by Yiyun Li
In a conversation with my new roommate after the old one had been transferred, I said something in a harsh tone that I had heard others use. You can’t talk about her that way; she’s like you and me; she’s ill, my new roommate said, which stunned me. I had not thought of myself as ill, but stranded.
Seneca, writing about his “frailty” when spending time with people, stated that “there is not one of them that will not make some vice or other attractive.” (I am fond of Seneca and his disciple Montaigne. Their wisdom and their self-assurance go so closely hand in hand that one feels an urge to poke fun at them while admiring them.) If I replace vice with language, though, it describes an experience I know well. I am easily influenced by people’s ways of talking—their words, intonations, and quirks.
In the army a blurrily photocopied edition of Gone with the Wind circulated among my peers. More than half the girls in my platoon—their personalities ranging from shy to chatty to outright mean—claimed they saw themselves in Scarlett O’Hara. Some of the girls were too interesting, others too boring, to be Scarlett. This collective longing must be part of self-making. There is little originality in this process; all the same, what a brave thing it is to do.
I did not see myself in Scarlett O’Hara; or Anna Karenina or Tess Durbeyfield or Jane Eyre; nor did I look for myself in Jean-Christophe or Nick Adams or Paul Morel or the old man fighting the sea. To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.
There was a girl in the army who had a few times stolen yams or buns from the mess hall for me. The gesture, which I did not know how to decline, filled me with cold resentment. To be thus singled out means one has to acknowledge a status the giver awards herself; worse than to be beholden to someone is to be beholden for things one does not want. In the hospital, three women made a game of smuggling oranges out of the dining room into my drawer. That I ate oranges like a good, sane person amused them as much as the Tolstoy novel and the Montaigne essays—I had asked for them when a friend visited—I carried around. I accepted the contraband fruit and welcomed their jokes, though I quoted a Graham Greene character—a Catholic priest—saying they could laugh at me but not my books. One of them would be transferred to rehab; the second, having failed other treatments, was to start ECT; the third was placed on suicide watch the day before my departure. One must laugh at oneself with those who are in situations not much different from one’s own.
The hospital reminded me of the army. Habitat-specific vocabularies form a prism through which the civilian world looks fantastical; jokes are shared property; one’s mind becomes a boundless maze, a compensation for the unavailability of physical space; to be seen by all is the easiest way to hide; to speak, and to speak someone else’s language, the best mode of silence. How can the world at large be any different?
—
THE FIRST EVENING in Ireland I took a walk by the Shannon. Other than a lone fisherman and a moored boat, there were few reminders of the human world. Were the waterbirds, the reeds, the falling dusk, and the foreign sky enough proof that life was worth living? Across the river were hilly meadows, and beyond, the lanes McGahern wrote about.
A maze of lanes link the houses that are scattered sparsely about these fields, and the lanes wander into one another like streams until they reach some main road. These narrow lanes are still in use. In places, the hedges that grow on the high banks along the lanes are so wild that the trees join and tangle above them to form a roof, and in the full leaf of summer it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light….
There are many such lanes all around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live for ever.
I underlined the words “an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace” and then did something violent: I hurled the pen into the water. It sank soundlessly, and I regretted the action right away. I had never in my life harmed or destroyed an object out of uncontrollable emotions: not a door slammed, not a plate or a cup smashed, not a piece of paper torn into pieces. I must have inherited this respect for things from my father, who is a hoarder, though I have resisted forming an attachment to any object, or any place. I wished then and I wish now that I had never formed an attachment to anyone in the world either. I would be all kindness. I would not have done anything ruinous. I would never have to ask that question—when will I ever be good enough for you?—because by abolishing you, the opposite of I, I could erase that troublesome I from my narrative, too.
I stayed by the river until it was too dark to read on. The wounds McGahern reopened in his memoir are not the kind to be healed, forgotten, or worn as a badge of honor through hardship; in laying them bare (yet not raw), he seems to acknowledge that he misses the good things taken from him and wants them back. There is no greed in this wanting—greed comes from lack and a desire to be rid of it by any means. He is at peace with wanting. Perhaps this is why the memoir is always difficult for me to read. If there are things lacking in my life—and there are, as is the case for everyone—I have resolved never to want them. This must be greed too; wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.
The lanes described in his memoir—with flowers that never failed to blossom, with siblings and a mother who walked together day after day before illness and death disrupted them—are not so different from the paths I had known in Beijing. Garden Road was an asphalt road with ditches on both sides that flooded when it rained. There was no garden along the way, only wild grapes and Xanthium bushes and weeds known to me not by their names but by their changes through the seasons. It was safe as long as a child did not stray, and once, when my father was away for a nuclear test, my sister, five and a half then, walked forty-five minutes to where Garden Road joined a bigger street and shopped for vegetables. The path I took to the elementary school circled our apartment block, behind each window some grown-up keen to catch a child in a bad deed; cut through an open field where we hunted grasshoppers in summer; passed a scantily roofed outhouse—muddy on rainy days, fly-ridden in dry weather—which served the school as well as a nearby People’s Commune; and had a most threatening stretch—out of anyone’s sight, no longer than a hundred meters—between the outhouse and the school. In first grade my best friend and I were accosted there by a man with a knife on a winter afternoon, but we were able to escape, screaming all the way back to the school to alert the teachers. In fourth grade, when the friendship was no longer sturdy enough for us to walk home together, my friend was seized by another man with a knife and taken behind the outhouse, a misfortune much talked about, but the harm could not be undone, so nothing was ever done.
There must have been plenty of times when I had someone next to me on those paths. Before my friend and I drifted apart, we invented games to play on the way to and from school. Once my sister and I walked the entire distance of Garden Road to see a movie, a school event, to save the bus fare. We left an hour early and every ten minutes or so waved at a passing bus when our classmates called out to us. Once my grandfather—my mother’s father, who lived with us—took me to a district post office beyond Garden Road. He gave me a grand tour, including a counter where packages bundled in old pillowcases were examined and then sewn back together by an old woman in a green uniform. He also composed a message, on a card with green grids, to demonstrate how to send a telegram. ALL IS WELL DO NOT WORRY, it said, and was delivered to a telegrapher behind a pane, and a few minutes later a receipt was brought back, promising the telegram’s arrival later that evening. It was dispatched to a niece of my grandfather’s whom he had not been in touch with for twenty years.
These moments shared with others—to write about them is to revive feelings, but it is to leave those feelings behind that I write. It is the moments spent alone that are the preferred narrative
: I was happy walking by myself. It did not matter that there were men lurking behind the outhouse or exposing themselves with one hand while steering a bike with the other; older boys waiting to ambush me with rocks; a mean girl from my sister’s class who followed me with a list of insulting names she rotated daily (Meatball was one, Bighead Carp another). These moments were not forgotten because they formed the background of aloneness, which was an intensely gratifying experience. There was, I remember, a brick wall around a nursery school next to our apartment building, and I would circle the wall for a long time, poking at the centers of the bricks, convinced that in time each brick would bear a dent left by my finger, of the same shape and at the same height.
Willfulness is a strange optimist. It turns the inevitable into the desirable. If aloneness is inevitable, I want to believe that aloneness is what I have desired because it is happiness itself. It must be a miscomprehension—though I have been unwilling to give it up—that one’s life could be lived as a series of solitary moments. In between, time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance. That there is an opposite perspective I can only understand theoretically. The time line is also a repetition of one’s lapse into isolation. It’s not others who vanish, but from others one vanishes.
Willfulness is also a pessimist. It turns the undesired into the inevitable. The unhappiness I knew well—my mother’s shrill, my father’s reticent, my sister’s bitter—was to be endured as weather or national politics. Did we ever ask ourselves: Why are we so lonely, so proud, and so adamant about perfecting our pretense? We kept our secrets well, from the world and from ourselves, and out of fatalism we cultivated stoicism. For years I refused to see our unhesitating compliance with my mother’s behavior, not even when she announced, on the day I got married, that I had left her with only the hope for my divorce. It’s one of those moments that one repeats to oneself and others as a joke, along with the tale that the Johnson County judge who married us at a brief ceremony, in front of an American flag and the state flag of Iowa, with two friends as witnesses, later had an affair with the assistant district attorney, a scandal where scandals are scarce. Laughter, however inadequate, insulates one.
—
SOME OF MY earliest literary education came from a set of illustrated autobiographies of Maxim Gorky. The three palm-sized books—My Childhood, In the World, My Universities—abridged and supplemented with vivid ink drawings, were called little people’s books, though they were not for children. (It was a literary format that had made Shen Congwen, one of my favorite Chinese writers, lament the loss of literature in Communist China—even an illiterate person could flip through them, just as I started reading the Gorky autobiographies before I had learned any Chinese characters.) As a child, though, I obtained endless pleasure from these three books—my own possessions, and I owned very little. There was not a single dull page: Gorky’s grandfather beating his grandmother, his stepfather kicking his mother, his uncles convincing a kindhearted young man to carry a heavy cross to the graveyard and watching him get crushed to death without any remorse, Gorky being clubbed as an apprentice. Death happened every few pages: his father, his brother, his mother, a young man with consumption who used to hum melancholy tunes, friends and neighbors and strangers. The book’s messages—hardship, inequality, Gorky’s political awakening—all these were lost on me. What entertained me were the range of characters: ragpickers, rich relatives, sailors, townspeople, priests, icon painters, shop owners, longshoremen, widows, prostitutes, beggars, a one-armed man, a blind man, a cook who cried over the beauty of poetry, a beautiful woman who loaned Gorky books, a tyrannical bakery owner mourning his pigs poisoned by his hired hand. (What a strange introduction to Russian literature. Beginning with Gorky feels like climbing on top of a bungalow, not realizing that nearby lies the Great Wall of China.)
Rereading the autobiographies now, I can still recognize the allure of the books. Gorky goes through a life that maims and defeats others but always leaves him center stage, more elevated and heroic and charismatic with each adventure. There is no time to be wasted between one drama and the next; in fact, there is no life to be lived between dramas.
The time between dramas: Gorky happily edits out that space from his life; McGahern seems to find peace in that space for living and writing. I would be livid if I took Gorky’s position; I admire McGahern’s without understanding it.
—
WHAT IS PEACE, what is security? All I wish, when bleakness besets me again, is to be left alone, to curl up, and to stay still. I cried when I reread the ending of McGahern’s memoir the other day, with his mother and the lanes they had loved:
If we could walk together through those summer lanes, with their banks of wild flowers that “cast a spell,” we probably would not be able to speak, though I would want to tell her all the local news.
We would leave the lanes and I would take her by the beaten path the otter takes under the thick hedges between the lakes. At the lake’s edge I would show her the green lawns speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and trains her young. The otter whistles down the waters for the male when she wants to mate and chases him back again to his own waters when his work is done; unlike the dear swans that paddle side by side and take turns on their high nest deep within the reeds. Above the lake we would follow the enormous sky until it reaches the low mountains where her life began.
I wish I had left a part of me on those walks in China, and it could peek into this life and know that its resolve to stay a fugitive is wise. Instead, one holds on to smaller doses of that nowhereness: reading a book that keeps the world at bay for as long as the words last, making up stories about characters who care little about one.
I wonder if I am late in recognizing this: fatalism is not following the predestined path unquestioningly; it is at every turn making a defiant decision against one’s intuition. The part that could be so free and happy on its own is not fit to live among people. It strives in vain to articulate its right to be; it shies away from drama or feeling yet the avoidance only leads to melodrama; it compromises one, it shames one, it terrorizes one; it makes one’s life into a cautionary tale. But subtract it and one’s life becomes another cautionary tale. A life lived to forget is a life lived to remember, too.
—
ON MY SECOND day in Leitrim, I was interviewed onstage. One of the few things I remember talking about was McGahern’s country lanes that were still around, and the roads in Beijing that no longer remained. The auditorium, going up at a steep angle, was filled with readers who came back each year for the festival. When I described the places as McGahern described them, they murmured in consent. An old man said, the way you looked up when you talked, you reminded me of John. I was moved. There was no way for a Chinese woman to resemble an Irishman but for love and memory to say so.
After the interview, I met one of McGahern’s sisters. I said something about his books, and the talk went back to the country lanes. I’ll never forget them, I said.
And I’ll never forget your chicks, she said, speaking of the excerpt from my novella “Kindness” that I had read earlier:
When I was five, a peddler came to our neighborhood one Sunday with a bamboo basket full of spring chicks. I was trailing behind my father for our weekly shopping of rationed food, and when the peddler put a chick in my palm, its small body soft and warm and shivering constantly, I cried before I could ask my father to buy it for me. We were not a rich family: My father worked as a janitor, and my mother, ill for as long as I could remember, did not work, and I learned early to count coins and small bills with my father before we set out to shop. It must have been a painful thing for those who knew our story to watch my father’s distress, as two women offered to buy two chicks for me. My father, on the way home, warned me gently that the chicks were too young to last more than a day or two. I built a nest for the chicks out of a shoe box and ripped newspaper, and fed them water-softened millet grains
and a day later, when they looked ill, aspirin dissolved in water. Two days later they died, the one I named Dot and marked with ink on his forehead the first to go, followed by Mushroom. I stole two eggs from the kitchen when my father went to help a neighbor fix a leaking sink—my mother was not often around in those days—and cracked them carefully and washed away the yolks and whites; but no matter how hard I tried I could not fit the chicks back into the shells, and I can see, to this day, the half shell on Dot’s head, covering the ink spot like a funny little hat.
I have learned, since then, that life is like that, each day ending up like a chick refusing to be returned to the eggshell.
People often ask if the incident with the chicks happened to me. That I never answer the question is accepted as a coy acknowledgment that the episode is autobiographical. But I have never had a chick in my life. I did not desire, on those Sundays when I trailed behind my father with the ration book, to own anything. There was no outsider who knew our story. There was, however, a woman who had once tried to talk with me as though I were a grown-up. She was older than my parents, and I did not understand her singling me out. She embarrassed me. My mother and her friends laughed at the woman’s intention to start a friendship; I always crossed the street when I ran into her.
When one does not have to account for one’s own existence in it, however, the world offers abundant joy. The co-op, with a cluster of shops around a courtyard, was a crowded place, but there were enough curious sights for me to endure the pushing and yelling and sometimes fistfighting among strangers. At the general store, where I stood in a queue for soap and laundry detergent and matches and, rarely, half a kilo of animal crackers, there was an overhead transit system with motorized wires. The shop assistants attached the payments to the metal clips, the money traveled to the cashier, and the change and the receipt traveled back—how it happened so reliably I could not figure out. Behind another counter, a row of jars stood in line, arranged by size, the smallest one my height, each with an apparatus affixed to the top. When a customer handed a bottle to the assistant, he needed to raise a lever to release the right amount of liquid—soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, or cooking oil—into the bottle. The meat and fish department boasted the biggest cutting board, which traversed the entire shop. It was always cold and damp there, as it was always dry and warm where rice and flour and beans and cornmeal were sold. The last was my favorite stop, as my father would let me help him hold a cloth sack, its mouth snugly fit around a metal chute. When the assistant measured out the ration, she tipped over the metal pan, and with a dull puff and a cloud of fine dust the flour or the rice filled the bag, weighing down our hands.
