Yiyun Li’s Berlin Family Lectures Reflect on Language, Attention, and the Work of Being
By Rivky Mondal
Photos by John Zich
On March 31, April 7, and April 14, internationally acclaimed writer Yiyun Li delivered the 2026 Berlin Lectures, titled “Three Lives; Two Exiles; One Question,” “Precision and Clarity in the Time of Uncertainty,” and “Placeholder and Serendipity.”
Inaugurated in 2014 with a gift from Randy and Melvin Berlin, the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago brings to campus leading scholars, writers, and creative artists from around the world. Each academic year, the visitor delivers an extended series of lectures, participates in the university’s intellectual community, and develops a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press. Li’s talks follow this tradition. Other recent examples include Mary Beard’s Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old and Teju Cole’s Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time.
Li’s talks drew more than 1,000 attendees in person and online. In her introduction to the second lecture, Ling Ma, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English, framed Li’s work against the expectation that a “Chinese American writer” must answer to identity as a category, instead emphasizing Li’s resistance to generalizations and her commitment to observation—how a writer sees, what they notice, and how attention to the textures of daily life, down to the etymologies of words, sharpens readers’ perception.
Moving among figures such as Marie Curie, Shen Congwen, and Alexander Lenard, Li explored how individuals can sustain inner lives and scholarship in conditions of exile, irrelevance, or uncertainty. Across the series, Li returned to a central tension that she termed “seeming versus being,” suggesting that our usage of language can both clarify and distort authentic experience.
Her second lecture pressed for precision and clarity as counters to cliché, urging careful attention to our choice of phrases and metaphors to describe the world. Literature, Li suggested, proceeds not from certainty but from an acknowledgment of not knowing. In her final talk, Li paired “placeholder” and “serendipity” as methods of reading, writing, and being. Li noted that an overheard comment or an intriguing turn-of-phrase in a story holds space for thought while remaining open to chance and encounter.
Audience questions ranged from the limits of language and the ethics of attention to the profound uncertainty posed by AI. Throughout, Li emphasized reading and writing as practices of endurance and radical acceptance, in the end reminding listeners to “be thankful for your oddity.”
One day after her final Berlin Family Lecture, Li learned she was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list, which recognizes the artists, innovators, and leaders whose “stories are shaping the world.” It’s a fitting distinction for the Berlin Family Lecture Series as it continues to bring such voices into conversation with the University of Chicago Arts & Humanities Division.