Radio Free Asia & the Asia Society present award-winning author
Yiyun Li, who will discuss her new novel The Vagrants.
Date: February 18th
Time: 6:40 - 8:15 pm
Location: Radio Free Asia, 2025 M Street, NW,
Washington, DC 20036. Ground-floor conference center.
Cost: Asia Society members and RFA staff $5, nonmembers $10. Please
RSVP at https://secure.acceptiva.com/?cst=375965
RSVP deadline: noon, Tuesday, February 17th.
Set in China in the late 1970s and inspired by author Yiyun Li's
own experiences, The Vagrants is a deeply imaginative, beautifully
realized story of life in the provincial city of Muddy River.
"Magnificent. . . . Li records these events dispassionately
and with such a magisterial sense of direction that the reader can't help being
drawn into the novel, like a sleeper trapped in an anxiety dream."
- Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
A young woman from Muddy River, Gu Shan, always a bold spirit
and a former follower of the late Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in
communism. A political prisoner, she is to be executed for her
dissention. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the superstitious
custom of burning her only child's clothing for the journey to the next world,
is about to make another bold decision. Her father, who has already buried
his rebellious daughter in his mind and heart, begins to retreat into memories
of the past. Neither can imagine that their daughter's execution will
have profound and far-reaching effects on other people, in their town, and in
Beijing beyond.
Yiyun Li is a winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short
Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and the Guardian First Book
Award. She grew up in Beijing and attended Peking University. She came to
the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years
later. After receiving a master's degree in immunology from the University of
Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received an MFA. The
author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li was selected for a
Whiting Award and named by Granta as one of best young American
novelists. Yiyun Li teaches at the University of California, Davis and lives in
Oakland, California.
Sarah Jackson-Han, Media Relations Director at Radio Free Asia
and formerly with NPR and Agence France-Presse, will moderate the discussion.
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Sarah Jackson-Han
Director, Media Relations
Radio Free Asia (RFA)
jacksonhans@rfa.org
202 530 7774 w
202 907 4613 m