Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

A piercing collection of stories about ordinary lives in contemporary China, where loneliness, longing, and small acts of kindness expose the fragile ways people reach for connection.

From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Yiyun Li comes a quietly devastating collection of stories about solitude, devotion, grief, and the fragile ways people reach for one another in a changing world. Set largely in contemporary China, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl follows men and women whose lives appear modest, even uneventful, yet are shaped by unspoken longings and private reckonings.

A middle-aged woman looks back on a life of service and emotional restraint, tracing the origins of her loneliness. A grieving couple returns from America to China, hoping to replace loss with new life through surrogacy. A retired professor tries to arrange a perfect marriage for her son, unaware of the deeper, more complicated bonds already in place. Across these nine stories, chance encounters, small acts of kindness, and well-intentioned plans open into quiet catastrophes or unexpected grace. Li’s characters move through ordinary routines—work, family obligations, social rituals—while carrying desires they barely allow themselves to name.

Spare, tender, and piercingly observant, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is a luminous collection about the emotional lives that unfold beneath the surface of everyday existence, and about the human need for connection even when it arrives too late, or in forms we never anticipated.