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"  &amp;quot;Hanfeng had returned from the States a month earlier. He had told his former colleagues in San Francisco about his intention to settle down in China, and they had joked about moving with him and becoming the forty-niners of the new gold rush. He went along with the joke, making up ambitious business plans that he knew he would not carry out.&amp;quot; Yiyun Li&amp;#039;s delectable new collection, Gold Boy,Emerald Girl (Random House), brings us nine subtle and assured stories. As in her \u00ADprevious works, A \u00ADThousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, Li\u2014who studied \u00ADmedicine \u00ADbefore she began to write\u00AD\u2014finds the pulse points in the lives of her \u00ADChinese and Chinese-\u00ADAmerican characters and renders her findings with empathy and \u00ADexactitude. In the lead-off tale, the near-novella-length &amp;quot;Kindness,&amp;quot; a never-married math teacher living near \u00ADBeijing reminisces about her service in the \u00ADPeople&amp;#039;s Liberation Army two \u00ADdecades earlier, forging connec\u00ADtions to her childhood and to the present, where, she admits, &amp;quot;I have no hobby that makes me leave my flat during my spare time. I do not own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a cen\u00ADtury older than I.&amp;quot; Books, and the stories they hold, are &amp;quot;more real than our own, because, after all, we, the \u00ADinadequate \u00ADmakers of our own lives, [are] no match for the masters who had written those tales for us.&amp;quot; Such passages reveal Li&amp;#039;s striking ability to move from her characters&amp;#039; mundane routines to the soaring truths that bind them all to the \u00ADmysterious, on\u00ADgoing exigencies of life and death. &amp;quot;He was raised by his mother alone,&amp;quot; the title story begins, &amp;quot;as she was by her father.&amp;quot; And thereby hangs the frame for the bright-dark tale of Siyu and \u00ADHanfeng, who are set up on a date by Hanfeng&amp;#039;s mother, a \u00ADretired zoology professor who missed &amp;quot;not the \u00ADstudents...but the white skulls of mammals and birds on her office shelves...and the fact that she could mask her \u00ADindifference to the human species with her devotion to animals.&amp;quot; With serpentine beauty, Li&amp;#039;s stories wind around the wreckage of multiple marriages, lonely only children, and old men \u00ADwedding women 30 years younger than them. From these seminal situations, Li&amp;#039;s \u00ADcharacters, and perhaps her \u00ADreaders, emerge a bit \u00ADsadder\u2014and that much wiser. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a11363/book-release-yiyun-lis-gold-boy-emerald-girl-472926/>