01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, October 9, 2005

BY TOM D'EVELYN
Special to The Journal

A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS: Stories, by Yiyun Li. Random House. 203 pages. $21.95.

Yiyun Li's first collection of stories confirm the cliche that everybody has a story.

Her characters, all Chinese, range from a eunuch serving an imperial family to an elderly Chinese man visiting his daughter in the United States. All of them have stories, stories that for several reasons seem truer than real ones. We believe it when the elderly Chinese man converses in Chinese with his new lady friend, who speaks only Persian.

When Yiyun Li arrived from Beijing to go to medical school in the United States in 1996, she could read English but not speak it fluently. Her first collection of stories still shows signs of her learning curve (errors of diction have been corrected between proof and finished book). Li's strength is her inventiveness as a storyteller.

"Eating such good food without working hard is a sin," we read in a story about Granny Lin, a spinster recently let go from her job without a pension.

As the story unfolds, Granny Lin, who has little sense of self, is married, widowed, becomes a maid at one of the first private schools in China, and is fired -- but not before she experiences love. On the last page she is mugged and her duffel bag stolen. But she stll has her lunch pail, where she has hid her severance pay. Above all, she now has her self-respect.

After the slow sentence-by-sentence growth of her stories, Li's endings blossom surprisingly, even shockingly.

In "Love in the Marketplace," we see the events of Tiananmen Square from a distance. Thirty-two-year old Sansan is no radical, but she invents a plan in which her boyfriend temporarily marries another girl so she can go to the United States.

Sansan says little in the story, her inner life conveyed through actions like her compulsive eating of sunflower seeds to avoid imagining her boyfriend making love to his wife. The ending is stunning -- and horrifying. Li's most powerful effects come not from the beauty of her words but from her deep sense of transcendent reality.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is not only an outstanding first book of fiction by a young writer, it is a literary event that transcends language. Li's stories express an inexpressible joy. One can only wish Yiyun Li many happy returns to her writing desk.

Tom D'Evelyn is a freelance editorial consultant in Providence.