The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Bryan Washington Reads Yiyun Li

January 1, 2026·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Why does Bella cling to a teacher who ignored her, according to Bryan Washington's analysis?

1. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features Bryan Washington reading and discussing 'A Small Flame' by Yiyun Li, which appeared in the New Yorker in May 2017. 2. Deborah Treisman hosts as fiction editor; Bryan Washington, author of four books including the 2024 National Book Award-finalist novel Palaver, is the guest reader, joining from Tokyo. 3. The episode explores how Li structures a story so that its architecture is invisible to a casual reader but fully legible to a writer paying close attention — and what that reveals about a woman who cannot access her own past. 4. Washington first encountered Li's work in the New Yorker stacks at his university, in a section organized by author, which gave him immediate access to much of her backlist. 5. He describes her as one of only a handful of writers in contemporary English who can make every structural decision feel both technically precise and emotionally invisible. 6. The story opens in Beijing: Bella, a Chinese-born New York lawyer in her 50s, has come to China with her old law school friend Peter and his boyfriend Adrian, who is researching his Chinese great-grandfather's story for a novel about the Western Front in 1918. 7. A girl no older than ten tries to sell roses outside a Peking duck restaurant; Bella pays her 300 RMB for the entire bouquet and throws it in a cypress bush, but Adrian retrieves the flowers for the girl, who vanishes 'a swift and purposeful minnow.' 8. Bella is in a 'horrendous mood' over her second divorce; she and Peter have known each other 25 years since law school in Boston, and Peter, who remembers her life in finer detail than she does, has become 'the wrong accompaniment for Bella's solo.' 9. Alone in a Beijing hotel after Peter and Adrian leave, Bella sings songs from The Sound of Music, which she had to watch every Saturday for a year as part of her high school English class requirement. 10. In a high school flashback, Li establishes that Bella was the school's best English speaker, voted 'school flower' for being the prettiest girl, but what she had secretly wanted was to play the little match girl: 'Matches, matches. Please buy some matches, sir.' 11. Bella's English club teacher, Miss Chu, had spent a year in Australia, read D.H. Lawrence aloud to the students — The Fox several times, 'no doubt her favorite' — and treated Bella with more sarcasm than anyone else while seeming blind to Bella's attentiveness. 12. Li establishes that Bella was adopted: her diplomat father and opera singer mother adopted her from an unspecified background; before her, they had adopted a baby girl diagnosed as deaf-mute, who was sent away with her nanny when Bella arrived. 13. Bella has had two failed marriages — twelve years and five years respectively — and both ex-husbands called her 'toxic'; Peter has told her 'you don't take yourself seriously' and saw her eyes 'snicker even while keeping her face straight' at both weddings. 14. Through her childhood friend Pepe — who married their geography teacher at fifteen through her grandfather's political influence — Bella locates Miss Chu's new identity: the co-founder of a nonprofit advocating for LGBT rights in China. 15. An audio clip on the organization's website has Miss Chu discussing domestic violence she experienced in a relationship with a woman thirty years earlier: 'I was young, and I was ashamed of my relationship with another woman.' 16. Bella thinks 'whoever this person was, she was not Miss Chu of the English club,' whose heart had been 'made of polished ice,' and is disturbed by this stranger 'looking for purpose and solace in the wrong place.' 17. The story closes with Bella imagining herself as various characters — the deaf-mute, the fox from Lawrence's The Fox, the little match girl — and calling the organization to ask to speak to Miss Chu, knowing that 'faceless to Miss Chu, Bella would only be a voice on the line that could be cut off at any moment.' 18. In the post-reading discussion, Washington argues that the rose-seller opening is a masterclass in establishing character: Bella operates by her own narrative logic and the girl simply refuses it, previewing every relationship in the story. 19. The episode has a close, exploratory tone; Washington speaks with evident admiration for Li's craft and Treisman asks precise questions about narrative choices. 20. Listeners interested in contemporary Chinese-American fiction, in how short stories use structure to reveal character, or in work dealing with adoption, obsession, and self-knowledge will find the episode compelling; listeners seeking a linear plot may find the story's associative structure difficult.

As heard by us

A restrained New Yorker Fiction episode in which Yiyun Li turns schoolroom performance and old friendship into a quietly cutting study of memory.

Bryan Washington's selection of Yiyun Li's "A Small Flame" brings The New Yorker: Fiction to a story where childhood theater keeps darkening into adult memory.

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Why you'd press play

For a measured literary reading where memory and resentment stay close.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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