Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

by Yiyun Li

  To exist as fully as the world expects one to, yet to remain absent inwardly: not equipped with words to articulate the secret I nevertheless understood it at a formative age.

  When I left the auditorium, I wondered when and where and how I had gone astray from that intuition. Why are we told to seek out people? In forming attachments, does one become more than oneself, or does one lose an essential means of preserving oneself? The danger of forming an attachment—to a person, to a place, to a profession, to a cause, even to one’s own life—is that one can trick oneself into believing that an attachment has a reason, and worse, that the reason can be mistaken as a right.

  —

  WE GATHERED AT the dock, where we were to board a boat—Moon River, the boat I had seen the evening before—to the barracks at Cootehall, where McGahern grew up. His sister said farewell to us. Is she not going? I asked, and someone said that she had joined the excursion the first year of the festival, and it had proved too traumatic an experience after not having seen the barracks for decades.

  The Shannon widened as we went westward. Across the river there was a beer garden; drinkers waved and their waves were returned. A small boat sped past us, pulling a young man on water skis, but before we had time to appreciate his skill, he lost his balance. His companions went on obliviously, and the young man laughed, bobbing up and down in the water. Farther downriver, on both banks there were brand-new houses that had been left unfinished, or, if finished, unoccupied. All over Ireland it was a sad sight, these mansions deserted. Sadder still was to see horses—status animals during the boom years—abandoned, skinny, roaming in the wilderness.

  At Cootehall, and later, on the walk to Henry’s Bar—places that appeared in McGahern’s memoir—people came and talked with me. They pointed out the lanes, the buttercups blossoming in the evening sun; and at a cemetery, the graves of those said to be characters in McGahern’s novels, including two of my favorites, Amongst Women and By the Lake. Many of the festival participants had known him in person; others had been his readers for years. An old woman who had traveled from England said that her father had grown up not far from Cootehall. A man told me about two locals arguing who between them was the real person behind a character. When he asked me if I ever put people I knew into my books I shook my head. Never, never, never, I said with a fake shudder, and he laughed.

  Why write autobiographically? There must be a belief in some kind of freedom. For Gorky, the freedom seems to come from his ability to judge the world according to a system in which he holds a strong belief: right and wrong, good and bad, future and past, all presented in unmistakable contrast. For McGahern, who judges neither others (including his father) nor himself, what is the freedom? Though freedom, like originality, is curious only as a universal fantasy. How people endure the lack of freedom is more interesting to me than their pursuit of it. Besides, those who clamor for freedom, like those who pose for originality, can be rather predictable, too.

  But for those who wish to erase their selves by writing: Why write at all? I was working on a novel, the writing of it so intertwined with the rapid unraveling that I had started to view the book—in which a murder, halfheartedly intended, takes place—as a haphazard murderer of many good things in my life. But that, I knew too well, was to find an excuse for a dilemma that I wasn’t able to sort out. When I gave up science I had a blind confidence that in writing I could will myself into a nonentity. I had for a few years relished that status, living among the characters who did not know my existence. But how does one remain forever an emotional hanger-on when one wants the characters to live, if not better, or more honestly, or more wisely, at least more fully? Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.

  It was crowded in Henry’s Bar. Friends and acquaintances greeted one another. Drinks were passed over shoulders. After a while, when everyone was settled, people took the stage and read from McGahern’s memoir, some from the book, others having memorized the text. The readers followed one after the other, and then, ever so naturally and without an introduction, McGahern’s voice came in:

  In another week Mother came home. She was well and happy and went straight back to school. With her each morning we went up the cinder footpath to the little iron gate, past Brady’s house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the deep, dark quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill by Mahon’s shop to the school, and returned the same way in the evening. I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

  I must have been one of the few to have encountered that voice for the first time. The passage, which I had underlined many times in McGahern’s memoir, is an epiphany that only the most confident dreamers dare to claim. Did I envy McGahern? At that moment, yes, because I wanted to trust his words, yet I knew I did not. I, too, could feign such truth: I had often glided through life with deceiving tranquility; I had the confidence to put up a seeming as my being. That confidence, however, is the void replacing I. The moment that I enters my narrative my confidence crumbles. Can one live without what one cannot have—the absence of I, and the closeness to people that makes that absence impossible?

  —

  THE NEXT DAY an Irish writer showed me around the countryside. We drove past an IRA memorial, and half a mile farther an old couple making turf—with the good weather, she said, they would have a productive day. In a castle hotel we visited the McGahern Library. A golden plaque had been dedicated by the former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, and his name was defaced. Unhappiness about his role in the collapse of the Irish economy, it was explained, which reminded me of a teacher in middle school who had been disliked for her tireless preaching in the Theory of Communism class, and someone had carved her name on an ancient pavilion pillar in the Old Summer Palace adjacent to campus, a vandalism that led to a police investigation. When the news spread we all went to visit the pavilion during lunch break. In every protester there is a heart capable of gleeful childishness.

  We drove to see McGahern’s grave, where he is buried next to his mother near a small white chapel. Behind his and his mother’s stones there was a gate, which led to a shaded path and beyond, a handsome-looking house, half-hidden among well-groomed trees. I wondered if it was part of the church, and my guide said she thought not. Then it came back to me. When McGahern’s mother died, his father drew a plan for the plot himself, though with a mistake it blocked a path from the family house of the Dolans, who had donated the land to the church and had the privilege to come through their private path rather than through the congregation’s gates. Legal issues arose; the Dolans had to be appeased.

  I remember an old uncle of theirs vividly, Charlie Dolan, who had spent years in America and was fond of fishing. Most days in summer he passed our house in Corramahon on his way to and from Garradice. Whenever he caught a big fish he hung it from the handlebars of the bicycle even though the tail trailed in the dust and the body of the fish slapped awkwardly against his knee as he cycled along….It was a childish world. People knew his weakness…and Charlie was stopped at every turn of the road. The huge fish was admired in wonderment: it must have taken a near miracle to get such a monster up on the shore, and Charlie never failed to rise to the bait. This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.

  To recognize the path and the house and the story behind it—it was the closest to clarity I felt on that trip. Not peace, but solidity. An unmistakable event from someone else’s life had left unequivocal evidence. McGahern’s life was lived among his people, his books written among his people. His characters, real and fictional, are no better and no worse than their creator, who—again unlike many of his brilliant countrymen—wastes no time in seeking originality. “The people and the language and land
scape where I had grown up were like my breathing,” McGahern wrote toward the end of his memoir. It is only natural to return to the memories. There is relief in redrawing the boundary between suffering and feeling; there is joy, too.

  The paths I walked by myself in Beijing are gone. Even if the city had remained unchanged, I have turned away from the people and the language and the landscape. Homecoming, in my case, would only be meaningful followed by leave-taking. A permanent homecoming would be a resignation. To be among people—does that require one to be at home with others, to be at peace with oneself? But an agitated mind does not know any road to peace except the one away from home, which time and again exposes one to that lifelong phobia of attachment, just as to write betrays one’s instinct to curl up and hide. Every word one says, every word one writes, every dream and fear and hope and despair one reveals to others and to oneself—they all end up like chicks refusing to be returned to the eggshell.

  Memory Is a Melodrama from Which No One Is Exempt

  One of the most callous criticisms of Stefan Zweig’s suicide along with his wife Lotte came from Thomas Mann. “He can’t have killed himself out of grief, let alone desperation. His suicide note is quite inadequate. What on earth does he mean with the reconstruction of life that he found so difficult? The fair sex must have something to do with it, a scandal in the offing?”

  Death, except for someone entirely isolated, is always a personal moment made public. Suicide, among the most private decisions one can make, is often taken over by the public. Those who express strong feelings mistake themselves as the center of a story. The intense emotions around suicide—anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation—demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.

  One’s wish to die can be as blind and intuitive as one’s will to live, yet the latter is never questioned. A suicide can be dismissed as a drama gone awry and entering the realm of melodrama. If a tragedy makes us weep out of compassion and a comedy makes us laugh out of appreciation, a melodrama alienates and discomfits. When we cry, we cry under protest, suspicious of being manipulated; when we laugh, we laugh with the belief—doubtful—that we are beyond its absurdity. But this is a misunderstanding of melodrama. Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give—sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one’s expectation but its internal need to feel.

  My intention is not to defend suicide. I might have done so at other times in my life, but I have arrived at a point where defending and disputing my actions are the same argument. Everything I say is scrutinized by myself, not only the words and their logic but also my motives. As a body suffers from an autoimmune disease, my mind targets every feeling and thought it creates; a self dissecting itself finds little repose.

  In the ideal, argument is a commitment—both parties, by giving and taking, discover something new. But this belief is as naïve as a young person’s idea about the perfection of love. The possessiveness in human nature turns loving or arguing into something entirely different: winning, conquering, owning, destroying.

  The talent of argument becomes about finding the right rivals—those who can be awed or bullied into agreement—and dismissing those who cannot be as irrelevant. That talent needs an audience. The world will always quote Mann on Zweig’s death. Yet the latter’s silence prevails.

  There is another way to cope with the same autoimmune condition. A friend is good at arguing against herself from the perspective of others, even when she sees through the fallacy of their arguments. The mind, to avoid targeting itself, becomes two: one which, by aligning with others, is protected; and one which, by staying quiet, eludes being conquered. A self preserved by restraint is the self that will prevail.

  —

  MY SISTER HAD a classmate in college who was afflicted with lupus. She seemed sanguine about dying young, and indeed she had less than two years to live. Lying on her bunk bed in the dorm, she would talk about her boyfriend, who worked as a bodyguard for a wealthy family in Hong Kong, and the expensive dresses he bought her, which she was planning to distribute to her friends and classmates upon her death. When I read Elizabeth Bowen’s biography, I recognized the young woman’s impertinence in Bowen’s mother. When she was diagnosed with cancer in her forties, she talked cheerfully about her imminent death, only months away. The first time I met William Trevor, he told me where he would be buried. I visited the seaside Irish town the next summer. The trip was not made for sentimental reasons. I am still not much different from the person who watched unblinkingly the young woman in Beijing when she talked about the dresses that would outlast her. I have always believed that, between living and dying, from being to being no longer, there are secrets understood by those nearer death. I want to know them, too.

  But knowing is not understanding. There is a moment in the hospital that I return to, when a nurse chased me down the hallway because I could not sit through a morning meeting where everyone was to state an achievable goal for the day. She was a stern-looking woman, slim built with hair dyed platinum. You have to understand, she said, a suicide attempt is selfish. Someone close to me said it was irresponsible; another said manipulative. Yes, I know what you mean, I said to each of them. Understanding cannot be willed into existence. Without understanding one should not talk about feeling. One does not have the capacity to feel another person’s feelings fully—a fact of life, democratic to all, except when someone takes advantage of this fact to form a judgment. One never kills oneself from knowledge or understanding, but always out of feelings.

  —

  IN LIFE WE shun melodrama, as its audience and, more urgently, as participants. In its original meaning, melodrama was the music that accompanied speech or pantomime onstage. Its purpose continues to be to evoke feelings rather than to narrate plot or create characters. But feelings carry value like currency. People like to think they have control over their feelings in connection with others. I feel for you, I’m happy for you, I’m angry on your behalf, people say; or else they say, You don’t deserve my love, sympathy, respect, or hatred. These words reflect a status. Those who feel can stop doing so if they want; and they will, if their expectations are not met.

  When I was in the army—and for a time was in despair—I felt the only solution for life was the trigger of a machine gun. I could not bring myself to do it—though this could be a lie of memory, a revision to avoid other truths—because I was aware two people, whom I knew little, would have their careers and perhaps even lives destroyed by my action. The platoon leader and the training officer, who supervised the shooting drill, were both kind to me. They would not have had any idea of the melodrama playing out in my head. I can see clearly how I appeared to the world. My glasses had been broken in a combat drill, so I had to borrow a pair from a chemistry student for shooting practice. Her right lens had a similar prescription to mine, but the left lens was much stronger. At the range I would drape a handkerchief in front of my left eye to save myself from disorientation. A piratess, I remember laughing with a friend.

  After I left the hospital for the second time, I attended two days of volunteer training at a hospice service—to sit with the dying, as that was the only task legally allowed for a volunteer. Many speakers came: doctors, nurses, social workers, office managers, a spiritual healer, a chaplain, veteran volunteers, family members. My favorite speaker was a former ballet dancer, who started his talk with a song, the lyrics taken from an Emily Dickinson poem; when he finished singing, his pink shirt was drenched with sweat, and he left the audience in tears. My least favorite was the woman who ran the volunteer program. She was newly married and spent the time before the training and during the breaks showing a slideshow of her wedding and honeymoon. Isn’t he handsome? she asked, insisting on confirmation from the room. She also pointed out an old friend of the bridegroom, who, drunk before the ceremony ended, had cut and stolen a piece of her wedding cake. She made it
clear to this man to stay away from the marriage.

  Both tragedy and comedy allow us to experience solid emotions, which are possible to share. Sorrow becomes less excruciating, laughter more resonant. Melodrama puts us on guard. We are the uneasy enemies of our own melodramas as much as other people’s.

  —

  JUNE 2014. AS I write today, the world is inundated with images of and opinions on the Tiananmen Square massacre from twenty-five years ago. Everything is said with certainty. People, especially those watching a tragedy from afar, talk with such eloquence. Anger, grief, idolization, and idealization of a historical event full of discrepancies, untrustworthy characters calculating on both sides with people’s lives as betting chips, farces even—these feelings are readily expressed with an arrogance similar to Mann’s. Those who speak without understanding have no trouble finding center stage.

  When I was reading the news earlier, a random memory, which I had forgotten, returned to me. My sister was in medical school then, and went with her classmates to Tiananmen Square to help the students on hunger strike. From one of the visits she brought back a sun hat for me. Made of thin white muslin and shaped like a Victorian bonnet, it was called a Jane Eyre hat, and I had always wanted one. After the massacre, the hat vanished. No doubt my father, who had gone to a nearby hospital to count bodies the day after the bloodshed, was the one to have purged it. As an item donated to the protest it might incriminate my sister.