by Yiyun Li
Copyright © 2017 by Yiyun Li
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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“Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life” was originally published in A Public Space and reprinted in The Best American Essays 2014.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Music: Excerpt from “Five Hundred Miles,” words and music by Hedy West, copyright © 1964 (Renewed) Unichappell Music, Inc., and Atzal Music, Inc. All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.
Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite. Philip Larkin’s letters copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Philip Larkin; Monica Jones’s letters copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Monica Jones; selection, introduction, and editorial matter copyright © 2010 by Anthony Thwaite. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.: Excerpts from All Will Be Well: A Memoir by John McGahern, copyright © 2005 by John McGahern. Rights in Canada are controlled by A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Li, Yiyun, author.
Title: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life / Yiyun Li.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017675| ISBN 9780399589096 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399589119 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Li, Yiyun, 1972– —Mental health. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography. | Depressed persons—United States—Biography. | Autobiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Depression.
Classification: LCC PS3612.I16 Z46 2017 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017675
Ebook ISBN 9780399589119
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Rachel Ake
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ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Amongst People
Memory Is a Melodrama from Which No One Is Exempt
Two Lives
Amongst Characters
To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture
Either/Or: A Chorus of Miscellany
Reading William Trevor
Afterword: On Being a Flat Character, and Inventing Alternatives
A Partial List of Books
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Yiyun Li
About the Author
There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless.
—Amy Leach, Things That Are
She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them.
—Rebecca West, This Real Night
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
1.
My first encounter with before and after was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America. I duly followed their advice—I had an anthropologist’s fascination with America then. I had never seen a glossy magazine, and the print and paper quality, not to mention the trove of perfumes waiting to be unfolded, made me wonder how the economics of the magazine worked, considering I paid no more than a dollar for an issue.
My favorite column was on the last page of the magazine, and it featured celebrity makeovers—hairstyle and hair color, for instance—with two bubbles signifying before and after. I didn’t often have an opinion about the transformation, but I liked the definitiveness of that phrase, before and after, with nothing muddling the in-between.
After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see advertisements for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or plastic surgery with the contrasting effects shown under before and after. The certainty in that pronouncement—for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer be—both attracts and perplexes me. Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.
2.
I was leaving to teach class when an acquaintance who lived across the country in New Hampshire called my office. She had traveled to a nearby city. I talked to her for no more than two minutes before telling my husband to go find her. He spent twelve hours with her, canceled her business appointments, and saw to it that she flew back home. Two weeks later her husband called and said she had jumped out of her office on a Sunday evening. He asked me to attend her memorial service. I thought for a long time and decided not to.
Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.
I don’t want the present to judge the past, so I don’t want to ponder my absence at her memorial service. We had come to this country around the same time. When I told her that I was going to quit science to become a writer, she seemed curious, but her husband said that it was a grave mistake. Why do you want to make your life difficult? he asked.
3.
I have had a troublesome relationship with time. The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The present—what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved. Unless the right actions are taken, one seems never to pass the test to reach the after.
4.
After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again.
I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.
I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Do you want to share anything, I was prompted when I had little to offer. By
then I felt my hope had run out. I saw the revolving door admitting new people and letting old people out into the world; similar stories were told with the same remorse and despair; the lectures were on the third repeat. What if I were stuck forever in that basement room? I broke down and could feel a collective sigh: my tears seemed to prove that finally I intended to cooperate.
I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.
5.
I have been asked throughout my life: What are you hiding? I don’t know what I am hiding, and the more I try to deny it, the less trustworthy people find me. My mother used to comment on my stealthiness to our guests. A woman in charge of admission at the public bathhouse often confronted me, asking what I was hiding from her. Nothing, I said, and she would say she could tell from my eyes that I was lying.
Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.
6.
There are five time zones in China, but the nation uses a unified time—Beijing time. When the hour turns, all radio stations sound six beeps, followed by a solemn announcement: “At the last beep, it is Beijing time seven o’clock sharp.” This memory is reliable because it does not belong to me but to generations of Chinese people, millions of us: every hour, the beeping and the announcement were amplified through loudspeakers in every People’s Commune, school, army camp, and apartment complex.
But underneath this steadfastness, time is both intrusive and elusive. It does not leave us alone even in our most private moments. In every thought and feeling about life, time claims a space. When we speak of indecision, we are unwilling to let go of a present. When we speak of moving on—what a triumphant phrase—we are cutting off the past. And if one seeks kindness from time, it slips away tauntingly, or worse, with indifference. How many among us have said that to others or to ourselves: if only I had a bit more time…
7.
One hides something for two reasons: either one feels protective of it or one feels ashamed of it. And it is not always the case that the two possibilities can be separated. If my relationship with time is difficult, if time is intrusive and elusive, could it be that I am only hiding myself from time?
I used to write from midnight to four o’clock. I had young children then, various jobs (from working with mice to working with cadaver tissue to teaching writing), and an ambition to keep writing separate from my real life. When most people were being ferried across the night by sleep, unaware of time, unaware of weather, I felt the luxury of living on the cusp of reality.
Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.
8.
A friend came to see me when I visited Beijing in 2008. We talked about her real estate investments and our old schoolmates. Half an hour after she left my parents’ apartment, she called. She hadn’t wanted to mention it in person, but a boy who had been close to me when we were teenagers had committed suicide, along with a lover.
My first reaction was wonderment, that my friend would wait until we were out of each other’s sight to tell me. My next reaction was still wonderment, as though I had always been waiting for this news.
Our dead friend had had an affair, and both he and the woman had gone through difficult divorces only to be ostracized as adulterers.
It’d have been better had he gone to America, my friend said.
Why, I asked. In college he had already been doing well as a self-taught designer. Often he would include with his letters cutout ads from newspapers and magazines: brand-name garments, imported mints, cashmeres. He was someone who would have made a good life in the country’s developing economy.
My friend sighed. You’re the only one more impractical than he was, she said; you should know this is not a country for dreamers.
My friendship with the boy existed largely in correspondence. It was a different era, thoughts and feelings traveling by mail, urgency conveyed by telegrams. My family did not have a telephone until I was in college; email came much later, when I was in America. I still remember the days when the engine of a motorcycle disturbed the quietest night—only a telegram announcing a death or a looming one would permit such an intrusion. Letters, especially those bearing too many stamps, carried the weight of friendship.
I can recall only a few things from those letters: a crush on the girl sitting next to him in class; a Chekhovian political satire he wrote, featuring Gorbachev and an East German general and a pistol going off in act 3—this was in 1988, and Communism still retained its hold on part of Europe. It was in that year too that we last saw each other.
But I do remember that before he found an outlet for his artistic obsession and sent those profitable ads, he had dreamed up, designed, and named endless car models; there had also been odd assortments of pistols, rifles, spacecraft, and household appliances, as well as abstract graphics. All the drawings were meticulously done, sometimes in their fifth or sixth drafts, and their detail used to fill me with awe and impatience.
Perhaps when I say I was expecting his suicide, it is only memory going back to revise itself. There is no reason an artistic and sensitive boy could not grow into a happy man. Where and how things went amiss with him I do not know, though even as a teenager, I recognized his despondency when at school the production of his play earned him jeers and a special exhibition of his car designs estranged him from his classmates. He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.
9.
A dreamer: it’s the last thing I want to be called, in China or in America. No doubt when my friend in Beijing used the term, she was thinking of traits like persistence, single-mindedness, willfulness, and—particularly—impracticality, which she must have seen plenty of in me. Still, that one possesses a dreamer’s personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.
The woman in New Hampshire and I, and many like us, came to this country with the same goal—to make a new life here. I wouldn’t call it a dream, not even an ambition. She had followed the scientist’s path and had a secure job at a biomedical company. I had drifted away, choosing a profession that makes hiding less feasible, if indeed I am a habitual hider.
I don’t wonder what my life would have been had I stayed in China: not leaving had never felt like an option. For a decade there had been a concrete after ingrained in everything I did. The day I arrived in America I would become a new person.
But there is the possibility that I might never have taken up writing. Had I remained a scientist, would I have turned out differently—calmer, less troubled, more sensible? Would I have stopped hiding, or become better at it?
10.
A few months before my friend’s suicide, he had found me on the Internet. In his email he told me about his divorce, and I told him about giving up science for writing. He wrote back, “I congratulate you. You’ve always been a dreamer, but America has made your dream come true.”
Someone described me onstage as an example of the American dream. Certainly I have done that too, putting myself on a poster of before and after. The transformation, however, is as superficial and deceitful as an ad placed on the back of a bus.
Time will tell, people say, as though time always has the last word. Perhaps I am only hiding from time as I have been hiding from those who want the power to have the last word about others.
11.
I would have liked to be called a dreamer had I known how to dream. The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasionally feel so I find untrustworthy. I would not mind being taken as many things I am not: a shy person, a cheerful person, a cold person. But I do not want to be called a dreamer when I am far from being a real one.
12.
What I admire and re
spect in a dreamer: her confidence in her capacities, her insusceptibility to the frivolous, and her faith that the good and the real shall triumph and last. There is nothing selfish, dazzling, or preposterous about dreamers; in everyday life they blend in rather than stand out, though it’s not hiding. A real dreamer has a mutual trust with time.
Apart from feeling unqualified to be called a dreamer, I may also be worrying about being mistaken for one of those who call themselves dreamers but are merely ambitious. One meets them often in life, their ambitions smaller than dreams, more commonplace, in need of broadcasting and dependent on recognition from this particular time. If they cause pain to others, they have no trouble writing off those damages as the cost of their dreams. Timeliness may be one thing that separates ambitions from real dreams.
13.
The woman in New Hampshire was neither a dreamer nor an ambitious person. She had hoped for a solid and uneventful life in an American suburb, but loneliness must have made her life a desert.
My dead friend in Beijing was ambitious because he understood his talents; he had dreams, too. I must have been part of his dreams once—why else would he have written if not to seek kinship with another dreamer.
14.
I came to this country as an aspiring immunologist. I had chosen the field—if one does not count the practical motives of wanting a reason to leave China and of having a skill to make a living—because I had liked the working concept of the immune system. Its job is to detect and attack nonself; it has memories, some as long lasting as life; its memories can go awry selectively, or, worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to eliminate. The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.
