A Sheltered Woman by Yiyun Li, 2014
The magic trick:
Putting us in the mind of a character we immediately perceive as the story’s change agent, only to turn the tables as the plot deepens
In “A Sheltered Woman,” we meet a nanny, who immediately strikes us as experienced and totally in control. She has worked for 126 families. Unflappable. Maybe even frighteningly so.
The narration puts us in her mind at the start, too, further giving the reader an impression that this is the change agent character. Surely, we think, this Auntie Mei will bend the other characters to her will.
So it’s interesting to read on and learn that our early impression proves dead wrong.
And that’s quite a trick on Li’s part.
The selection:
The new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the placemat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. Many, however, was not exact. In her interviews with potential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: a hundred and twenty-six when she interviewed with her current employer, a hundred and thirty-one babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays—these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together.
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