her own words and made them too skin-prickly real, fill the stories with seas of painful experiences for readers to dive in and discover understanding in their depths, and describe the human condition called sadness so acutely one can almost taste it at the tip of one’s tongue, grasp it, and then, perhaps, contain it.
This was my experience within and after reading Gold Boy,
Emerald Girl in January, a tearjerker start to my reading experience this
year, a serious deviation in my plan to take it easy and, hence, read
subjectively easy-to-read books. If anything, the book made me feel too much,
from an Asian perspective while living in a country heavily influenced by the
Chinese, to the point that I physically and strongly set it aside once I got to
the middle of the third short story titled Prison. Then I stopped for a
few days, almost ready to give it up. What more can there possibly be? What
more can I possibly feel? I already read some sad short stories by Gilda Cordero-Fernando or those found in Manila Noir. But
like a person with a tiny bothersome splinter inside a finger that needs to be
removed in order to feel relieved, I returned to Li’s stories with a heavy
heart and finished them in the same state.
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is, for me, like a crazy love
song. I found a slow, long introduction I swayed to in the first story, Kindness,
which goes against the principle that no man is an island by showing a
character who grows up as a lone island-lone and very lonely. In A Man
Like Him, another lonely character tries to share a common ground with
another lonely man but to no avail. I thought the story, Prison,
is the crescendo of the entire song, this collection of nine short stories, but
the others displayed their own firm beat, their own reflections of loneliness.
Prison shows how far a mother will and can do for her
child. The Proprietress, a widow, finds her own kind of
controlled comfort from the strays of women she houses within her arms. House
Fire bands together grandmothers with their own sets of worries to face
and solve other couples’ adultery issues. Number Three, Garden Road
can be considered a unique love story that poses the striking thought on much
space and how many people does one really need in his/her old age. Sweeping
Past tells how fragile friendships can be and how easily they can be
broken in times of family tragedies. Souvenir reminds people not
to easily judge other people because one doesn’t truly know what the other is
going through.
The last short story, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,
is a singular coming together of three individuals, each lonely in their own
ways-either
caused by sexual preference, old age, or family circumstances. Its last
sentence described it well and all other stories in the collection: “They were
lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another
less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate
their loneliness.”
My rating: 5/5
Reading Challenge: #DealMeIn2020 (Card: ♥2)
(Photo and text by Nancy Cudis-Ucag. All Rights Reserved.)
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