A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
I have been trying to finish Clay Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life because Mike from Floodgate raved about it. But it has not been sinking in. Sometimes I crave nonfiction, but other times I want something more emotive. Right now feels like the latter. I had my wisdom teeth removed this morning, and A Thousand Years was the book I carted around for the past few days - on Uber rides, in waiting rooms, and on the dentist’s chair. I’ve been crying all afternoon.
Yiyun was born in 1972 , only a few years after my parents. Her stories inhabit the world I imagine that they grew up in. When I was reading, I found myself translating her vocabulary back to Chinese: zuanshi-wanglaowu (钻石王老五_),_ soft persimmons (软柿子)…I could go on. I know they are authentic sayings, but they feel like anachronisms because I have never heard them colloquially.
Most of all, I was struck by how much pain her characters were in. Death, illness, and unhappy marriages are prominent themes. My favorite stories were “Son” and “Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way.”
In “Son,” Han, a gay graduate student, comes home to his religious Chinese mother. At church, they meet two young children begging for money. The mother gives the children money on the condition that they come to church with her, insisting that “it can only benefit them.” Han, knowing that the children are employed by a parent or some minder to beg, offers to give them double the amount if they do not go to church, an offer which they accept eagerly. The boy beggar is hit by a car on that same day, an event that feels as absurd as it is tragic.
This story resonated with me because my mom preaches in the same way that Han’s mother does. Han reminds her, “Marx, your old god, says religion is the spiritual opium,” something my dad used to say constantly before he, too, converted. He points out that she hasn’t truly read the stories in the Bible, even when he has. He accuses her of being incapable of “[using her] own brain to think,” as she would defer to her husband before his death and now she defers to him. But I can sense the futility in Han’s logic. All the things that Han says are true, but in the end, one could argue that the boy dies because of his clever stubbornness. I have been thinking a lot about if I should yield to my mom’s proselytism. I don’t want to, but I also don’t want to become Han.
In “Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way,” a young girl with a nuclear physicist father 1 spends her summers away from home with a family friend. In Beijing, her family is locked away in a research compound, but in this village, she is free to roam. Her adoptive parents save her from her own precociousness, and she develops an enduring affection for them.
I think good stories are emotional journeys, and that was what reading this book felt like. I accept that I am running away.
# 💬 Quotes that stuck
“They did not invite guests to their home; after a while, they stopped having friends.”
“He pays for the two books and walks back to his room. He studies the dictator’s portrait and compares it with his own face in the mirror, still perfect from every angle. He sighs and plunges into the yellow book, devouring it like a starved man. When his erection becomes too painful, he forces himself to drop the book and pick up the red one.” - brilliant
“Every place is a good place. Only time goes wrong.”
“They had loved the stories, the bigness of the book that made their worries tiny and transient.”
“It’s not easy to shut up in America. They value you not by what’s inside you, but by what’s pouring out of your mouth,” Han says. “Yes, of course,” Han’s mother says, quickly agreeing. “But Baba would say you have to learn to listen before you open your mouth. Baba would say the more you talk, the less you gain.”
“Han knows it’s the boy. It has to be the boy, ready to deceive anyone who is willing to be deceived. The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han’s memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else’s disbelief.”
“I just laugh when the roosters finally escape his grip, fluttering their wings around in our apartment. In a few minutes my father will catch them again, and in a few hours they will fill our stomachs and then be forgotten. Life goes at small baby steps when one is young, but then it picks up speed and flies.”
“Death is not a bad joke if told the right way, yet I do not see a right way. I start to understand what Mrs. Pang said about death long ago, that one would rather see beloved ones die instead of suffering. It comforts me that she would not have to see Mr. Pang’s death, and have to listen to the jokes told by the Song boys. It comforts me that not one more scratch would have to be left on her life, and I am the only one to live with the awkward joke that Mr. Pang’s death makes.”
“If you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”