MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Yiyun
Li
Every spring Dad and I
planted vegetables in our small garden. Every autumn a
fourth-floor
granny came before our first harvest, picking up the green beans and
the
tomatoes while humming to herself. The first time I caught her, I
was
playing on our balcony. I hid behind a trunk and watched her, not
knowing
if I should yell out to stop her.
When I told my parents the
incident, they said, “That’s all right.
She doesn’t have a
garden.”
“But she is stealing from
us,” I said.
“You can’t be so rude,”
they said. “She once sewed a coat for you when you were a baby.”
The next year, the granny
came and gathered our vegetables to her basket. I hid behind the
window
curtain and watched her. My parents had told me not to go out
onto the
balcony when she was around.
“Don’t embarrass her,”
they said. “Think about the coat she sewed for you when you were
a baby.”
She came back yet another
year. “She cannot come every year to pick up our vegetable,” I
said to
Sister Jin. “She cannot do this forever even though she had sewed
a coat
for me when I was a baby.”
She did not have the
chance to do it to us forever. That fall she
died of a heart attack, a
few days before I turned ten.
Yiyun
Li grew up in
Beijing and came to the United
States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The
New Yorker,
Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and
elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Lannan
Foundation and
Whiting Foundation. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good
Prayers,
won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway
Award,
Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction;
it was
also shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize and Orange Prize for New Writers.
She was
selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American
Novelists under
35. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary
magazine, A
Public Space. She lives
in
Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at
University of California, Davis.