‘Number One’ Special: Lillian Li ’09 Turns Misadventure Into Her Debut Novel

Some summer jobs are better left forgotten, and after a month as a waitress, Lillian Li '09 was ready to throw in the apron.

 

In her first shift working at a Chinese restaurant, she spilled a beer down a customer's back. From there, things went only downhill. It didn't help that Li constantly felt like an anomaly among her co-workers: She was 20 years younger than anyone else; the only one with no restaurant experience; the only one with English as her first language.

 

Better, she decided, to move on and forget this had ever happened.

 

But as she settled into grad school, Li found that her former co-workers wouldn't leave her mind. "I couldn't stop thinking, Working six days a week, 12 hours a day, serving people who looked right through you: What would that do to a person? What would they be willing to do for a personal connection, for love?" she said.

 

The questions gnawed at her, so Li did what she's done since she was a child: She began to write her own answers to them.

 

The result is Lillian Li's debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, which will be released June 19. The book focuses on the owners and employees of a restaurant where long days of work provide structure and complications in pursuing the American Dream.

 

Li's book tour will bring her to Washington on June 23, when she will read from the novel at Politics and Prose at 6:00 p.m.

 

This spring, Li came to NCS for the annual Writers Day for an advance reading and to talk with Upper School students about her lifelong calling. "A lot of my identity is tied up in creative writing," she said.

 

Seated before dozens of students at the front of Hearst Auditorium, Li reflected on the large role NCS had played in bringing her to this moment. She had come to NCS in 9th grade from a magnet school in Silver Spring for humanities and, especially, gifted writers. On her school tour, she received a copy of the literary magazine Half in Earnest and thought, " 'Oh my God, a ton of people are into what I'm into, and these people are geniuses,' Getting into that book was my goal," Li said.

 

Within a year, she had achieved that goal, as the 2006 HIE included a submission of hers; by the time Li graduated, HIE had published 19 of her works. She twice won the English Department's Writer's Prize for her class, as well as the 2009 Joye Pregnall Creative Writing Award. The summer before her senior year, she won the Killip Fellowship, which provided for an NCS student's attendance at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference in Tennessee.

 

"That fellowship really set me on the path. That was big," Li recalled.

 

Even so, Li felt torn as a college undergraduate between two other possible careers, law and journalism. Each appealed to her, yet neither felt fully right. Creative writing had become confined, as she put it, to the margins of her life. The situation came to a head during her junior year, when she realized that "I was a little bit too polite to really be a journalist, and being a lawyer wasn't quite the right path for me, either."

 

"Ultimately what always interested me about journalism was human relationships and human connection, and that was already what my creative fiction was doing," she continued. "Eventually, I asked myself, Why am I not doing this [writing] every single day?"

 

With that insight, Li returned her focus to creative writing, earning her degree in English from Princeton before gaining admittance to the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.

 

Once settled in Ann Arbor, she kept pushing aside the novel she'd begun in New Jersey in favor of writing a new short story about the Chinese restaurant. Li told herself that she was crafting one scene just to get the story out of her system. "It became clear by the end of that short story that I had barely touched all that I wanted to say," she said. "That was when I realized this had to be a novel project."

 

Her journalism classes, she found, were paying dividends: In researching a major plot point, she identified people who could answer her questions and then interviewed them to better inform her narrative.

 

Meanwhile, the Zell Program at Michigan connected her with faculty and fellow students who helped her refine the manuscript, land an agent, and sell the novel to a publisher. Li also began working at an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Literati, that introduced her to a broad community of support, including published writers.

 

"That's actually been one of the best choices I've made because I'm just surrounded by all kinds of readers, and I have a lot of friends who went through this before I did," she said. "That's been really helpful because a sense of perspective is the hardest thing to get."

 

As Number One Chinese Restaurant prepares to meet an international audience and the book tour nears, Li is looking forward to hearing at last the response of readers to a book she's spent years with.

 

"Being in the bookstore and just seeing people being passionate about books and different kinds of books," she said, "it helps me know there is going to be an audience."