The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.
Yiyun LiTo write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun LiOnly the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
Yiyun LiOne easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
Yiyun Li