Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories

Written by Yiyun Li

Narrated by Angela Lin, James Yaegashi, Jackie Chung and Jennifer Ikeda

Author Yiyun Li, honored as one of Granta's 21 Best Young American Novelists under age 35, continues her illustrious career with this insightful collection of short stories. With compelling visions of the scrapes and unpleasant situations in which people find themselves, Li's works trigger emotional responses of all types-whether through a tale of unrequited love, an unburdening of guilt, or something else entirely. These heartrending stories are certain to strike a chord with listeners as they recognize aspects of their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449808778

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the winner of the 2026 Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

[curious_squid · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Short stories about lonely people. A bit depressing.

[lindap69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a bit depressing for this time of year but the writing is excellent and kept me in the book

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Finest short story collection of the year. Really stellar.

[mawls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The short stories were sad stories which were very well written.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I almost put down this book after reading the first story, a long (81-page) and rather dry reminiscence of a woman's time in the Chinese army, spurred by the death notice of her company officer. It was salvaged by her parallel memories of a local professor who befriended her and introduced her to Dickens and Hardy and told her the truth about her own background, so, fortunately, I kept reading.

Yiyun Li is a writer with a delicate touch and a poetic voice. The stories in this collection focus mainly on lonely people, forgotten people, people suffering devastating losses, people whose lives have been shaped more by tradition and government policy and fate than by their own needs and desires. They long for meaning: to do something significant, to marry someone to whom they will matter, to have children who will depend upon them and through whom they can live vicariously. A widow sets up a shop across from a prison, selling goods at high prices to visiting women and, in turn, listens to their stories, often offering assistance; but is it for them or more for herself? A twice-divorced woman in her fifties, now living alone in her family's childhood home, pursues the widowed neighbor on whom she once had a crush. A secretly gay son agrees to his aging mother's plans to marry him to her one-time favorite student, who has a secret of her own. An aging group of women become detectives spying on cheating spouses.

If you are looking for the funny or uplifting, you won't find it here. But Li is clearly in touch with the human heart, and these stories have a depth and beauty that will resonate long after you finish reading them.

[readingwithtea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“‘The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,’ she said. ‘When you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you. Do you understand, Moyan?’”

In this highly-acclaimed volume of short stories, Li examines what it is to be a girl in modern China; adoptive daughters, female soldiers, old spinsters and marriages of convenience all come under consideration in her spare prose, in her little vignettes which rarely touch on the plot and involve few men. Mostly, this is a collection of reflections on men’s and women’s different roles in life and how women deal with that difference.

This has been very favourably reviewed by a number of bloggers (full list of those I’ve come across at the bottom of the review) but somehow the magic didn’t reach me. I found the recurring theme of how hard women have it in life wearing (although I don’t deny its truth, certainly in certain countries) and tired of the almost stereotypical women presented – there were a number of spinsters, tired and world-weary, a group of busybody investigating old hens, a woman acting on a teenage crush… had this been written by a man I would have flung it out the window in disgust.

Li has a beautiful turn of phrase, I won’t dispute that:

“Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut”

“She had always liked to talk about her own death as if it was an event to look forward to, her secret superstition being that death, like a man, would make itself conveniently unavailable once it knew it was desired.”

“Hanfeng looked at Siyu’s face, detecting a familiar absentmindedness. His mother, too, asked him questions to which she seemed scarcely interested in knowing the answers. He wondered if this happened to women who lived by themselves.”

but her characters were often unsympathetic: in the first story, the narrator is quite heartless about a funeral

“It is a hassle to travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face strangers’ tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people.”

while her mentor bluntly reveals that the girl is adopted

“‘You do know that you are not your parents’ birth daughter, don’t you?’ She turned and faced me. ‘And you do know that no matter how nicely they treat you, they can’t do much for your education, don’t you?’”

I am very much the odd one out in perceiving this collection to be less than remarkable; I suspect it is my inexperience with the short story format. I would expect this collection to appeal to fans of an sparser writing style (others have suggested Kazuo Ishiguro as a companion author and I wholeheartedly agree) and those interested in feminist literature.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been doing a lot of short story reading lately. I’ve become fairly familiar with them as a result, but I’ll tell you this – this collection was unlike anything I’ve read yet.

Really, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl contains a novella and some short stories. The novella was interesting – but it was the latter stories that really hit me hard. The title story was the most poignant. In such a short span of pages, Yiyun Li establishes such a relationship between her reader and her characters that I found myself weeping with want and sorrow for them. Within the context of that short story so much unspoken background was clamoring for attention that I found it difficult to focus on the surface story without feeling the pain, tension, and longing between the lines.

This is a collection of beautiful writing, intriguing stories and one that I count myself lucky to own. I highly suggest reading it – especially if you are a fan of short stories and are looking for something a little different to broaden your horizons.

[kellyn_903682 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a rule I do not like short stories but I loved this collection. The settings were intriguing and the characters memorable. The understated language created a depressing atmosphere that was appropriate to the narrative.