Put it this way: the story of Yiyun Li’s immigration troubles hits awfully close to home right now. And at least for the moment, her story doesn’t have a happy ending yet:
In the summer of 2004, Li petitioned the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to become a permanent resident of the United States. To approve her application for a green card, USCIS would need to agree that she was an artist of “extraordinary ability,” defined in Title 8, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 204.5(h)(2) as “a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”
To the upper echelons of literary publishing, Li looks like a slam-dunk to meet this definition. Not to the USCIS, however. A year after she filed it, her petition was rejected.
She has appealed. A USCIS spokesman says she is likely to get her answer in a few weeks.
After filing her petition in August ’04, the USCIS wanted more testimonials from people she didn’t know as well, so she managed to get Salman Rushdie and David Remnick to contribute. And she was still rejected. Why?
Li’s submission, according to the decision from USCIS’s Nebraska Service Center, was “not persuasive” that she had “risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.” The decision also denied that “any specific works by the petitioner are particularly renowned as significant contemporary writing.”
The problem, Li’s supporters think, may be a failure to understand the intensely competitive world of literary publishing.
“Yiyun Li is a huge success in literary fiction,” Medina says. “But how does that read,” she wonders, to someone unfamiliar with the context for her accomplishments?
Aside from this particular article, I’m guessing Li’s chances are significantly improved by the fact that there are actual copies of her short story collection available for USCIS officials to take a look at (as well as book reviews that attest to the quality of the collection.) But man, if she can’t get in, what about the rest of us poor slobs?