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"  They had become sworn sisters in Ailin&amp;#039;s backyard fifty year ago, her being the oldest of the three and the one to come up with the idea. They were twelve going on thirteen, their bodies just beginning to fill the gray Mao jackets handed down from their mothers. By then sworn sisterhood, as many other traditions, was labeled as noxious feudal legacy, and they had to bribe the neighbor&amp;#039;s daughter to take Ailin&amp;#039;s younger siblings to the marketplace for sugar canes so that the three girls could be free of prying eyes -- it would take the little ones a sweet long time to chew from one end of the sugar canes to the other. Mei had stolen some yam liquor from her father&amp;#039;s cabinet, and they each took a sip of the strong liquid before pouring it on the ground. Let the heaven and the earth be the witness of the beginning of the rest of their lives. Ailin read a pledge she had adapted from old novels in which men and women chose their sworn brothers and sisters beyond the bound of blood. And Mei and Lan repeated after her that they, sworn sisters from now on, would stick through thick and thin till the day they were to leave the earthly world together.  Later they went to the only photographer in town to have a picture taken. The photographer, a bachelor in his late thirties, watched the three girls giggle and was moved by something in the girls&amp;#039; faces that was beyond their understanding. As innocent as flowers, unaware of the time sweeping past like a river -- in the final prints he wrote, with a fine brush pen, a line from an ancient poem.  Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O&amp;#039;Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. She was recently selected by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3989/li-napkin/>