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Immortality | Introduction

"Immortality," a short story by Chinese writer Yiyun Li, was first published in the Paris Review in 2003. It was reprinted in Li's collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in 2005. "Immortality" is set in China and is told from the point of view of an entire town as it goes through the turbulent events that affected China in the twentieth century. These events include the overthrow of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12); the establishment of a communist dictatorship and the personality cult of Mao Zedong; the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, in which millions died; and the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989. All these details form the backdrop to Li's highly unusual story of a boy who was born in 1949, the year that the communists came to power, and who as he grew up bore such a strong resemblance to the dictator that he was summoned to Beijing and trained to impersonate the dictator in official films and national events. With its vivid picture of life in China during the communist era, Li opens a window on a world that to Western readers may seem exotic and strange, and the tragic story she tells, of a young man who eventually falls from grace as rapidly as he first rises to fame, is a quietly compelling one.

Immortality Summary

"Immortality" is told in the first person plural by a narrator who represents an entire Chinese town over the course of the twentieth century. The narrator begins by going back to the time of the Chinese imperial dynasties, when members of the imperial family were served by eunuchs who attended to their every need. Eunuchs are men who have had their testicles surgically removed.

This particular town has a history of sending boys to be castrated and serve the emperor and his family. Serving in this way was considered an honorable calling, and the town is proud of the role it has played in producing what were called "Great Papas." The tradition died out, however, when the last imperial dynasty was overthrown and replaced by republics. By the 1930s, most of the Great Papas lived in poverty in temples around the Forbidden City, which was the imperial palace located at the center of the capital city, Beijing.

In the late 1940s, the communists were victorious in the civil war, and the new rulers promised everyone a prosperous life. In the narrator's town, a carpenter's wife becomes pregnant. As the baby grows inside her, she keeps looking at newspaper pictures of the communist dictator. (Historically, the dictator was Mao Zedong, although in the story he is not named.) The narrator reports that there is a saying in China that the more a pregnant woman studies a face, the greater the possibility that the child will resemble that face. So it turns out. The baby boy soon begins to resemble the dictator rather than his father, who was executed by the communists after making some indiscreet remarks about the dictator in a pub. The dictator's rule is a brutal one, but the townspeople are unaware of this, merely going along with whatever the authorities want them to believe.

The boy's mother, widowed at the age of eighteen, is given a job as a street sweeper. No one wants to marry her, and she ages rapidly. By the time the boy is ten, she looks sixty. At that time, a famine comes and lasts for three years. (Historically, this is the famine in China that occurred from 1959 to 1961.) It is partly the fault of the communists, for mismanaging the economy. But when the authorities tell the townspeople that the famine is caused by sparrows and rats that ate all their food, the citizens believe them and attempt to kill all the sparrows. (This incident is based on Mao Zedong's declaration during the famine that sparrows were pests and should be hunted down by the people.) The boy who resembles the dictator tries to sneak a sparrow into his sleeve and take it to his mother to eat, but a bigger boy grabs him and accuses him of stealing the... » Complete Immortality Summary