by Yiyun Li
Melodrama is that Jane Eyre hat. To make sense of the memory I would have to go through decades of history; I would have to intrude into other people’s pasts. Nevertheless it would be a futile effort. I could parse tragedy and comedy on all levels—national and familial and personal—yet the Jane Eyre hat would remain elusive. I would never be able to explain why its memory made me weep.
That flimsy object could be turned into something more than it was—a symbol or a metaphor; it would become much less than what it was. Melodrama, stubborn, refuses such transformation.
—
TO ARGUE FOR and against melodrama, as with suicide, is to argue against myself. As one in the audience, I have been suspicious. I have occupied melodrama, too. Yet this experience is what makes me not dismiss melodrama. To understand it, I offer this hypothesis: memory is melodrama; melodrama preserves memory.
Memory is a collection of moments rearranged—recollected—to create a narrative. Moments, defined by a tangible space, are like sculptures and paintings. But moments are also individual notes of music; none will hold still forever. In the instant they are swept up in time—in that shift from space to time, memory is melodrama.
Yet melodrama has not much chance to survive. Not brave enough in that instant, we miss the music and are left to replace it with interpretation. If we do capture the music we regret the action—it is hard to live with melodrama. Time brings an audience—external critics and censoring self, adept at tainting, diminishing, or even erasing the melodrama. But time, that fatal enemy of memory, presents itself as an ally when memory agrees to be excised and spliced into optimized existence. The music turns less unbearable, more fragmented; what remains is an altered score.
In the end, memory has two forms, neither exempt from distortion: as melodrama and as adaptation. One holds on to the latter so the former does not make a shipwreck of one’s mind. Shorn of the melodrama, though, what does one have but an empty life of busyness?
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ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1940, the SS City of Benares, a British ship heading to Canada, was attacked by a German U-boat. The passengers included ninety children, and seventy-seven of them were lost. This ended the British government’s wartime evacuation of children overseas. Not on the ship and thus not lost was Eva Altmann, age eleven, who had at about the same time boarded another ship that was headed to New York. Eva was the niece of Lotte Zweig. By then the Zweigs—having been uprooted by the Nazis and having migrated from Austria to England to New York and eventually to Brazil—had settled in Petrópolis, where they would live until they committed suicide two years later.
The Zweigs—who had arranged the papers for Eva’s travel and secured a host family for her (“you may be both sure that we will look after her and bring her back grown-up and perhaps with a Yankee-accent,” Stefan wrote to her parents)—received cables informing them of Eva’s safe arrival just before the news of the SS City of Benares reached them. “The shock of reading in the paper the news of the disaster, was as great for us as it was for you, and I can understand how you feel about it,” Lotte wrote to her brother and sister-in-law. “That thought haunted us for days. Fortunately your cable had arrived the night before….Well, at least she is safe…”
That thought was unspecified in the letter—the descent into hell does not have to be imagined fully. Lotte moved on to describe the exotic, peaceful landscape of Petrópolis. Well, at least she is safe. The sentence, both candid and off-putting, stood out when I read the letter. This was between the two hospital stays; I often saw in people’s efforts to make someone feel better a dismissal.
The sentiment expressed in that phrase, well, at least, is familiar, in wartime as well as in everyday life. Around the same time as the sinking of the SS City of Benares, a mother in Shanghai lost her young son to diphtheria. Well, at least, no doubt people pointed out—if they took the trouble to console her—she had two older children, and a new one on the way.
A glimpse into the depth of other people’s misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another’s suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.
The Zweigs’ letters were written in English. The recipients—Lotte’s brother, sister-in-law, and mother—lived in England then, and letters in German would have been checked more closely. To read Stefan’s letters in the original language appeals to me, as I have only read his books in translation. To read Lotte’s words is important, too; after all, she made the decision to end her life at a rather young age.
Their letters from Brazil, especially the later ones, are shrouded in melancholy. Toward the end of their lives, several times Lotte describes how they sit on their front steps between eleven and noon, watching, often in vain, for the postman to bring letters from Europe and America. “We have the impression to be still more away from you than ever,” Stefan wrote. Waiting is treacherous. Rather than destroying one with the clean stroke of catastrophe, it erodes the foundation of hope. “We are looking every days [sic] through all the newspapers for good news,” Stefan wrote around the time when he was arranging for Eva’s travel. The next year, working on a biography of Montaigne he would not finish, he wrote: “It is good to read Montaigne in these days and all those who give good lessons in resignation.”
In resigning, Stefan gave up belief in measurability—there is no hierarchy in suffering. In the South American letters, he often reminds himself that his position—away from the war and with a place to write—is to be envied. But how do we compare the despair of Stefan Zweig—who attended a carnival in Rio a few days before his death and expressed his “mixed feelings to assist to [sic] such fantastic explosion of joy in a time where nearly in the whole world explosions kill people”—to the despair of a fifteen-year-old in China, who, seeing little hope in a life trapped in a village, drank weed killer? Her last days were photographed by the media, from a girl on a stretcher to a body wrapped up in a plastic sheet.
“There is in reality not much to tell as our private life is of no importance now and the public events have enough publicity,” Stefan Zweig wrote on December 31, 1941. To take one’s private suffering into one’s own hands: Is it not a rebellion, too, a refusal to have one’s life measured against other lives?
—
A FEW DAYS before the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, I was interviewed on a radio program. It was meant to be about books, but for a while I was asked to recall how the protest in April progressed to bloodshed in June. Surely someone could have done the research beforehand, a friend said afterward. No, it’s not about research, I replied; it’s about having a historical event placed in a personal tale. In the following days I refused several interview requests. “All that I can say has been said,” I wrote in my last email. “I hope you understand that I have nothing more to add.”
The truth is, my impatience comes from the fact that what can be said, on a radio program or on TV, is always a simplification or a distortion. The desire for an individual’s experience to be connected to something larger comes from both the audience and the actor, and the performance is evaluated by its relevance to the time. One either has to submit oneself to that script, or else choose to only speak on one’s own terms.
In any interview it is impossible to talk about the Jane Eyre hat. There are other memories that cannot be told. When we returned to school a week after the bloodshed, a friend who lived near the square made us laugh with all sorts of tales. The least harmful one was about her uncle, who would open a can of Coca-Cola when her grandparents were not paying attention. Coca-Cola, or any soft drink, was a rarity at the time, and the popping would make the old couple jump from nervousness as gunshots had. Was it cruel of us to laugh? After that summer she left the country to join her parents in Germany, and later sent us a package wi
th chocolates and a cassette tape, on which she had recorded stories about her new life. Three of us listened to her monologue, of accidentally locking herself in the wrong restroom at the airport, of stepping into dog waste while ogling an apple on a pushcart, of going to school without knowing any German (her parents had arranged for her to attend night school in Beijing to learn German, but she had either skipped classes or brought trashy romance novels instead).
When it was our turn to record a cassette to send her, we stalled. Beijing was the same city, windy and dusty on that November evening; high school was the same place, some classmates asked about her news, others had already forgotten her. The summer before, with martial law enforced, the four of us used to ride bicycles to a post where a soldier who had a crush on her was stationed with his troop. When he got a half-hour leave, we stood at a street corner, watching our friend lecture him about the evildoing of the People’s Liberation Army. The boy soldier, not yet twenty and with a red face, pleaded with her not to endanger herself. Martial law continued into the next year, but after her departure we did not revisit the post. Unable to find stories to make our friend laugh, we ate the chocolates and never sent her anything we had intended to.
—
I HAVE, FROM an early age, been familiar with one person’s memory. When she was born, her mother, having lost a son to diphtheria, had already gone mad. The girl took care of her mother between ages ten and eighteen, while her father and her older siblings pursued their careers elsewhere. During those years there was a young love, a student who had to drop out of nursing school because of tuberculosis. He rented a room across the courtyard from the mother and daughter. The scene—her sitting in front of her window, halfheartedly doing her schoolwork while he rests his arms on his windowsill and talks with her—this scene had been described to me many times. It is so familiar it may as well have come from a Zweig story. One has no trouble understanding it. The girl loses her mother, who dies in an asylum; the girl also loses the young man to an early death. But external misfortune—illness, epidemic, war, natural disaster—is not melodrama. Melodrama is absolute loyalty to the original moment.
It has been pointed out by some critics that my fiction is not political enough. A young man confronted me at a reading, questioning my disinterest in being a political writer. A journalist in China told me that most writers believe in their historical responsibility toward our time. Why can’t you live up to that expectation? they ask, and my reply, if I were to give one, is this: I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.
Melodrama is never political. It’s not my responsibility to manipulate the memories of my characters. It is presumptuous of anyone, other than the characters themselves, to label their experience, or to impose meanings upon their memories. Characters who do so have agendas, yet they are not my agenda. My curiosity is to watch how memory, both as melodrama and as controlled narrative, lives on in time. Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally and reliable annihilator?
—
SOMETIMES I IMAGINE that writing is a survey I carry out, asking everyone I encounter, in reality or in fiction: How much of your life is lived to be known by others? To be understood? How much of your life is lived to know and understand others? But like all surveys the questions are simplifications. How much does one trust others to be known, to be understood; how much does one believe in the possibilities of one person’s knowing and understanding another.
In life we seek like-minded people despite—or because of—the limit of knowing and understanding. We do so to feel less lonely, though it brings a different kind of loneliness. In seeking others, inevitably we try to control an interaction. We insist on being known only as the version we prefer to attach to ourselves. A narrative catering to others is not far from memories revised for ourselves: both move us away from the quicksand of feelings. And those who do know us beyond our chosen version—by proximity, by intuition, by observation—must provoke similar discomfort in us as melodrama does. Does our wariness of melodrama contribute to our wish to escape their eyes, or is it the other way around, that in avoiding meeting those who have more access to our interior world than we are willing to allow, we can feel momentarily protected from our own memories?
Much of life’s complication is that in many important relationships, one becomes more than one. A child, running along the street to search for her mad mother mocked by strangers, is also the mother’s guardian. A father, speaking of death as a relief, unknowingly becomes a coconspirator when the child has already found solace in the same thought. In friendships and loves beyond childhood—do they happen by luck or by will?—in these relationships, we choose to present more than one self, and with these multiple versions are memories suitable for one version but not the other. With these conflicted memories, relationships take on an unexpected element of melodrama, as none of the controlled narratives stay unchallenged. Shared memory could become shunned; though oftentimes it is shunned memory that connects one to another.
Only in the most extraneous or contract-bound interactions is there the possibility that each person takes up only one role agreed upon, and in these situations memory can be overwritten. One may also have a less complicated relationship with a book. The book is timeless; one has only to account for one’s own changing in time.
To be more than one, to be several, and to live with the consequence, is inevitable. One can err the opposite way, and the belief in being nothing used to seem to me the most logical way to live. Being nothing is being invisible and replaceable; being nothing to others means remaining everything to oneself. Being nothing is one way to battle the autoimmune condition of the mind, and this is closest to my friend’s silence. Yet silence is not melodrama, or at least it is not presenting itself to be.
—
STEFAN ZWEIG HAS been rediscovered in America in recent years, but to me he is associated with the 1980s, when I read him tirelessly as a teenager. In one of my favorite novellas, “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” the recipient of the letter, a famous writer and womanizer, does not recognize the sender, a woman who claims to have loved him all her life. She was his neighbor as a young girl and watched him live a busy life among women. Later, he mistook her for a prostitute. She bears his child, who dies in the flu epidemic of 1918; she, about to die herself, writes the letter to narrate her lifelong love.
It is a melodramatic story in the sense in which melodrama is commonly used—it is not surprising that it has been adapted into films in several languages—but Zweig elevates the woman from a mere cliché by granting her a fate that most dare not meet. She does not deceive herself by finding dignity in her despair. “Such purposeless affliction,” she says of her life, yet without regret.
When I first read the novella at fourteen, I was enamored of the woman’s valiant loyalty. I now see what I missed. Rather than a story of unrequited love, it is a story about melodrama’s transgression. The woman accuses the man of “almost inhuman forgetfulness,” yet the necessity to forget is only human. What is truly inhuman is the woman’s refusal. She has the courage to keep her melodrama intact; the callousness to imprison another person in it. This is the cruelty of melodrama—like suicide, it neither doubts nor justifies its right to be.
More damaging than becoming a victim of political or historical turmoil is becoming the casualty of someone else’s memory. At the end of the novella, the man shudders. Who, then, lives in a real sorrow: the woman, who has maintained melodrama as the only form of her memory, or the man, who has been, and will always be, imprisoned by another person’s remembering?
I am unfairly prejudiced against the woman because, unlike at sixteen, I am wary of the damage a person’s memory can do. Do you know the moment I die your father will marry someone else? my mother used to whisper to me when I was
little. Do you know I cannot die because I don’t want you to live under a stepmother? Or else she would be taken over by an inexplicable rage, saying that I, the only person she loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not love her enough. Why did you curse me so, Mother; why did you not stop her cursing, Father? Though the truth is, I do not want to know the answers. I resent even thinking about the questions—what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.
There is a defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is. In his memoir Ways of Escape, Graham Greene reminisces about the first film he saw at six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen—and the music offscreen. “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded….That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.” Greene is the only writer I have read who acknowledges that he not only enjoys melodramas, but also wants to write them. Me, too! I wrote in the margin. It is the only time I have admitted my ambition, albeit to a dead man. It does not matter that I may fall short. To capture a moment—of life, of history—is less a reason to write than to return to confront the melodrama, to understand how illusions beget illusions, memories eulogize memories.
