Nationality 1: Chinese

Birthdate: 1972

Yiyun Li was born in Beijing, China, in 1972. Her father was a physicist and her mother a teacher. As a young child, Li learned how harsh the judicial system could be in the communist country. In 1978, when she was five and a half, the police drove through her neighborhood informing all the residents by loudspeaker that they were to assemble in an open field in ten minutes. In the field, four heavily bound men were placed on a temporary stage, and a police officer announced that they were counterrevolutionaries who had been sentenced to death. The sentence was to be carried out after the men had been paraded through all the local districts. At a signal from her daycare teacher, the five-year-old Li raised her fist, and along with everyone else, shouted a slogan calling for the men to be put to death...