Yiyun Li's Love In The Marketplace

Yiyun Li, a Chinese American writer, is known for her perception of peoples’ feelings, thoughts, behavioral traits, and characteristics. She expresses her perception through her novels and short stories (“Yiyun Li”). One of her short stories, “Love in the Marketplace,” illustrates the despondent life of a Chinese, female school teacher, Sansan. The jilt to America by her husband, Tu, and her best friend, Min, led to her breakdown ten years later. Tu and Min get a divorce, and Sansan’s mother wants her to take Tu back, but Sansan does not want to marry him because it did not work out the first time. Sansan is at a standstill in her life, failing to achieve her mother and societies’ traditional expectations of women, and her own happiness of life, until she realizes everything has just been an imagination caused from opium, and sets herself free. She leaves her routinely incapacitating memory, the traditional expectations of women in her culture, and the addiction of her imagination of the past in order to free herself from the restricting life that causes her to lose sight of herself. One of the most burdensome shackles that is holding Sansan from her happiness is her mother. Sansan’s mother constantly …show more content…
She is addicted to sunflowers which are spiked with opium, and these seeds hold her in a permanent dream. Sansan intentionally eats the seeds to escape the nagging of her mother, the memories of Tu, and the “marriage bed” of Tu and Min, but they instead lock her into the thoughts of her own mind. Opium is a very addictive drug that can impact the social well-being, emotional well-being, and spiritual well-being of the addict. On account of Sansan’s lack of affection, inability to reach societies traditions, and her hopelessness of future improvement of her life, she “craves” the sunflower seed that are “pooping in her skull” in order to make her life more bearable (Li