Leaf Arbuthnot

Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

Li’s thrice widowed heroine, now in her eighties, recalls the lover who abandoned her in her teens, and the devastating repercussions it had

Yiyun Li [Getty Images] 
issue 15 August 2020
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  • Must I Go

    Yiyun Li

    Hamish Hamilton, pp. 368, £16

I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a Chinese industrial town in 1979, it opens with one woman’s death and closes with another. The pages in between are jammed with misery meted out by scalpel: treacherous friends, underfed children, craven officials, all have their turn upon the stage, while school choirs sing unfalteringly in praise of the communist party.

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Her latest book, Must I Go, is more cheerful, if only by a whisker. It’s the first time Li has set a novel squarely in her adopted America, with a faded Californian babe as its heroine. Lilia Liska is 81 and thrice widowed. She is spending her final years in a retirement village that she tolerates. When more sentimental residents start a memoir-writing course, Lilia goes it alone and decides to compose a record of her life for the benefit of her descendants.

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