A thousand years of good prayers

Starred Review. A beautifully executed debut collection of 10 stories explores the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on modern Chinese, both in China and America. ˝Extra˝ portrays the grim plight of Granny Lin, an elderly widow without a pension, whose job as a maid at a boarding school outside Beijing leads to a surprising friendship with one of her young charges, Kang. Li deftly weaves a political message into her human portraits: young Kang, the son of a powerful man and his now ˝disfavored˝ first wife, is an ˝extra˝—that is, as useless in the new society as Granny Lin has become. A hollowed-out recluse in the collective apartment block of ˝Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way,˝ Mr. Pang—once denounced by his work colleagues as being ˝a dog son of the evil landlord class˝—still appears daily at a job where he is no longer even paid, and spends his home life counting grains of rice on his chopsticks. Even the charmed fatherless boy of ˝Immortality,˝ his face so like Chairman Mao’s that he’s chosen to be the dictator’s impersonator after Mao’s death, falls from favor eventually, ending his days as a self-castrated parasite. These are powerful stories that encapsulate tidily epic grief and longing.