Yiyun Li, 41, was born in Beijing. After college, she emigrated to the US to study immunology and turned to creative writing. Her first collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the 2005 Guardian first book award. Her first novel, The Vagrants was set shortly after the death of Chairman Mao. Her second collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, followed in 2010. Her new novel, Kinder Than Solitude, focuses on three friends, and alternates between 1990s Beijing and present-day America. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and sons, and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis.

It's a brilliant device to open a novel with the death of a 43-year-old women who has been in a coma for 20 years. But isn't it inspired by a real-life case – the thallium poisoning of a Chinese student, Zhu Ling, in 1995?

That case was so prominent in the history of my generation that I would call it a shared memory. And I had it in the back of my mind because the case remains unresolved. But I made the novel completely different because the young woman was a college student, and the suspect was her dorm-mate, whereas my characters are teenagers. What made the case stand out was the corruption – there was no information made known to the public. In despair her friends posted an "SOS" letter on the internet, asking for help with a diagnosis. Responses poured in, many claiming she was suffering from thallium poisoning. But also I wanted to write a story about poisoning because it's a very passive-aggressive crime. It's not physical violence, but it's dangerous because it happens between people who live closely or are intimate. I read scientific textbooks about poison and a lot of psychological background on why people would poison. Interestingly more women than men poison.

Do you read detective fiction?

I love Patricia Highsmith. You know Tom Ripley is going to kill the next person, and you're waiting to see how he does it; that's the suspense. But with Kinder Than Solitude I wanted to look at the psychological violence people inflict. Teenage years can be quite desperate. I remember talking to an English woman who had a daughter in boarding school, and I said: "Not all teenage boys suffer but it seems to me every teenage girl suffers." And so it's very unfortunate in my book that the poisoning happens at a time when they only have this much experience of life, and they are very serious, very intense, so that combination can be very dangerous.

The teenagers in your book grow in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, but before China's emergence as a superpower. Was that deliberate?

Yes, people tend to think I write about older history. But in this novel I really want to say: this is my generation. It's what we experienced from 1989 to now. If you look at these three characters, they never talk about Tiananmen Square. To me there's a real negation of that history, which is interesting, because that history is still there, and they refuse to acknowledge how much it has done personally, collectively, to their lives. And of course, coming up to the 21st century, you see the material wealth in China versus the moral poverty. All feelings are measured by money, and that to me is a huge loss. The previous generation were desperate to experience life meaningfully. But this younger generation are very desperate because the girl next to them in the street has a better designer bag or a better apartment which produces a lot of pressure on young women.

Two of the characters move to the US. Can you connect with that sense of dislocation?

I left China age 23. It's interesting how much of yourself you can sneak into a novel. I'm none of these characters, but some of their memories are my memories. And Beijing in the book is the city I grew up in. In America you see a lot of immigrant literature about people coming from other countries, and how they struggle to make a good living. But with the two women in my story, if they'd wanted to have a good life, they could easily have done. Theirs is not the immigrant struggle, it's everybody's struggle – the struggle with the past, with painful history they can't understand. My characters are not activists in life but they protest by being solitary. They are very stubborn and don't want to be centre stage. I think loneliness is partly their choice and I really, really respect them for that choice.

How difficult is it writing in English?

I had to read English literature in secret as a child. My parents were very cautious; they had gone through 50 years of Communist history so they didn't want us to get into trouble. I remember my father said: "There is no truth in humanities, but at least there are truths in science, so you should stick with science because real truths won't come and hurt you." And that's how I was brought up to be a scientist because it's a haven in a way.

What's the difference between writing a novel and writing short stories?

I think a novel requires a lot of commitment to suffer and endure your characters. With Kinder Than Solitude these characters invaded my life. I love short stories because you don't have that huge canvas and you still have to achieve the same level of emotional impact. With a short story I always say you put the lid on tightly, and these characters are in the bottle, and you really put the pressure on.

Reading Kinder Than Solitude reminds me of Villette. Do you mind when critics say you're almost a 19th-century writer?

I'm so glad because I actually read Villette for the first time when I was working on the novel. I think people say I'm 19th century because I read mostly older writers. Maybe I also work in a consciously traditional way. I like storytelling. I'm not so fond of experimental fiction. So these older writers like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are my peers.