We, the Narrator

by Alexandra St. Pierre

            Many of Yiyun Li's stories allow the characters to develop through actions, thoughts, and sparse dialogue. Rarely does she impose her own opinion as the author, preferring a detached relationship with her characters and permitting the reader to have only rare insights into the emotions of the people described. It becomes notable then, when Li switches the narration from her own reserved voice to the collective "we" which appears in the vignette "Immortality." Through use of collective narration, Li forces the reader to question the objectivity of the narrator while demonstrating both the sense of empowerment gained through community and the distortive effect it can have on one's individuality. In each story, it is the suspension of the readers' belief in the credibility of the narrator that enables them to examine with an objective eye whether a sense of community (traditionally revered and empowered in Chinese culture) is ultimately a unifying or destructive force.

            By the second page of  "Immortality," the reliability of the collective narrative falls into question. After having described the castrations of the Great Papas, the narrator mentions what are described as "wild rumors...about them serving as playthings for the princes...of Great Papas being drowned, burned bludgeoned, beheaded for the smallest mistakes" (45). However, the narrator goes on to utterly refute these "wild rumors" because "such stories, as we all know, were made up to attack the good name of our town. What we believe is what we have seen" (45-6). The use of  "we" enables Li to explicitly present this information as broad-based opinion as opposed to fact and causes the readers to detach themselves from being a part of this "we." In addition, the reader must ask, do you have to see something for it to have occurred? Of course not and Li recognizes that her audience will know that these horrific things did in fact take place and thus intentionally begins her story by depicting the narrator as blatantly unreliable. Likewise, the common narration and its relay of events and opinions as factual and accepted force the reader to view them skeptically. What the collective voice depicts as a "malicious attack on the dictator" (49), the reader views as a harmless joke. The integrity of the narrator is again called into question when after visiting the dead dictator's wake, he states, "We will be so impressed with this great man's body that we will ignore the unnatural red color in his cheeks, and his swollen neck as thick as his head" (57). Not only does Li present the collective narrators as being unwilling to believe things they do not see, but in this instance, she goes further to suggest that they will ignore things they do not wish to see. The reader thus comes to the understanding that the collective voice is capable of deceiving itself and creating its own reality. In essence, whereas it is often tempting to accept the author's narration as truth and fact, Li's detachment from the "we" allows the reader to approach the collective narration as capable of deception.

            Suspended as the faith in the narrator may be, it is impossible not to recognize the sense of empowerment and surety the collective voice demonstrates as a result of being part of a community. However wayward their objective, the collective voice of "Immortality" acts and speaks resolutely as if incapable of fallibility. The conviction of the "young man's" father is exemplary of the security the narrator has in the justness of their action despite its apparent severity to the reader. Just after the carpenter's "insult" to the dictator, Li writes,

That's it, a malicious attack on the dictator's population policy. The carpenter is executed after a public trial. All but his wife attend the meeting, every one of us sticking our fists high and hailing the People's victory, our unanimous voice drowning out his wife's moan from her bed. We shout slogans when the bullet hits the young man's head. (49)

This scene not only depicts the power of a unanimous community, it also implicitly suggests that the source of its unity is communism and Maoist propaganda. In any case, the unity inherent in the "we" voice allows the village to act quickly, definitively and without dissension. Ignoring for the present that a young man has been put to death for a trivial joke, the accord with which the town acts is remarkable. Through the shared ideology of revolutionary China and faith in the dictator, the town is able to remain unified even through famine as evidenced in the following passage.

When the famine catches us unprepared, we listen to the dictator's encouraging words…. He calls for us to make our belts one notch tighter for our communist future, and we happily punch more holes in them.  (51)

Again, despite the unity that the collective voice seems adamant to stress, there is something unnerving about Li's depiction of the village. The narrator finds the death of the four maid girls glorious. Similarly, one man's drunken joke is a threat to an entire ideology and exhausting sparrows to death in order to eat is considered, "the most festive event in...three long years" (51). The emphasis of the collective voice is employed to suggest that these notions are commonplace serves to further alienate the reader. Despite being unified, this unity has been perverted into a mob mentality where a benign, off-colored remark can result in death. In this village, there is no forum for voicing individual opinion because as far as the narrator is concerned there is only one correct and just ideology which is set by the dictator and carried out by the "we" mindset of the people. Although the town is arguably unified, it is a tenuous concord at best and is achieved only by silencing dissention and employing a vicious, unquestioning mob mentality.

            In addition to depicting the narrator's and the village's devotion to its fragile unity, Li seems to also suggest this same uniformity's capacity to eliminate sense of self and individual identity. Nowhere is this clearer than in the downfall of the central character of "Immortality" who, through no coincidence, remains nameless for the entirety of the vignette. When the reader first encounters the young man, he is being brutally beaten by the villagers who refer to him as "the little counterrevolutionary" (52). The townspeople cease not out of compassion, but rather because they realize that the boy has the face of the dictator. The young man is treated reverently by the narrator only because of his face and as such, the young man's value in his society is not based on character but his likeness to another individual. This in turn strips him of his own identity which becomes subjugated to the desires of the people to maintain the facade of the dictator. The "we" narrative signifies the village's stripping of the young man's identity when they repeatedly qualify him as "our young man" (57, 58, 60). This statement explicitly suggests that the young man's identity does not belong to him but rather is construed by what the villagers wish to see. Ultimately, when the young man's long denied desires lead to his dismissal as the dictator's impersonator, he finds that he has nothing: no family, no marriage prospect and from the reader's prospective, no name. The young man ends up desolate, lacking any sense of self and after his castration is literally is no longer a whole person.

It is important to recognize the disparity between what the villagers accept as their origin of unity and pride and what Li implicitly suggests is actually the source of their unanimity. The collective voice points to the Great Papas as their source of communal pride, going as far as to ask, "If not for [the Great Papas], who were we, the small people born into this no-name town?" (46) Juxtaposed with the reverence of the Great Papas is the unwavering loyalty demonstrated to the dictator and subsequently, to the young man with the dictator's face who replaces him in their homage. Both instances show the town's desire to find something outside of them to be defined by, for as they suggest, they would have no identity were it not for an exemplary few. In allowing their identities and values not to be self-determined, they adopt a communal ideology set forth by the dictator and perpetrated by an unquestioning mob mentality. In this way, the carpenter is killed not so much because he opposes the dictator's population policy but because he threatens the very foundation of the town's unity.

            Li grapples with the concept of unity in discussing her inspiration for writing "Immortality." She explains that, upon entering his class one day, James Alan McPherson announced that Americans, through their ruthless pursuit of individuality, were losing any sense of a communal voice. Li goes on to remark that this was one of the first of his comments that she ever fully grasped. She consequently wrote "Immortality," which, as she explains, demonstrated "the 'we' voice present in Asian countries." At first it is tempting to classify "Immortality" as a denunciation of China's historical emphasis on community above the individual, but this would be an unfair oversimplification of Li's literary sense. Rather, it becomes evident that "Immortality" depicts the extreme of collective voice and its negative implications. Furthermore, the society depicted in "Immortality" has other factors contributing to the less than admirable series of events that unfolds, chief among these being that its unification is based on a corrupt and dehumanizing Maoist regime that seeks to subjugate rather than unite China under its ideology. Seen from this perspective, the villagers' desire and efforts towards achieving and maintaining accord are not contemptible, only the means by which they attempt this goal. In the end, it is neither the unquestioning society of "Immortality" nor the aspiration for individualism evident in America that leads to disunity. Rather, it is the extreme to which the villagers of "Immortality" pursue unity that results in the destruction of individual thought and character.