Gold Boy Emerald Girl

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010) is Chinese-American author Yiyun Li’s highly-acclaimed collection of short stories. Though Li’s background is in immunology and she immigrated to the United States to study medicine in 1996, she changed her studies to attend the famed Iowa Writers Workshop for an MFA. Amazingly, her very first short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, not only won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, it also won the coveted PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as many other accolades. Li then followed this breakout success with 2009’s The Vagrants, a novel that continued her meteoric rise in the literary world. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl follows on the heels of her earlier successes. The stories are told in lyrical, measured prose, with themes that include history, politics, folklore, loneliness, and struggle, all viewed through Li’s expert grasp of what it means to be human.

As a critic for NPR surmises, the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl “often focus with great empathy on older generations who survived the chaos and personal disruptions of the Cultural Revolution.” In “Kindness,” for example, one of the subplots revolves around the female protagonist’s parents. The secrets her parents harbor from their past are the very obstacles that have led to a secluded life for the protagonist.

Other stories address contemporary issues in China. “Number Three, Garden Road,” for instance, places a love story in the context of a booming real estate market brought about by privately-owned housing in places like Beijing.



“House Fire” is a story about a group of driven women in their 50s and 60s who form a detective agency of sorts. Though they expose husbands who cheat on their wives, the six women are flabbergasted when they receive their first male client, a man who believes his father is sleeping with his wife. “The Proprietress” is another story with a twist. In it, a reporter interviews a woman who has petitioned the court for a peculiar case of rights. She wants a child by her husband, who is due to be executed.

“Prison” is the tale of Yilan and Luo, a hardworking couple whose sixteen-year-old daughter, Jade, dies in a car accident. They have spent their lives sacrificing so that Jade might have a better life. To ease the pain, they decide to adopt a daughter in China, but the decision leads to startling consequences.

In “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” a professor attempts to set her middle-age son up with a companion of hers, while in “A Man Like Him,” two men become fast friends: one of them is a lifelong bachelor and the other has been unjustly accused of imprudence.



Many critics note that the success of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is due to Li’s careful crafting of characters. The settings can in fact be anywhere, East or West, but the attention to detail and each character’s careful introspection are what make Li’s stories in this collection resonate with readers.