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- [00:01]
Deborah Treisman
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear A Small Flame by Yiyun Lee, which appeared in the New Yorker in May of 2017.
- [00:51]
Brian Washington
She spoke English better than anyone. She had studied with a tutor since she was seven, something unheard of among her schoolmates in Beijing in 1985. What Bella had wanted to play instead of Red Riding Hood or Cinderella was the Little Match Girl.
- [01:09]
Deborah Treisman
The story was chosen by Brian Washington, who's the author of four books of fiction, including the novels Family Meal and Palaver, which came out last year and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hi, Brian.
- [01:21]
Brian Washington
Hi, Deborah. How are you?
- [01:23]
Deborah Treisman
I'm fine. Thank you for joining from Tokyo.
- [01:25]
Brian Washington
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
- [01:27]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Not this hour.
- [01:28]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, we're at very different hours, but we're making it work. How did you first come to Yi and Lee's writing?
- [01:35]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I actually first came to it through the New Yorker, to be quite honest. When I was in undergrad, I would spend a lot of time in the stacks, and the university that I attended, they had a pretty extensive backlog of periodicals, and there was an entire section dedicated to the New Yorker that was separated a little bit innocuously by author. So I was in a somewhat unique position in that I immediately had access to much of the rest of her work that she published around that time. So it was a really useful moment narratively, of someone who is trying to work out a sense of style and taste concurrently to be in proximity and to have access to an author whose sense of structure and whose sense of narrative and whose sense of pacing was so distinctly unlike much of what I had read prior to approaching her work.
- [02:43]
Deborah Treisman
How do you feel that she differs from most other story writers?
- [02:48]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
As someone who just personally is a little bit obsessed with structure at the word level, at the beat level, it's striking to read someone and to know the very first graphs that they too are not only as at least concerned with the pace of one line of dialogue in proximity to the next line of description or the placement of a seemingly innocuous gesture that ultimately ends up revealing the entirety of a character's progression or a character's lack thereof. To see the narratives in which Ian has chosen to contract certain tactics or certain decisions very intentionally at various moments across the story, only to collapse them later on, or to engage in the inverse and have it all make structural sense, but also exist in such a way that you could really just read the story without being clued into any of that. And it'll still be a phenomenal story. I think there are not so many people in the English language right now.
- [04:04]
Brian Washington
Who are able to do both.
- [04:06]
Deborah Treisman
Right. And especially impressive since it was not her first language. Yes, you very quickly decided on A Small Flame for the podcast today. What is it about this story that stands out?
- [04:18]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah, my understanding is that it was a little bit contentious when it was first published. My understanding is that there were more than a few people who were like, what is going on when it was first published? And what was fascinating to me was that when I first read it, which was I think maybe a year or two after it was published, like early 2019, it just made sense to me. There was not a moment of ambiguity in regards to the structural choices. There are, I think, just only a handful of narratives that I've been privy to written in the English language, and most of them are written by Yiyun Li, where I just read them and they make narrative sense, they make emotional sense. Every decision that is made is just so fine tuned that I can just exist in the story whilst being privy to the thoughtfulness that's required in order to craft it at the level that it exists.
- [05:21]
Deborah Treisman
That's wonderful. You get to turn off your editor's brain. Yes, I love that sensation. Well, we will talk some more after the reading. And now here's Brian Washington reading A Small Flame by Yiyun Li.
- [05:36]
Brian Washington
A Small Flame A girl no older than 10 accosted Bella and Peter as they left the restaurant famous for its pecking duck. Adrian, Peter's boyfriend, was lagging behind, practicing his Mandarin one last time before the end of their trip. By Rose. The girl said to Peter in English, for your girlfriend. Thank you, my dear. Peter said, but she's not my girlfriend. The girl did not understand English. She prompted him again with the memorized line.
- [06:08]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Quiet.
- [06:09]
Brian Washington
Bella said in Mandarin, he's not my boyfriend. How can it be, sister? He's handsome and you're pretty. Sister, I'm old enough to be your aunt. Then tell my uncle to buy a rose for you, the girl said, gesturing toward the cardboard sign she wore like a bib. 10 RMB, it said, with crudely drawn flowers surrounding the price. Peter shook his head and stuck both hands determinedly into his jacket pockets. Listen, I'll give you the money for a rose and you leave us alone, bella said. No, the girl said. You have to buy one. I can't go home until I sell them all. Bella counted out 300 RMB. Enough? She asked. The girl surrendered the entire bouquet and Bella tossed it into the cypress shrubs by the restaurant's entrance, well groomed and fenced in. Now, she said. Home you go. The girl put the money away carefully and then, standing on tiptoe, tried to reach the flowers. Adrian, who had just come out of the restaurant, jumped over the fence and retrieved the bouquet for the girl. She vanished into the darkness, a swift and purposeful minnow. The April night was cool but not clear, the smog bringing tears to Bella's eyes. What's wrong? Adrian asked. You owe me 300 yuan, Bella said. Adrien exchanged a look with Peter, and Bella knew they were speaking to each other in that language which lovers stupidly.
- [07:40]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Think of as their own.
- [07:42]
Brian Washington
She was in a horrendous mood. They were telling each other she was angry over her second divorce and was taking it out on them, and they had to put up with her for only one more hour. Bella had known Peter for 25 years. They had shared a place with two other housemates in Boston when they were in law school, and for as long as they had been friends, they had been talking about visiting China together. It was one of those promises made for not keeping, similar to the solo trip to Antarctica that Bella had sometimes imagined when things were going wrong in her marriages. But China, not as far fetched as Antarctica, had become much closer when Peter started dating Adrian, a French Canadian whose great grandfather had been among the Chinese laborers who collected bodies and dug graves on the Western Front in 1918. Adrian was a writer, and he was working on a multi generational and intercontinental epic based on his family history, and during the past two weeks the three of them had toured a number of towns on the East China Sea, sifting through local archives, tracing the untraceable. We know his surname was Li, adrian had said of his great grandfather, and that his family migrated from Jiangsu to Shandong sometime during the Qing Dynasty. Do you know how many people bearing that surname live in China?
- [08:59]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Bella had said.
- [09:01]
Brian Washington
90 million. It was irksome to Bella that Adrian had created romances for his characters and himself in the places he had the remotest reason to claim Xiang Yen Hulian Marseille Ypres Boulancas Montreal, New York With a novelistic certainty, this blue eyed, pale skinned man and his Chinese great grandfather would be sentimentally reunited. People without genealogies, Bella thought, were like weeds, their existence of consequence to no one but weed killers. Perhaps that was why any reasonable person would try to locate a family root or two. From the roots to the flowers and the fruits, the penchant for cultivating a garden, a love affair, a family, a friendship, a made up epic, seemed to be a healthy constructive habit. But Bella was no horticulturist. At work she read legal documents and contracts and dissected them with vehemence, as if out of hatred. In the cab back to the hotel, no one spoke. Peter and Adrian said goodbye to Bella in the hallway. They were to take an early flight the next morning. So long, farewell, she replied in a sing song voice. Adieu, adieu to you and you and you, peter said. Come home soon. Bella had arranged to spend a few extra days in Beijing before flying back to New York, thinking that she would need a break after playing tour guide. Now she deplored their imminent departure. Loneliness, people might call it. Yet it was not loneliness that made her feel betrayed. Peter had been an early friend in America, made out of convenience when Bella first arrived. But heat turned out to be a rarity with a seemingly boundless memory. He could recall with precision any episode from a friend's life, and he had many friends. If Bella had to write an autobiography, what a thin, dull volume that would be. He would be her ghostwriter if she were to put her life on stage. He would be her prompter. But the ease of having her life stored in another person's memory had done little to help Bella on this trip. Peter had become the wrong accompaniment for Bella Solo. Perhaps he and Adrian felt the same way about her. What's wrong with China? Bella said now. This is still my home country. You may not be an easygoing person, peter said, but you've always been fun here in China. It's like you're stoned the wrong way. So I'm a bore. A contentious bore. It had been a mistake to combine Adrian's research with her recovery. Holiday memory lane was barely wide enough for one traveler. In the bathtub, Bella hummed to herself. I'm glad to go. I cannot tell a lie. I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly. To this day she could sing from.
- [11:57]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Beginning to end, every song from the.
- [11:58]
Brian Washington
Sound of Music, which she had to watch every Saturday afternoon for a year as a requirement for her high school English class. It had so sickened her that when the English Club discussed putting on a stage production, she threatened to quit. It was either Maria von Trapp or Bella, and her classmates had chosen her oh, English Club, the epitome of Bella's youth. Of course, she had had a different name then, but she had been Bella for the past 25 years, legalized in America. The name used for her passport, for her marriage licenses, and then for the divorce papers. Not, though carved on her parents gravestones, both stones bore her Chinese name, that of their only child. Bella had not included her first husband's name on her mother's gravestone. Her mother had given only lukewarm approval to the marriage. When Bella's father died, she was in her second marriage, already seeing cracks which she could have made an effort to mend had she cared a little more. She had been wise not to include a husband's name on either gravestone. Her parents could have been stuck for eternity with a consecutive ex sons in law, though that possibility, a discordant note that their marriage, known for its harmony, would have had to endure posthumously. Entertained Bella in the Russian novels Bella had read in college. English clubs hosted feasts and boasted of social status, whereas the English Club at her high school had merely collected a medley of students with various motivations and needs. Some wanted to have access to the only typewriters in the school and quite possibly in their lives, or to the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, among other writers, which were available in the English Club's library. Others required extra tutoring from their teacher. Ms. Chu and others chose it because, unlike the Science Club or the Mathematics Club, it was undemanding, a place to escape the heavy load of schoolwork for a few hours. Bella wanted to be near Miss Chu. There was no other reason for Bella to be in the club, which was beneath her in many ways and for which she had to tolerate the English plays they staged. She was always given the leading role. No one questioned this. She was voted the school flower by the boys, an honor given to the prettiest girl. She spoke English better than anyone. She had studied with a tutor since she was seven, something unheard of among her schoolmates in Beijing. In 1985, what Bella had wanted to play instead of Red Riding Hood or Cinderella, was the Little Match Girl. Matches. Matches. Please buy some matches.
- [14:37]
Deborah Treisman
Sir.
- [14:38]
Brian Washington
Please buy some matches. Madame. Buy a rose. Buy a rose for your girlfriend. But there had never been such a production. The story did not have many roles or many lines. Even for the Little Match Girl. It was silly to perform fairy tales when the students were already in high school. But most of her classmates did not speak enough English for more sophisticated work. Once they had ventured into the Necklace by Maupassant, and at a rehearsal Bella had watched with abhorrence the boy who was playing her insignificant husband kick open an imaginary door. Mathilde, he said, his voice reminding Bella of an inner tube hung at a bicycle repairment stand. Rubbery, greasy, intestine like Mathilde, my dear, look what I have got you. She had to open the card he handed her part of the play, but instead of an invitation to the party at the Ministry of Education, it held a love poem from the boy Dibella contaminated. She remembered the episode afterward. The basement room with its buzzing fluorescent tubes, a few chairs and curtains forming a makeshift stage, and the boy's hands clasping hers. Part of the play, too. Contaminated also were Bella's memories of high school, the place, the people, the endless years. But she was unfair. Her alma mater had received support from UNESCO and had served as a model school for foreign visitors, its cluster of marble white buildings poised like an aristocratic swan among gray alleyways and sprawling run down quadrangles. And Bella had been treated well by teachers and students alike. Once a delegation of American politicians had toured the campus, and Bella, assigned to accompany them with the headmistress, had worn her favorite dress, its lavender color matching the wisteria hanging over the pathway between the science building and the art building. The delegation did their share of praising, and the headmistress reciprocated with her share of appreciation. Bella, interpreting for the visitors, believed for a brief moment that she could have anything. All she needed was to want. But that blissful feeling was cut short by Ms. Chu, who was walking across the lawn without casting even the most perfunctory glance at the visitors or at Bella. What Bella had wanted was to be the Little Match girl, hungry, cold, forever begging and forever dying. What she was was the opposite. She had been raised in a family of stature. Her father was a diplomat, her mother an opera singer. Her maternal grandfather had been among the group of revolutionaries who established the Chinese Soviet Republic in the 1930s. The only imperfection in others eyes, more than in the family's, was that Bella was not connected to these people by blood. Her mother, whose beauty and career were not to be destroyed by childbearing, had adopted a pretty baby girl from her home province. At 2, the girl had been diagnosed, in the parlance of the day, as deaf mute and had been sent away. Not to her birth parents, Bella had learned, but with her nanny, who had received a handsome sum of money for them to settle comfortably in the countryside. Bella had come later, another baby girl whose beauty was prominent. And this truth, like the story of the deaf mute, had never been kept a secret from her. A more sentimental heart would have experienced curiosity or sympathy for the girl whom she had replaced. A more inventive mind would have seen herself as that deaf mute growing up in silence. One time, a distant cousin that Bella's grandfather had come to visit, bringing with him his granddaughter who was Bella's age. Poor relatives, Bella, 10 years old then, instantly recognized a gentler soul would have formed a kind of kinship with the girl who was wearing a gray passed down blouse. But Bella bossed the girl around, showing off her Swiss chocolates and her Japanese stationery and her dresses made of silk and taffeta and velvet, allowing the girl to touch the fabric with only one finger. Bella would have tortured the deaf mute girl similarly, except that the deaf mute, even if she had been permitted to visit, would not have understood anything Bella said to her. Perhaps Bella could have locked her in a closet. Would she have banged on the door in panic? Or would she, not knowing how to make a sound, have waited quietly until her death? Once, at a rooftop party in Key west, an old man had reminisced about an encounter years before with a boy who had been adopted to be the heir of a scion. At the dinner, he came in to greet everyone, barely three years old in a white tuxedo. I swear, no boy could have been more perfect than him. But the next year he was gone. The reason the mother decided he wouldn't do. I've never forgotten him. Imagine. For a year he was destined to be one of the richest people in the country. He didn't know, Bella said. True, the man said. Still, what a strange fate. Oh, changelings of the world. We go up and down the ladder.
- [20:04]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
In this circus called life, and we.
- [20:06]
Brian Washington
Are more entertaining than clowns, more grotesque than freaks. How dare Peter call her a bore. Bella dried herself and put on a silk robe. She uncorked a bottle of wine and thought of inviting Peter and Adrian over for a drink. But they would decline, saying they had to get up early for their flight. They might not even pick up the phone by the second glass. Bella did not have any difficulty seeing herself as the little match girl, forever begging, forever dying. Yet Ms. Chu would not notice the tiny bursting flame when Bella struck a match for her. She would Remain blind to the streak of light when Bella turned into a falling star. What on Earth had Ms. Chu become? A wife? A mother? Bella, sitting alone at breakfast the next day, wondered. Miss chu had been 27 when she was the advisor of the English Club, Bella, 16. Ms. Chu would be close to 60 now, old enough to be a mother in law. The mathematics was disorienting. Bella did not feel a moment of wistfulness about her own aging. She was the same person she had been at 6 or 16, unchanged and unchangeable. But other people, Would they stay loyal to what her memory dictated they should be? There had to be ways to find out from her school friends, or perhaps by calling her high school. But Bella hated to put herself in such a position. Whenever she traveled back to China, she needed only to announce her visit, and there would be plenty of friends and acquaintances ready to welcome her with a banquet or a tete. A tete. This was the first time she had not let the news out. She didn't want to see people exchanging knowing looks about her divorce. She counted the days she had left, a void she'd have to fill by herself. Perhaps she should change her return flight. Of course, it wasn't entirely true that Bella could always play the homecoming queen. There were people whom, if she wanted to see them, she would have to seek out. For instance, Pei Pei. They had been boarders for three years at Sunflower Childcare before going to elementary school, their beds placed side by side and in opposite directions. They had often, when the teachers were not looking, sneaked their hands through the rails and held each other's feet when they could not sleep. They had been classmates until the first year of high school, when Pei Pei discovered the man of her dreams, their geography teacher, Mr. Wu. For someone from a lesser background, it would have been called a schoolgirl crush. But the power of Pei Pei's passion matched that of her family. Bella's grandfather had political prestige, but Pei Pei's had political influence. When Pei Pei refused to accept any solution but a consummation of her love, her grandfather had to summon Mr. Wu through his secretary. Soon after that, Pepe dropped out of school and Mr. Wu stopped teaching. A Cinderella, Bella's mother commented, and Bella wondered if an unwilling Cinderella would make a wretched ending to a fairy tale. Bella had always disdained Pei Pei a little, as she knew others might disdain her. But between Pei Pei and herself, there was a fundamental difference. Pepe had not left China. It had been unnecessary. She and her husband had their own fast food and hotel chains. Having made good use of their assets, his handsomeness and his ability to discern and accept what could not be changed her pedigree. Bella, despite the fact that her road had been paved more smoothly than most people's, was on her own. She had studied hard and aced college and law school. She had overcome many hurdles to establish herself. Who in America would care that her grandfather was one of the founders of the Chinese Soviet Republic? Bella's parents would have preferred that she stay in China. They would have used their connections wisely on her behalf. For that reason, Bella had decided to emigrate. What a waste, her mother said. A waste of what? Bella asked. Your good looks, her mother said. And of course, your good fortune. Bella's good looks had been given to her by the people who had conceived her. She knew nothing of them, but that they had had enough charity to not lower her into a tub of water like an unwanted kitten. Her good fortune had been given to her by her parents. To throw it away was a gesture of ingratitude. But by all means, it's your life, her mother said. We aren't parents who would interfere. Bella had not been particularly close to her mother, but by middle school she had acquired enough sophistication to please her, and they got along nicely as two women who respected each other's beauty and brains. Bella's father, indulging her in an absentminded manner, did not have any real interest in her. This Bella had understood and accepted when she was young, as she had the story of the deaf mute. Her father was the kind of melancholy man who would always be born into the wrong family, married to the wrong wife, settled in the wrong profession, and destined to die alone only after his death. Bella's mother had been dead for four years. By then had Bella wondered about her parents relationship. The best marriage, they had once explained to Bella, is one in which husband and wife treat each other as honored guests. It was possible that there had been little or even no love between them. They were two guests who had lived in their shared courteousness for so long that they had mistaken it for affection or warmth. But even two guests living together for 50 years would have some secrets between them. Perhaps Bella could have understood them intuitively had she been their blood child in her own marriages. The first had lasted 12 years. The second five, Bella had fared poorly as host to her husband guests. Your problem, peter had said after the second divorce, is that you don't take yourself seriously. I saw your eyes when you were walking down the aisle. They snickered even Though you kept your face straight with Paul? Bella asked. Both times, peter said. What do women do when they can't take themselves seriously? Bella asked. That's not a question I can answer, peter said. She wished he hadn't taken the liberty of giving her a diagnosis without offering a cure. Both her ex husbands had called her toxic. She had to respect them for that and for not wanting to stay on and be poisoned. She would have respected Pei Pei, too, if she had outgrown her obsession with Mr. Wu. Over the years, Bella had successfully maintained the right distance between Mr. Wu and herself. Too close and Pei Pei would have felt jealous, too removed. Pei Pei would have felt slighted on behalf of her husband. If only Pei Pei could have an affair, or better, divorce her husband and sent him tumbling back to the pool of commoners. But she held onto the marriage with a kind of fairy tale loyalty. What would Mr. Wu think of this passion which refused to die? Obsession that has outlived youth must be poison too. Perhaps that's what separates a lucky person from a luckless one. The lucky, like Mr. Wu, had to give up something essential in order to advance in the world. Because a person of good luck could become a person of bad luck overnight. The luckless, like Bella or the deaf mute, had no choice but to follow the path assigned to them. That their lives had turned out differently was a mere accident. Unlike the other teachers at Bella's high school who had held permanent positions, Ms. Chu had been hired on a contract that could be terminated at any time. The credential that had made Ms. Chu attractive to the school was that she had spent a year in Australia. What connection had taken her there was not known to any student. She had taught at Bella School for only two years, and after she quit, there were rumors that she had returned to Australia. Ms. Chu was not pretty. Her cheeks, too chiseled, had an unhealthy pallor, her eyebrows were constantly knitted, and her eyes had a distracted and sullen look. If anything made her stand out, it was her voice. Bella, from her experience with the students her mother had taken on as she grew older, knew that Ms. Chu's voice, had it been remedied with training, would have become unique, extraordinary even. But nobody seemed to have put any work or imagination into it, so it had an unpleasant quality, like a piece of half used sandpaper, its coarseness uneven. Ms. Chu made little effort to hide her irritation when her students functioned at any level below her expectation. Yet who other than Bella could have met her demands? It was in the English Club that Bella had first encountered Don McLean and D.H. lawrence. The music of the former was the soundtrack of Ms. Chu's mood. When she sat in a trance, even the chattiest girl or the neediest boy knew to leave her alone. Then the work of the latter, Ms. Chu read aloud to them the Rocking Horse Winner and then the Princess, and finally the Fox, which she read several times, no doubt her favorite. Sometimes, when Ms. Chu went on reading for too long, Bella's clubmates brought out worksheets in Math or physics or chemistry. Elias playing to a herd of cows masticating their own ignorance, Bella often thought soulless they were. Soullessly they treated Miss chu. Bella wanted Ms. Chu to know that she understood the indifference they both had to endure. She wanted Ms. Chu to suffer less because she was suffering with her. Yet Ms. Chu treated Bella with more sarcasm than she treated the other students. Do not act like a drunken mouse, she admonished Bella when at a rehearsal she tottered on in a pair of heels, unfit slippers for an unenthusiastic Cinderella. But at this moment, Cinderella is overwhelmed by happiness, Bella argued. Then she's an imbecile to feel that way, Ms. Chu said. And please stop widening your eyes like a 3 year old. Was there an English teacher by that name? Pepe said. I have no recollection. Your eyes could only see one teacher back then, Bella said. And your precious eyes can't put up with a grain of dust, Pepe answered. Which is why I can't keep a husband. Bella said her divorce, rather than being bad news, could be used to taunt Pepe, who had been married to the same man for too long. Even the most superficial tie could take permanent hold if it lasted for 40 years. Do you realize that only for you would I rearrange my business meetings at such short notice? Pepe had said the moment she walked into the restaurant. Do you realize no one else would count your toes hundreds of times as I did? Bella had replied. What about this teacher? Pepe asked now. Why are you looking for her? I'm not just curious what has become of her. You always fuss over this or that random person. When are you going to outgrow this childishness? Bella said. She had no idea what Pepe was talking about all the time. Pepe said. Remember when we used to take turns acting deaf and mute until the teacher's band that came at Sunflower? Bella asked. She did not remember the game. It appalled her that she had left such a sentimental episode in Pei Pei's memory. When did you learn about the Girl, I don't think it was ever a secret, pepe said. And after that game, we pretended to be each other's nanny. You said you were my Auntie sue and I was your Auntie Lan. Bella knew of the existence of Auntie Lan only from a few childhood pictures. She had stopped working for the family when Bella began boarding at Sunflower. Had she ever missed the woman who would become the only mother known to her? Had Bella been deemed flawed, as the deaf mute was before her? Bella was surprised that Pei Pei, like Peter, remembered more about her life than she herself did. Friends like them gave her permission to forget, but they also summoned memories. At unpredictable or inconvenient moments, Pepe said she would ask around about Ms. Chu. Bella was certain that Pei Pei would help her. They were each other's hostage, and no ransom could rescue them from their shared past. But mutual loyalty. Who else would remember Pei pei's despair at 15, when she held a finger to a lit match until the flames scorched her? Who else would recall the deaf mute, a reminder that Bella had been a replacement for an imperfect product? Two days later, Pei Pei texted Bella the new name that Ms. Chu was going by and the organization that she worked for. Once a teacher, now a preacher, was Pei Pei's accompanying message. Bella, who had chosen her English name the moment she landed in America, found it ridiculous that Ms. Chu needed a new Chinese name. Who did she think she was, a celebrity? Bella tapped the link for the organization, a non profit advocating for LGBT rights. The website listed Ms. Chu as the organization's co founder. There was an audio clip of an interview she had given to a media company, a list of her public appearances, and blog posts signed by her. The most recent focused on a new law against domestic violence, the first of its kind in China, which excluded protections for victims in same sex relationships. There was no picture of Ms. Chu on the website, nor did a search of her new name yield an image elsewhere. Bella wanted to see Ms. Chu's face. She wanted it to remain the same as she remembered. But seeing it altered by time would bring some vindictive pleasure, too. Faceless. Ms. Chu had denied Bella access. She considered texting Pepe. I thought your omnipotence would have arranged a dinner meeting for me by now. But what was the point of attacking Pei Pei? Bella played the audio clip. Ms. Chu's voice had not changed much, though there was something different, a fervor that had not been there before. Or perhaps it was simply liveliness. Ms. Chu discussed the grassroots effort led by her organization and some polls and interviews conducted within the LGBT community in response to the government's claim that there was no evidence of domestic violence in homosexual relationships. Why is it important to you that the law recognized domestic violence in same sex relationships? The reporter, a woman softening her tone into disingenuous understanding, asked, when members of a heterosexual relationship outside of marriage, the so called cohabiting relationship, are protected by the law while those in a same sex relationship are not. The exclusion raises questions about the legal rights we have as a community. But why is it important to you personally? Have you experienced domestic violence? Yes. Can you tell our audience more about that? Bella found the reporter's questions inane and Ms. Chu's willingness to cooperate distasteful. It was 30 years ago. I was young and I was ashamed of my relationship with another woman. In our time it was called a mental illness, defined as such in medical textbooks. I did not know anything about domestic violence either. The interview went on, giving a few more details of an inexperienced woman confusing control with love, compliance with devotion. Same old story, Bella thought, and when the conversation turned to statistics and case studies, she stopped listening. Whoever the person being interviewed was, she was not Ms. Chu of the English Club. The latter had had a heart made of polished ice, which, inviolable and immovable, had long ago absorbed what warmth could be found in Bella's blood. This stranger talking about her activism and revealing her personal life was a sham, looking for purpose and solace in the wrong place. Mistakenly, Bella, she thought she had found them in a just cause, that basement room. Bella wished she could be there now to study Ms. Chu and herself again. Had Ms. Chu, watching the falling dusk through the narrow window near the ceiling, been reliving the sordid pain another person had inflicted on her body? Had she been searching for meaning in her suffering when she listened to Dawn McClane, when she watched Bella's rehearsals with derision, or when she dismissed Bella's attentiveness with unseeing eyes? Was she refraining from doing harm? Or was she familiar with conquest and surrender, relishing her power? Those who allow themselves to be hurt in the name of love must understand better than anyone that desire to hurt. The hunter of the fox, hunted by the fox. Bella remembered falling under D.H. lawrence spell while listening to Ms. Jew, her voice almost beautiful when she herself fell under that same spell. The story should be made into a stage play. Why had that never occurred to Bella? No doubt Ms. Chu would have scoffed at her request. But Bella, who lived with a will to overwrite other people's wills would not have needed her grandfather to summon Ms. Chu through a secretary. She would have insisted to Ms. Chu that they play the two women in the story. Bella would be the unattractive and neurotic Banford. She wouldn't mind playing an unappealing role, and Ms. Chu would play the other woman, March endowed for the duration of the performance with a beauty that she had not been born with. Bella would be killed by the end. Someone always has to be in a Lawrence story. She wouldn't mind that either, because her death would leave Ms. Chu in a permanent trance. Why not, if Pepe was right that everything was a game of pretend for Bella? She could be the deaf mute, she could be the fox bewitching Ms. Chu. She could make up epic tales as Adrian did in imagining his ancestors. Adrien was still confined by geography and family. Bella had no such limits. Everything could be hers, men and women, days and nights, the stars in the sky, the eternal flame in the hands of the Little Match Girl. Make believe was her genealogy. The high school had an observatory that was open a few times a year to students outside the Science Club, and once Bella had gone there with some friends. She did not recall which stars or.
- [38:33]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Planets they were supposed to see that.
- [38:34]
Brian Washington
Night, but after the teacher had left, a boy from the Science Club, in order to impress, Bella had turned the telescope toward one of the first high rises in the city and found an uncurtained window. A man and a woman, their backs to the window, were watching a soap opera, the actress crying unabashedly. The room with the marriage in it, with the drama on screen, was pulled so close to Bella's eyes that for a moment, when the boy touched her elbow timorously, she did not bother to shake him off. She could still see the space between the man and the woman. They were sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, leaning on the armrests. She could even see the piece of crochet placed on top of the television, blue and white. Thirty years ago a television set had been a luxury that a woman dedicated to housekeeping would have decorated with fine needlework. Bella wished that the telescope had brought into her sight that night Ms. Chu and her lover instead of the insipid couple. Affection and aggression, passion and pain. Bella wished she had seen it all between the two women. But she had been too young when she met Ms. Chu, and she had arrived too late to know the deaf mute. Timing had made them the unattainable in her life and the unattainable which she could neither damage nor destroy lived on as wounds. Even now, if she called the organization and demanded to speak to Ms. Chu, what could she say? Faceless to Ms. Chu, Bella would only be a voice on the line that could be cut off at any moment. She would be the girl on the street corner, forever striking matches, forever reaching for a different world in the small flame when she turned into a falling star, Ms. Chu herself, another girl striking matches on another street corner, would not even sense the vacancy left by Bella's absence.
- [40:36]
Deborah Treisman
That was Brian Washington reading A Small Flame by Yi and Lee. The story was published in the New Yorker in May of 2017 and was included in Lee's collection, Wednesday's Child, which was published in 2023.
- [40:51]
Brian Washington
Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and think like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more.
- [41:15]
Deborah Treisman
That's all on the New Yorker Radio.
- [41:16]
Brian Washington
Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [41:22]
Deborah Treisman
So Brian, the story opens with this scene of the young girl selling roses as Bella and Peter come out of the restaurant and Bella finds her sort of irritating or, you know, wants to stop her sort of importuning them. So she buys all of the roses and then throws them in a bush and this little girl, instead of going home as she's told to do, retrieves them so that she can sell them for a second time. Why do you think the story begins that way?
- [41:55]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
It's so fascinating because in many ways something that I feel like I've been very fortunate to take from Yiyeon in this particular narrative is the ability to display much of who a character is, to display much of the challenges that the reader will be privy to over the course of a relatively short scene in which direct action is taking place. There's nothing a lot of exposition in this particular scene, but we see Bella as someone who exists in one way in English, as she is interacting with Peter and then interacting with Adrian. We see how Bella is interacting with the girl, and we see Bella's frustration in and with narrative in a lot of ways. We see how she exists in one set of narrative rules and how she tries to impart that on the little girl and this girl's just rejection of that narrative or this rejection of what.
- [43:17]
Brian Washington
I believe Bella thinks that she's supposed.
- [43:18]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
To be doing or how she's supposed to react, or this gratitude earned or otherwise that she's supposed to show really, I think elucidates the struggle and the turn that we are privy to from Bella as it relates to the rest of her relationships over the course of the narrative. As an opening, I just think it's just really, really masterful.
- [43:42]
Deborah Treisman
I mean, obviously the Little Match Girl is very important in the story. And this girl in some way relates to her. Though she's quite different from the Little Match Girl. And perhaps it's in that way that she sort of resists the narrative that Bella's putting on her.
- [44:00]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah, it's really fascinating, right, because it's something that I just so admire over the course of the story is that Ian, she splits time, which is not. That in itself is not terribly remarkable. Like, there are many authors who are able to like, split time over the course of a narrative, which is to say that we get this sort of present tense timeline in which Bella is wrapping up much of this trip, really, before she finds a new tangent or a new fixation, I suppose, so to speak, in Ms. Chew. And, you know, as far as page time is concerned, it's a parallel timeline. But as far as, like story time is concerned, this other timeline where we get a little bit more concretely from the narrative voice who Bella is, or rather not even who she is, I think that that is also kind of like a bit of a ruse that Ian is utilizing, but more how she came to be. More concretely how she came to be. But it's really only, I think, for me as a reader, through the incorporation of both this sort of present tense timeline as we see Bella in China behaving one way, and these prior timelines where we see her upbringing with her adoptive family, where see the formation of a person that she experienced as a much younger person that we began to like, have a sense, I think, of who Bella may be. And even that again, is sort of subverted by the end of the story. So just like having many different iterations. Whether it is this girl that we see from the outset of this idea of Little Match Girl, or this idea of a woman who is Chinese born and growing up in returning back to China, like having all of these narratives running in parallel of who Bella is supposed to be or who she could be, or even perhaps who she is at different moments is again, not something that I think the author calls attention to. Yiyun just does it. She just shows it. She allows the story to exist and live. So that by the time we come away from the narrative, I think that each of us has a pretty clear sense of who this woman is.
- [46:24]
Deborah Treisman
And I suppose. Where do you think her starting point is? I mean, we have the childhood. She's adopted, more or less as a baby. She doesn't know her biological parents. She's raised in this family of stature that doesn't care all that much about her. She's adopted because she's cute. The previous adopted baby was also cute, but then turned out to be deaf. So it was sent away. And she's put into an environment where there's not a lot of love, but there's a lot of wealth and power. And in the midst of that environment, she longs to be this homeless, barefoot little girl in the cold on a street corner trying to cell matches. So why do you think that is?
- [47:17]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I think so to maybe try to approach the question in two components, I think that her start for me, narratively, or when I began to have the inkling of an understanding of how the woman that we see in this opening scene became who she is. This connection between our introduction to her and our introduction to her upbringing was.
- [47:45]
Brian Washington
The appearance of Ms. Chu.
- [47:47]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
So much of and in Bella's upbringing following her adoption seems in many ways predetermined. Seems in many ways, at least surface level, stable. Seems and in many ways is quite different from the narrative or the idea of the Little Match Girl or the narrative or the. Of a little girl who's selling flowers on the side of the road. Ms. Chu, she still can't seem to be bothered. So her seeming disdain for her students, Ms. Chu's, her seeming indifference toward Bella that I think in this particular moment might be the closest that she's able to garner to the disdain or to the indifference in this narrative of a Little Match Girl, in this narrative of someone who has been discarded, that she has been privy to, to have this adult in her life who seemingly does not care whether she lives or dies, who seemingly does not care that she exists, who seemingly only is tolerant of her because she is on a temporary contract and she needs to be. That seems really fascinating, really enticing to Bella, which in and of itself is a little bit juvenile, that creates, I think, for me as a reader, a moment of just like, tangible humanness for Bella. And to have it appear, you know, this late in the narrative, after having seen this woman who is pretty tough at the outset in the present timeline, to see the circumstances in which she came to be, which are themselves Very tough and very specific ways. Like, to have this moment of just sort of like, abject, notice me, please. You know, please notice me is just a really fascinating turn, but also a really difficult needle to thread. If yiyun Li weren't Yi and Li, I don't think that this would have been executed in a way that it feels seamless as far as a progression is concerned, at a structural level, but also at a thematic level.
- [50:06]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to watch the young Bella, you know, her mother's not very interested in her. Her father's really kind of uninterested in her. So she doesn't have loving attention at school. She has sort of adulation. She has boys who disgust her who, you know, want to touch her or hand her love notes, but that's, again, not loving attention. And she sees Ms. Chu, and Ms. Chu also ignores her and doesn't pay attention. So I wonder, what is it, do you think, that makes getting Ms. Chu's approval so important?
- [50:48]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I think that both implicitly and explicitly, Bella is very aware that she will never gain that approval. I think that Bella knows that she has nothing to offer Ms. Chu. There's nothing that she can provide tangibly to gain her favor or to gain her attention even. There's nothing that she can provide emotionally to gain her favor, to gain her attention. There's nothing that Bella can provide structurally in order to access this woman. And I think that that is what makes her just inherently attractive to her, to have an object of desire, even if it's only emotional desire or the idea of desire or sort of like, narrative of desire, you know, like, it is unlikely that Bella, at a certain point will be, you know, the Little Match Girl. It is unlikely that Bella will find herself in moments of just sort of like, dire straits. Although even Yi seems to undercut that later with, like, this line, like, perhaps that's what separates, like, a lucky person from, like, a luckless one. The lucky, like Mr. Wu, had to give up something essential in order to advance in the world, because a person of good luck could become a person of bad luck overnight. But it doesn't really seem to me, at least as a reader, that there is a moment after her adoption where Bella is in a position to become a person of bad luck overnight. In a lot of ways, her bad luck stems from her attraction to this woman who she has nothing to offer. In just, I think, another really grand structural decision, we move from These graphs about Ms. Chu that appear seemingly suddenly as a reader in the middle of the Narrative to the first line of dialogue in the next section from Pei Pei is like, was there an English teacher by that name? I have no recollection. So that really solidifies the background nature of this woman, Ms. Chu, to seemingly everyone else in Bella's life. But even that is kind of a romantic notion, right? For there to be someone in one's life that you have a fixation toward, even if it isn't necessarily explicitly romantic or sexual, that is a really powerful thing. And I think that can also be a really dangerous. And we see a sort of the danger of creating a narrative out of someone else that doesn't belong to them. In Bella's fixation with this woman over the course of decades, over the course of, you know, the passage of countries, it's just really. I still don't know what to make of it. And I think that.
- [53:47]
Brian Washington
That.
- [53:48]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I think even that in itself is like a structural decision.
- [53:52]
Deborah Treisman
I mean, the way I read the beginning is, you know, this issue of genealogy is all important because she's there with Adrian, who's tracking down his one root in China. And she talks about how she has no roots. She has no genealogy, which makes her, in her words, a weed whose existence is of consequence to no one but weed killers. And you can feel her grasping around for some kind of root. And what she comes up with is Ms. Chew. That is the root holding her to China. In a way, yes.
- [54:28]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah. It's just Yi and Li Yi just, like, making these sort of subtle turns. Like, we're introduced to this girl on the side of the road who has a role to play as far as the narrative, the world is concerned. We see Peter, who exists in his own narrative. Right. Petyr is Adrien's boyfriend, and Adrian is Peter's boyfriend. That's how we're introduced to them. We're introduced to, you know, Bella's adoptive parents. Like they have their own narrative. We spend a good deal of time on Adrian's just sort of, like, history.
- [55:00]
Brian Washington
A French Canadian whose great grandfather had.
- [55:03]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Been among the Chinese laborers who collected bodies and dug grapes on the Western Front in 1918. And Adrian is a writer which has its own sort of narrative tangents. All these people that were introduced to over the course of. Of a narrative, like they belong to someone or they belong to a sort of narrative, at least, like they slot somewhere in a fashion that Bella seems to understand or at least is able to convince herself that she understands. And to have, you know, someone like Ms. Chu, who is. She doesn't really slot cleanly into a particular narrative, partly because of her literal inaccessibility for much of the story, but her emotional inaccessibility, as far as Bella is concerned, like to have a moment where she's asking, what on Earth had Ms. Chu become like a wife, a mother? Bella, sitting alone at breakfast the next day, wondered. It doesn't seem like Bella is wondering about the outcome of very many other people in her life. So to have this person who is just inaccessible in more ways than one, it creates distance, sure. But in that distance, I think Bella attempts to place herself, to place emotions, to place preconceptions, earned or otherwise, of who she is and how she can be and how she fits in the world in that space of just sort of unknowability, which is very human in this particular context. It's a bit sad. And it becomes sadder as the narrative progresses in, like, a mournful way, like, in a really honest way. And perhaps that's another reason that I'm just so taken by this story and that it's a very specific mournfulness that doesn't call attention to itself. Right. Like, I think if an author were to say, you know, I'm going to write a story about someone who doesn't know who she is and is looking.
- [57:23]
Brian Washington
For that person and other people, that.
- [57:25]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Would not be particularly attractive. But to have the many different layers of narrative that he utilizes here in order to guide us there on our own, without ever really stating it, we just sort of see Bella just sort of be miserable and, you know, think about this woman that she really didn't spend very much time with at all. And then we realized that, oh, like, you know, this is her life. You know, this is one way to spend one's life. Just sort of like, narrativizing others in an attempt, or because of a lack of a narrative for oneself or a perceived lack of narrative, it's just really high bar as far as, like, work is concerned, and just really devastating, I think, as far as narrative is concerned, yeah.
- [58:10]
Deborah Treisman
I mean, there's a way in which Bella, as a girl, very much identifies with Ms. Chu. As you've said, everyone else is part of something larger, whether it's a couple or the class. She's standing out. Bella's a loner. She doesn't fit in. She doesn't want to fit in. And Ms. Chu is also, you know, walking by herself across the quad, paying no attention to other people. But then, you know, in the present time, she finds out that Ms. Chu was in relationship with a woman, a particularly destructive relationship. And so that sense of identifying with someone else who's alone, I think, is a little bit threatened at that moment. And perhaps that's. Do you think that's why she has a kind of negative reaction to hearing Ms. Chu's voice and thinking about what she was going through at the time that she knew her?
- [59:05]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yes, I certainly think that's one reason as a reader, I honestly think it.
- [59:10]
Brian Washington
Could have been anything.
- [59:11]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
You know, I think that any. I think if the moment that this narrative that BELLA Created for Ms. Chu, that was solidified with distance, that was solidified with unattainability, that was solidified with ignorance. Ignorance in the sense of just simply not knowing the moment that she could see concretely that, oh, Ms. Chu is not a narrative. She's a person. And not only is she as a.
- [59:41]
Brian Washington
Person, she's a person with a new name. Right?
- [59:43]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Like, she's not. She's Ms. Chu. In Bella's mind, seemingly only within the context of this narrative, I think that it's underlined by the fact that she's working for this nonprofit for LGBT rights, specifically, like an existence that is seemingly just quite far from Bella's own in this particular moment. It's underlined, I think, by the fact that she's talking about Ms. Chu when we see her struggles that are very much like her life, evidence of the fact that, you know, she's a living, breathing person with her own struggles that exist outside of Bella's preconception of who she is or could be like, really significant struggles. But Bella doesn't have access to those. And perhaps more significantly, within the context of this narrative, she really doesn't care because they don't align or exist with the silence of the effigy, the sort of unattainability that connotes attractiveness in of itself, unattainability, whether that's physical unattainability, whether that is just sort of like narrative on attainability, this person looks and seems so interesting, so I can spend my life wondering what I am to them and how I exist in the context of this world. And the moment that we realize that, oh, this is a person too, this is a person who exists among other people, that attractiveness is void. But what's really fascinating here, and I think that, to me, at least, that really is something I return to, is that she doesn't just. Bella just doesn't really just cast her off entirely. She finally figures out what became of this woman. She finally figures out, oh, she was navigating, getting significant challenges. She figures out where she is now to an extent, and what she's doing to an extent, and she returns to Ms. Chu. You know, we don't even get this woman's. The name that she utilizes now. Like her name. Something is, like, concrete as a name. Something as significant, you know, to a person is who a person is as their name. We don't get that for Bella. We get Ms. Chu, and she exists as Ms. Chu for the duration of the time that we spend with Bella, and presumably for the duration of Bella's life, which I think is another one of the great sadnesses that we're privy to here.
- [62:24]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, well, it's also true that Bella changed her name and we never hear her Chinese name. We know her only as Bella, which is an interesting choice of a name for this character. Why do you think she chose Bella?
- [62:40]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I think Yiyun Li is very good at her job. So I think that's why we get Bella. You know, there is a fairy tale like, quality to unattainability. There is, I think, even in the idea of Bella, like, there's a narrative there, you know, for good or for ill. You know, we hear Bella, like, we hear, you know, we hear fantasy to an extent. We hear, like, this idea of growth. Like, if someone who is just sort of like, waiting to blossom, like, would only blossom and could only blossom when the right circumstances appear, but they never do appear. So she's just sort of this beautiful entity locked in stasis, adopted for being.
- [63:29]
Deborah Treisman
Beautiful, chosen for that. There's another context, actually, that Yiyun talked about in the Q and A she did about the story with Cresta Lyschen, who's her editor here. She mentioned that she started writing this story in November of 2016, which was a sad month in two ways. One being the election results, and the other being the fact that the writer William Trevor died. And William Trevor, probably the most important writer in Yi Yun's own development. And she chose. I'm sure she chose the name Bella for many reasons, but one of them was because of a character named Bell in the William Trevor story, the Piano Tuners, Wives. And Belle. I don't know if you've read that story. Belle is a character who's been in love with someone her whole life. He married someone else, broke her heart. And then when his first wife dies, he marries Belle and she finally gets what she wants. She spends the whole marriage trying to damage the memory of the first wife, trying to undo his feelings for his first wife. And we have Bella in this story being called Toxic at some point. And I think Bella would have been called toxic if William Trevor had written that story now. But the word he uses is damage, the damage she does. And I've thought a lot about that word use and the difference between the two stories, because damage implies, you know, you're damaged by someone or something. Toxicity is kind of inborn and inherent. Which do you think is best or most appropriate for Bella? Do we think she's just a toxic character, or do we think she's been damaged?
- [65:23]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I think that the magic of Yiyeon Lee's precision and craft is such that Bella is someone who presents as toxic. But in learning of how she came to be, we see the various damages that she navigated. I think that something that I admire particularly, thinking of this as a story that is written as like a mentee. Like to take a narrative from your mentor at a deeply challenging time. My understanding is that she wrote this quite quickly. This story came together, like, really fast, all things considered. And to have a narrative that is of their work in which the connection can be seen, but one which furthers the conversation, or rather more concretely furthers the question of how.
- [66:24]
Brian Washington
Can a person.
- [66:26]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Become who they are? And to what extent does our understanding of the forces and entities that form them change our sense of who they are in the present tense? That's a sticky question. That's a tricky question. It's one that is presented from scene to scene, from section to section, but it's presented in narrative this question of damagedness. It's presented in narrative this question of. Of toxicity, the question of how toxicity can form from a place that in many ways is not toxic in and of itself. In some ways, I think it is very much like a love story, or doomed love story, certainly, but very much a love story between Bella and, if not Ms. Chu, specifically, the idea of Ms. Chu, like a Ms. Chu. And so that, for me as a reader, becomes the point of connection that Bella has in this narrative. You know, Peter and Adrian, you know, they have each other. Her parents had each other. Her husband's had her for a little while, but they labeled her toxic. And, you know, their situations changed. Even Pei Pei has her own narrative. And Bella's narrative is continually caught between this idea of the Little Match Girl and this idea of Ms. Chu. And so we have a character who is in love with narrative in a lot of ways, is in love with ideas, but with nothing concrete to attach them to. It becomes quite a sad situation.
- [68:12]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, there's a very sad moment towards the end of the story where Bella sort of equates Miss two and the. The deaf child she replaced. She had been too young when she met Ms. Chu, and she had arrived too late to know the deaf mute. Timing had made them the unattainable in her life, and the unattainable, which she could neither damage nor destroy, lived on as wounds. So the fact that these two people, these two characters, were the ones that might have made her different, but they were just out of reach because one existed before her and then was removed. The other is too old for her, she's too young for her, and she just can't get there. She can't go back, she can't go forward, so she's stuck without them. And there's kind of that just eternal loneliness for her with her no roots.
- [69:07]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah, it's rough. I mean, this idea, narratively, of what is sad, things that happen are sad, devastating, even.
- [69:20]
Brian Washington
What might have been is horrifying.
- [69:21]
Deborah Treisman
And interestingly, you know, you're talking about the many narratives here. We have some other concrete narratives at play. Of course. There's the Little Match Girl. There's Cinderella. There is Unspoken, the William Trevor story. And there's also D.H. lawrence's the Fox, which is another interesting story. A story about two women running a farm together soon after the First World War, who are, you know, probably unspokenly in a romantic relationship. And a fox comes in and keeps killing the chickens, and they can't. One of them becomes sort of fascinated by it. Then a man arrives, kills the fox and marries one of the women and steals her away from the other one. And this being Ms. Chu's favorite story, tells us a lot. But it's also, you know, the story that Bella fantasizes about appearing in a dramatic version of it with Ms. Chu, which is very strange. Many levels of strangeness.
- [70:26]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah, yeah, it's a bunch of levels of strangeness in this particular story. Like, we really do see that, you know, these characters specifically, but just us, our lives generally are formed of narratives that are not necessarily our own or narratives that exist in a continuum that, you know, we, by way of timing, as Ian writes here, by way of luck, good or bad, find ourselves stuck in, in some cases, perhaps in Bella's case, moving through or able to. Allied, perhaps in Pepe's case, are able to just sort of, like, navigate in a way that makes us at least somewhat presentable. Perhaps in the case of Peter and Adrian, or like, in a fourth place, sort of a very mysterious. Which I think is the space that Bella is occupying here. Like, really searching for her own narrative in a lot of ways and just really coming up short in a fashion that disappoints, in the fashion that saddens. But an inability to elucidate a narrative doesn't eliminate, you know, the present tense. You know, Bella still exists in the present tense, even if she can't attach that to a narrative. And one would imagine that that's quite a challenging thing.
- [71:50]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. She hasn't yet managed to die and become a shooting star. And we end on that very sad note that even if she did, Ms. Chu wouldn't notice because she'd be on another corner selling her own matches.
- [72:04]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Yeah, it's really horrible.
- [72:07]
Brian Washington
It's really terrible.
- [72:08]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
But it doesn't feel, at least to me as a reader. I remember the first time I read a story, I was like, I'm never gonna read this again. I don't like how this made me feel. I don't know what this woman was thinking when she wrote this, but they need to put it in a bottle and put it away, because she knows too much to be putting things down on paper. Just the literal organization of the narrative holds many different kinds of emotional weight. And they grow, but they also shift and change and accumulate. So that for me, by the time that I reach the end of the narrative, on my very first read and most recently, my recent reads, my understanding of how they came to be at the line level has certainly shifted, but their validity, the presence of the emotion, has not changed. It is still, for me as a reader, just as impacted as when I first came across this story, because it's true. I think it is very difficult to write a thing that is honest in the way that Ian Lee has accomplished here.
- [73:24]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about the counterfactual narrative in the story, which is that of pei Pei and Mr. Wu, which is very annoying to Bella because it's. It was a fairy tale. It was a Cinderella story. And the fairy tale is supposed to end with the marriage. They're not supposed to continue on and continue this fixation and obsession and love and so on. And pei Pei and Mr. Wu persist in being married and being together. Pei Pei persists in loving him and refuses to divorce. She has no reason to divorce. So frustrating to Bella.
- [74:02]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
I don't know if it's frustrating to Bella because it's something that she wants. Like, if she. It's something that she. There's frustration in her recognition that she doesn't have that, and it would be.
- [74:13]
Brian Washington
Quite difficult for her.
- [74:14]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
There are some Changes that would have to happen in her life as a person for her to acquire that. That is frustrating. Or if it's frustrating because it doesn't align with her comfort in the stasis of narrative. Right. The sort of, like, stasis of. Of Ms. Chu as an idea. Even if there's a lot of mystery, to be generous, in her sense of who Ms. Chu is, there is comfort in that mystery. There's comfort in knowing that I don't know the answer to who this person is or what they could be, but they could be this and I could be that. There's a lot of comfort in not knowing. Or there can be comfort in not knowing because you can fill it up. You know, you can fill the vase up with whatever it is that you want to. But once we see that the vase is not a vase, it's a person with their own autonomy, with their own narrative, that's not as attractive, that doesn't align with the idea of fantasy, that doesn't align with the idea of stasis. It's a narrative that keeps going. It exists in and of itself despite Bella's best attempts at control or Bella's best attempts to find herself inside of it. And that, too, is a sadness in and of itself. Right. Like the realization that you no longer exist in someone's narrative, or perhaps in this particular case, that you never existed.
- [75:39]
Deborah Treisman
Never existed. Yeah.
- [75:40]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
Someone else's narrative, it is so far away from you that not only is it not gonna happen, it was never possible.
- [75:49]
Brian Washington
That's really sad.
- [75:51]
Deborah Treisman
It is really sad. But on the other hand, it's what Bella clings to, this idea that Ms. Chu will never actually acknowledge her, will never care about her. She almost wants that. She doesn't call her because she doesn't want to be wrong about this. What if Ms. Chu said, oh, Bella, so nice to hear from you. What if she did remember her? It's almost like Bella is insisting on that ending where she dies and Ms. Chu doesn't notice.
- [76:18]
Brian Washington
Yeah.
- [76:19]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
And that's a kind of love story too. You know, it's a. It's a regrettable one, perhaps, but there is a kind of love in the sort of doomedness of unattainability.
- [76:30]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Brian.
- [76:34]
Brian Washington
Oh, yeah. Thank you so much.
- [76:35]
Podcast Guest/Commentator
It's a joy to talk to you. It was a joy to talk about Yiyun's work.
- [76:40]
Deborah Treisman
Yiyun Lee has published eight books of fiction, including. Including the novels Must I Go and the Book of Goose, a winner of the PEN Faulkner Award for fiction and the story collection Wednesday's Child, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her nonfiction work Things in Nature Merely Grow was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2025. Brian Washington, a winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award, is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial Family Meal and Paper Palaver, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2025. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in the Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by John Lame and Michelle o'. Brien. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. From prx.