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

by Yiyun Li

  Like the memory of my father’s jogging, this incident only came back to me when I tried to answer the interviewer’s question. I can, in retrospect, reconstruct the father’s worry and guilt, his dismay at our inaction; I can question our silence, not out of malice or indifference, but the fear of drawing unnecessary attention to ourselves. We were transitioning out of childhood then. The world—and the world belongs largely to adults—is an untrustworthy place. To be caught by uncertainty is worse when noticed by others. But inevitably the moment comes when one has to differentiate oneself.

  For me, it was when, a month into the school year, I was chosen as a librarian’s assistant. Twice a week another student assistant and I stayed until five thirty, giving out books through a window to the many hands that fought to give us slips with Dewey numbers written on them (each student was allowed to put down five numbers at a time and was allowed to check out one book). After closing, we shelved the books, cleaned up the slips left on the floor, and then were allowed our privilege: we could check out two books.

  I had not been in a library until then. My literary education had consisted of ancient Chinese poetry from my grandfather’s bookshelf, which I had obsessively memorized, and novels, both Chinese novels and translations, serialized in newspapers, unreliably available because I could not get hold of the newspapers consistently. (I missed half of Resurrection because the second part was not serialized, a loss I took hard in third grade. I also missed a major part of David Copperfield, which I made up for by watching the British miniseries, newly introduced to China, at our neighbor’s place—we didn’t own a television set then.)

  Within a few months, I had finished all the books on the literature shelves (the 800s, as I began to think of them). They were of uneven quality, good only for the palate of a hungry mind. Not much is retained. In fact, I remember only two books.

  The first is an eighteenth-century novel in verse, The Tale of Renewed Connections (the translation of the title, which is mine, does not catch its essence entirely, though I prefer it to the title of the TV adaptation, Eternal Happiness). The author, Chen Duansheng, was born to an affluent family of literary pedigree. She began to compose the book at seventeen or eighteen to entertain herself, her mother, and her sister, and within two years finished sixteen volumes. When her mother died, she stopped writing for ten years, and only resumed when her husband was exiled for a political reason. She died in her forties, leaving the novel unfinished. Two other authors—less talented, as I was quick to judge—wrote three more volumes. Except for the first reading, I always stopped at the end of volume seventeen. One ought to be loyal to whom one deems a friend on the page.

  The book can be interpreted in many ways—progressive, visionary, revolutionary—but I was not concerned about such things at the time. What captured me was the never-ending drama. A daughter from a wealthy family dressed as a man so she could travel freely and receive a man’s education; she befriended two young men, one the future emperor of China, the other her future fiancé. Entangled in the love triangle was the upheaval of the time. The heroine’s father was persecuted by political enemies; in order to save him, she entered the civil service. Predictably she ranked number one in the Palace Examination, with the surprising consequence of being chosen to become an imperial son-in-law. Her bride turned out to be her long-lost friend, who had tried to kill herself out of heartbreak, and had been saved and adopted by the emperor’s uncle and made into a princess.

  I was twelve and was developing a melodramatic streak despite a reputation of being aloof and bookish. I copied and memorized passages from the book, quoting them to myself in all kinds of moods. I felt an acute loss at not being a contemporary of the poetess, as though it would have changed the course of the book’s life, or, even, the poetess’s life. It strikes me now that invisibility, a prerequisite for my tireless conversations with dead authors, is the opposite of what my younger self desired. This wish to find a place in an author’s life and make a difference to a book’s fate: it must have taken bravery and naïveté to trespass.

  Any young mind has to fall in love with a book once to learn how to read. My infatuation, fortunately, was ended by another book, written, in contrast to Chen Duansheng’s, at the end of the author’s life. I wonder who purchased for the library the thin, stern-looking volume—Prose Poems by Ivan Turgenev. There was not another book that could match its quality, and it was so rarely requested that against the rules, I renewed it week after week. I did not know anything about Turgenev other than that he was Russian. There were only his words, about conversing skulls, meditative mountains, friends stabbing each other in the back, a woman standing poised before her execution, the author contemplating his own death, and fleeting moments of youth and happiness. I did not know the book had been written toward the end of his career, throughout which he had been criticized for betraying his country, his coolness toward the progressive and the revolutionary, and his insistence on being an apolitical writer.

  My mind was porous then, so perhaps the encounter with Turgenev did take place too early. Or perhaps the encounter happened at exactly the right time, a floodgate installed to keep out hopes and wishes indiscriminatingly.

  —

  A FRIEND, WHO had called me every day while I was in the hospital, continued to call daily afterward. Sometimes I could say nothing, only weep. You must write, she said all the time. I can’t, I said. Your characters deserve to live, she said. I don’t care about them anymore, I said. But I still care about them, she said. This conversation repeated itself, and then one day she suggested that we read Sense and Sensibility together. A few days later, she sent a message quoting Elinor’s plea to Marianne, who refused to be mitigated in her grief: Exert yourself.

  Where does one find that self to exert? Only by excluding it did the meaning of exertion become clear to me. My life during this period, other than taking care of my family, was lived almost entirely in reading. I reread everything by Turgenev on my bookshelf: his novels and stories and prose poems and essays and letters, and two biographies, including one by V. S. Pritchett. (I have always been partial to novelists writing biographies—Pritchett, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland.) This concentrated reading caused a small shift in my mind. What that shift is, and whether it is real, remain to be confirmed by time, but it feels as though in my long acquaintanceship with Turgenev I have finally come to a place where I can see him as someone from the distant past, the past to which he belonged, and the past in which I read him—as a middle-school student in Beijing, and as a new immigrant to America.

  Rereading his collected letters, I came across a wine stain from a meal eaten alone in an empty hotel restaurant in Vancouver. After the meal I rehearsed with a jazz group in a dark theater. I could not hear my voice at all while reading. When I finished, one of them played on a bamboo flute a slow tune: If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone; you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

  “Five Hundred Miles”—which I first heard in Beijing as a teenager, which a platoon mate played on a cheap wooden flute during a march across central China, which I listened to after coming back from the hospitals—the song, like these memories, like Turgenev’s books, belongs to a distant past now.

  “Oh, my dear Tolstoy, if you knew how difficult I find things and how sad I am!…May God spare you the feeling that life has passed by and at the same time has not begun yet,” wrote Turgenev in a letter. He was forty. Much of his major work was yet to be written. His decades-long quarrel with Tolstoy had not yet begun (the following year he wrote to a friend: “I have closed all my accounts with Tolstoy; as a person he no longer exists for me”). In another five years he would meet Flaubert—a friendship, more a kinship, that would last seventeen years, until Flaubert’s death.

  It would have to be either arrogance or cowardice that made a man, intellectually active and physically fit, say that his life had ended. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei, after losing his first wife in childbirth, “thou
ght over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion, that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.” He was thirty-one and had not met Natasha, the true love of his life.

  It is not an unfamiliar story. What Turgenev bemoaned throughout his youth and middle age—that life had passed without having begun—was precisely what I had needed to hear when I first encountered him in the school library. All children require a system to stop being children. Fatalism beyond questioning became for me that system. There was the solace in imagining myself back to the period of Chen Duansheng or Turgenev or all those who had come before me. There was the advantage in believing I was old already because it released me from having to be young. There was the possibility of death, which allowed one to bypass digressions into a life that had to be lived in detail. Pritchett called Turgenev’s pessimism absolute. The absoluteness—whether it is pessimism or optimism or fatalism—is the most effective defense against what haunts one.

  —

  WHAT HAUNTS, BEFITTING the word’s origin, is home. Varvara Petrovna, Turgenev’s mother, reigned over the household with pride and rage. His father, like the father in First Love, married for pecuniary gain, was unfaithful in the marriage, and died young. Ivan Turgenev was the younger of two sons and his mother’s favorite. When his brother, Nikolai, married against their mother’s wish, she cut him off and let him struggle on a clerk’s salary to support his wife and three children. After years of effort on Ivan’s part to reconcile his brother and mother, she arranged for the grandchildren to be brought out to the street in St. Petersburg, looked at them, and left. When the three children died in the same year she remained indifferent to Nikolai’s loss.

  Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child. I wonder if, even for the most uncharitable parent, there is a child whose role is to be the chosen one, and to be beaten when he cannot return the love at a reciprocal level. Varvara Petrovna loved Ivan with a vengeful and violent passion. “I alone conceived you,” she wrote to him when he traveled abroad. “You are an egoist of egoist. I know your character better than you know yourself….I prophesy that you will not be loved by your wife.”

  Turgenev lived most of his adult life abroad, an abandoner in his mother’s eyes as well as in the eyes of many of his countrymen. But how else can one live with what haunts one? I don’t even need to lay my eyes on you to know everything about you because you came from my body, my mother often said when I was growing up.

  —

  I SHIVER WHEN reading about a mother full of wrathful and possessive love. The thought that not all mothers are like that more and more is becoming a solace to me. There was Chen Duansheng’s mother, who raised her two daughters as poets at a time when education was considered damaging to feminine virtue. It was reassuring to see that John McGahern was buried next to his mother. When I met a friend’s parents, despite my theoretical understanding, it was extraordinary to see them interact with natural closeness. The fact that I had found it extraordinary made me cry afterward.

  But one cannot have a different biography. One cannot find consolation in revision. One cannot relive age twelve to unread Turgenev. On the phone my father suggested, with a quantum physicist’s mystic illogic and a fatalist’s pure logic, that our difficulties be put into a new light. Who knows what we did in our past lives to others, he said; what we have is what we deserve.

  How do we live with what we have, unhaunted? During the rioting of the Paris Commune, Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: “Oh, we have hard times to live through, those of us who are born spectators.” But people are not born spectators—they choose to be. It is a decision made for the sake of living.

  Turgenev never married. He spent much of his life in love with Pauline Viardot, a leading opera singer of the time (“that ugly Gypsy,” deplored his mother), arranging his time—from Paris to Baden to London and back to Paris—to be close to her. He became friends with her husband and collaborated with him on translation projects. He asked the couple to adopt his illegitimate daughter and renamed her Paulinette after Pauline. When Pauline’s stage career ended and she turned to composing operettas, Turgenev provided libretti.

  Turgenev’s talent was as a witness. His letters to Pauline and Flaubert included accounts of historical and everyday events. Writing from Paris about the revolution of 1848, he observed: “I was also struck by the way the hot-chocolate and cigar vendors moved around the ranks of the crowd. Greedy, pleased, and unconcerned, they had the look of fishermen hauling in a heavily laden net.” On July 7, 1865, a scorching day in Washington, D.C., the hanging of Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt—conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—drew crowds, and a reporter similarly noticed that “outside the prison, a different atmosphere prevailed. Cake and lemonade vendors were happily selling their wares.” With the security of distance, life can be looked at with curiosity—such is the comfort of a spectator.

  —

  FOR MANY YEARS I carried with me William Trevor’s Two Lives, a collection of two novellas, “Reading Turgenev” and “My House in Umbria,” the former my favorite work by Trevor. In their fictional reality the two protagonists have little in common: a Protestant Irishwoman from a small town who has chosen to spend more than thirty years in an asylum; and an Englishwoman with a handsome house in Umbria, a dubious past, and a shadowy present. A meeting between them would be unlikely.

  That Turgenev would be read and memorized by an Irishwoman in an asylum is not far from his being singled out in a middle-school library in Beijing. One could easily give meaning to the serendipity of reencountering him in Trevor’s work, though to do so is foolish. Connections can always be created, an artificial system of symbols and patterns. But life, which defies interpretation, eludes cliché.

  I stopped carrying Two Lives with me after the hospital stays. I can’t explain why. I was reading only dead authors at the time. Perhaps it was to resist medical advice and to isolate myself further. I distrusted all things solid in my life then. One afternoon, I sat on a bench with my younger son, waiting for his brother to come out of a class. We were not talking, as often we do not, but I was aware of his comfort in putting his hand in mine and keeping it there as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It must be, but it occurred to me that I didn’t understand it. I could approximate understanding, but it would be only that of an anthropologist.

  —

  TO PLACE TWO writers together because of similar details in their biographies reveals one’s motivations and limitations.

  Turgenev is mentioned a single time in Marianne Moore’s letters. When she was eighteen, during a visit to New York City (a trip she called her “sojourn in the whale,” her first contact with working artists and poets out in the world), she noticed his work next to Molière’s in a bookcase at an artist’s house. There is no reason to believe Turgenev’s work mattered to Moore. One could imagine her disapproval of his indiscreet obsession with a married woman. One could imagine, too, his frustration with someone so impregnably upright. He would not have quarreled with her well, as he did with Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

  I began to read Moore’s letters after I saw, by chance, an often quoted line from her poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.” I must have written something similar in Chinese in another life; in fact, I knew I had, and had lived as a subscriber to that belief. One makes oneself a rebel and a castaway simultaneously when renouncing a belief.

  I was reading the letters and journals of several writers, and it did not matter to add another dead person. Their banalities, more than the brilliant thoughts and words, soothed me. Even the dullest entry or the most mundane correspondence pointed to an end. I have given up on many novels that bore me but I have never given up following a writer’s journey in letters or journal midway.

&nbs
p; Yet I did not find consolation in my own banalities. The days, slow because I was not writing, were measured by minutes, recorded in a journal because I wanted to understand how to exert oneself. An hour of weeping could be reduced to half an hour, to fifteen minutes; an undistracted reading of ten minutes could double or triple. Writing fiction is about understanding how time passes, years ago I had said to a friend. What I had not realized was that time could also stand still. Ten years passed in a few sentences for Maupassant’s heroine. Yet to stay clear of any destructive impulse by keeping a deranged pen moving in the journal, I would often find, twenty pages later, that five minutes barely passed on the clock.

  In a letter to a disheartened friend, Moore wrote:

  Whatever the problem, we must elude the sense of being trapped—even if all one can say to one’s self is, “if not now, later.”…If nothing charms or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, “If not now, later” and not mope. I never fully succeed and am beginning to think I never shall; still, the automatic sense of participation, brings one along.

  The automatic participation of life: I held on to that idea as a fake talisman. I did not believe that later would be any different from now, but I liked the sound of her phrase.

  —

  LIKE TURGENEV, MOORE never married. He considered marriage a catastrophe for art. Her poem “Marriage” opens by calling marriage “an institution” and “enterprise,” but even earlier she had written, at twenty-four, in a letter to H.D.: “(There is no such thing as a prudent marriage;) marriage is a Crusade; there is always tragedy in it.”

  The parallel between the biographies of Moore and Turgenev is easily noticeable. Mary Warner, Moore’s mother, separated from her husband shortly after Moore’s birth, and he spent much of the rest of his life in a sanatorium for delusional monomania. Mary raised Moore and her older brother, Warner, by herself. Like Turgenev’s brother, Warner married against their mother’s wish. Unlike Varvara Petrovna and her infernal rage, Mary displayed enough magnanimity, though she was barely tolerant of her daughter-in-law. “My crime is that while I would count it nothing to die for you, I have refused to live for you,” Warner wrote to his mother shortly after his marriage. Often I come back to that fortissimo line. Not everyone born to a tyrannical mother has the mental clarity and strength to articulate this decision.