by Yiyun Li
It was the same type of black rotary we had back at the apartment complex, and my sister was on the phone. It was the first long-distance call I had received in my life. The next time would be four years later, when an American professor phoned to interview me. I still remember the woman, calling from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, asking questions about my interests in immunology, talking about her research projects and life in America. My English was good enough for me to understand half of what she said, and the scratching noises in the background made me sweat for the missed half.
Yet what did my sister and I talk about on that New Year’s Eve? In abandoning my native language I have erased myself from that memory. I have often been asked if—or else told that—English allows me the freedom of expression. As if in taking up another language one can become someone new. But erasing does not stop with a new language, and that, my friend, is my sorrow and my selfishness. In speaking and in writing in an adopted language I have not stopped erasing. I have crossed the line, too, from erasing myself to erasing others. I am not the only casualty in this war against myself.
In an ideal world I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking, and thinking alone. I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words. To speak when one cannot is to blunder. I have spoken by having written—this book or any book; for myself and against myself. The solace is with the language I chose. The grief, to have spoken at all.
Either/Or: A Chorus of Miscellany
Everything a writer produces is posthumous.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Once someone followed me across a parking lot after a reading, insisting that I should be not a writer but a stand-up comedian. Once an interviewer told me I was “well mannered” considering how dark some of my characters were. Once someone mentioned to a friend that she had thought I was “a little polite immigrant” and was surprised when I turned out to be “feisty” at an event she attended. Too often people ask why I write about melancholy and loneliness and despondency while I appear to be such a happy person.
Happiness and bleakness are not Orion and Scorpius, unable to occupy the same space in one’s emotional sky. Darkness has little to do with good manners; feistiness is irrelevant to politeness. I never set out to write about melancholy and loneliness and despondency. I keep my self to myself and I do not impose on my characters’ fates; among them I am as private as I am in life. The posthumous reputation of one’s words, truthful or misleading, is a eulogy given by others.
Who is this reader we talk about and start to resent before we even meet him?
—a student from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
A writer and a reader should never be allowed to meet. They live in different time frames. When a book takes on a life for a reader it is already dead for the writer.
It is preposterous for the writer or the reader to trespass, yet both sides often dismiss the border set by the characters: when a writer insists on his presence (on the page, between the lines) to dictate how his work is to be read; or when a reader reads without true curiosity about the characters, but with a goal of judging the writer.
I have read your article very attentively. It is rather difficult for an author to judge fairly a critical analysis of his own works—I must confess that I, for instance, find always the praise too great and the blame too weak. I do not attribute this impression to diffidence or modesty: it is perhaps one of the many disguises which self-love enjoys in.
—Turgenev to Henry James, on the latter’s review of Turgenev’s work
Diderot has said somewhere: “Avant sa mort l’homme suit plusieurs fois son propre convoi.” [“A man follows his own funeral procession several times before he dies.”] And now I have had to walk behind my own literary coffin.
—Turgenev to his brother, on his contemporaries’ attacks on Virgin Soil
A successful writer, who lives in isolation, told me that for a decade he had written privately and entertained the idea of accumulating his life’s work in a drawer. At his death people would discover his genius, he imagined, but he would not be around to be responsible for his words.
Perhaps only an absolute kind of self-love justifies such a belief. Most of us don’t seek this extremity. Without life there would not be death. Is it bravery or cowardice that a writer consoles himself with this thought when he parades after his literary coffin?
Author of Chinese Origin Wins Big Prize in UK; Accused of Selling China to Court Biased Westerners
—news report, April 2015
It was the first real spring day after a long Midwestern winter. I was browsing news websites, both in English and in Chinese, in a sunny hotel lounge in Chicago. Returning to that city was like returning to one’s youth. When I first arrived in America, I had traveled there for an immunology conference. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and I stood on Michigan Avenue, watching Americans watching the parade, amazed that they would volunteer to attend such a festivity with unconcealed happiness. I had been to celebrations and parades in Tiananmen Square, too, though they had all been political assignments. Still, some memories bring a sense of loss for Beijing. The giant portraits—two stories high—along Chang’an Boulevard: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, the first four foreigners’ names and faces every child in my generation had learned by heart. Nostalgia does not always align with politics.
I was thinking about noting that feeling in my journal when I clicked the link to the article about the Chinese writer, and was confronted by my own name and face.
The inevitability of a full circle: one writes to escape the omniscient voice that defines one, only to come to the same omniscient voice that takes the liberty to define one’s work as well as one’s self.
Perhaps the greatest pressure on the writer comes from the society within society: his political or religious group, even it may be his university or his employers. It does seem to me that one privilege he can claim, in common perhaps with his fellow human beings, but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty….Disloyalty is our privilege. But it is a privilege you will never get society to recognize. All the more necessary that we who can be disloyal with impunity should keep that ideal alive.
—Graham Greene to Elizabeth Bowen
I am used to being seen by some Chinese—both in the West and in China—as a cultural traitor. Why can’t she write in Chinese? people ask; if she doesn’t write in Chinese, what right does she have to write about our country?
The collective feelings of a group are oftentimes more fragile than an individual’s feelings. I feel little remorse when a group of people, out of hurt feelings, accuse me of any sin. Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.
The individual does not fight external enemies; it is with itself and its love that it fights it out, of its own accord.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Before I left Chicago my mother called and quoted the negativity in China, which had been reported to her by my sister. The thought then occurred to me that the news must have been seen by my husband, too, who visits the same Chinese news websites as I do. To know that my family would witness my name being abused: What are my obligations to them?
Writing is a confusing business. One’s inner clock, set to an exclusively private time, is bound only to what one writes. Life is lived in a different time zone. Caught in between is one’s family. To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.
I have so many stories to tell you. I think you should write a book about them yet you have no interest in them.
—My mother on the phone
I don’t think that’s what she wants.
—My father on the phone
Years ago, when I was defending a collection of essays as a thesis, a writer on the committee asked about my mother’s absence from the narrative. A m
other is not always central to a story, I said; perhaps my mother is only a flat character. If that’s the case, he said, we would appreciate learning it. That she is a flat character? I said. No, that you think she is, he corrected me.
Not writing, like writing, can be disloyalty, too. If one turns away from the storytelling of one’s mother, is it worse than turning away from one’s motherland and mother tongue?
What’s interesting to me is writers’ drive to express themselves. Not all people have such desire.
—My husband
Is it really to express myself that I write? Not if I think about what it is in myself that needs to be expressed: hardly anything new. This tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.
Stories I find difficult to tell: a year into college my mother quit school and moved to Beijing to be near her mother, who was to die within a year. Having broken the residency and education ruling, my mother did not receive a food ration, and my grandmother would starve herself until the end of her life for my mother.
Stories I refuse to tell: my mother’s either/or. Do you want a mad mother, she asked us all the time, or a dead mother? The assumption that no one wants a dead mother condones all behavior.
Stories I want to forget: my husband said that every phone call I made from the hospital started with a query about my mother. You have your children, he said, and she is not among them.
Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. “Will you,” said Mercury, “have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours we have in our chest of knick-knacks? So choose, but just one thing.” For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: “Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.” Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, “It has been granted you.”
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
The same day my mother reported the news from China, a high-school classmate, whom I had not had contact with for over twenty years, sent me an email and attached anonymous comments exchanged by our classmates. Having not been in touch with any of them for years, I was taken aback by the malevolence of the messages: jeering at a present person they don’t know, mixed with mocking the teenager I was. The man who sent me the email had once asked me to kiss him. Why? I had asked, being eighteen and having not the remotest inclination to do so. I forget what reason he gave me or how I declined, but the past, having passed, always comes back to claim what it has no right to. Worse than people who refuse to come into one’s stories are those who insist on taking a place.
Compared with the internal, the external becomes insignificant and of no consequence. The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is constantly in search of its object; the searching is the unrest of sorrow and its life.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
The one time during this difficult period I truly laughed without any restraint, it was one of those days when I sat on a ward couch and saw little hope in life. Another patient grabbed War and Peace from my hands, and, with R-rated language, scolded me for messing up my brain with nonsense. Her grievance against Tolstoy was so personal that I could not stop laughing.
Have I made you laugh? she said. She then raised the thick volume. Has this fucking book ever made you laugh? No! It’s so damn heavy it could kill me.
Well, what do you want me to do, I said; I can’t change myself.
Laugh more, she said.
Laughter needs a target, I wanted to say; it is not an argument but a judgment; I would rather argue than judge. These thoughts, circling in my head, made me laugh at myself.
When people insist that I look too happy for my work, or my work is too bleak for my appearance, I resort to glibness. Oh, I say, there is that wonderfully woeful Kierkegaard. For a year, when I could not save myself from despair, I read him obsessively. He has made me laugh more than any other writer.
A long story has after all a measureable length; on the other hand, a short story sometimes has the puzzling property of being longer than the most long-drawn-out one.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
One summer, my twelve-year-old read Les Misérables three times, cover to cover. I tried in vain to convince him that it is not the only great novel, and Victor Hugo not the only great writer (not even the only great French writer, I said to him).
A young person, beginning to read seriously, tends to live—infatuated, even—with one book at a time. The world offered by the book is large enough to contain all other worlds, or exclusive enough to make all other worlds retreat. Sometimes the book is replaced by another, the old world giving way to a new one; the enchantment—or the entrapment—may also be an experience that happens once in life.
Solitude is noble, but fatal to an artist who has not the strength to break out of it. An artist must live the life of his own time, even if it be clamorous and impure: he must forever be giving and receiving, and giving, and giving, and again receiving.
—Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe
A few years ago, I discovered in a secondhand bookstore a copy of the English translation of Jean-Christophe. The novel was originally published in 1910. In the 1938 Modern Library edition, which was what I found, the author’s name is followed only by the birth year: Romain Rolland (1866–). The owner of the book had his name, an Edward G———, and the date “October 30, 1943” written inside the cover. Rolland was still alive when the book was purchased: its owner was a contemporary. Other than that mark, he did not underline the text or comment in the margin.
Between ages sixteen and eighteen, I read the Chinese translation of Jean-Christophe many times. When I first arrived in America, with a French grammar book and a dictionary and without any previous knowledge of the language, I set out to read the original French text along with its English translation, both from the university library, where they had sat for decades without having been checked out. I thought it would be a good way to improve my English and to learn French with a novel that I had half memorized. I did not reach Volume Two before both editions were due.
Rolland, novelist, playwright, music critic, biographer, and Nobel laureate, has long been forgotten in this country, partly, I suppose, for the reason that he was a Communist (on top of being a Frenchman!).
When one is younger, one tends to read without a context—or what is considered as context is only a pretext. A love story is preparation for love, a sad tale paves the road to sadness, an epic an experience of honor and glory. It is the same with living. One learns to understand and make peace with one’s context, rather than going from one pretext to the next. The latter is an experience with which I have been familiar. For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.
It is surprising now to think that Jean-Christophe, a novel about being political, about participating in life, was at one time the novel that offered me the entire world. Would I even believe in Rolland’s words today? I have finally come to the point where I know the answers I look for are not in any book.
I said how my own character seemed to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood (I give it as an example of her understanding) & proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things.
—Virginia Woolf in her diary, on her last meeting with Katherine Mansfield
Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield had an intense and uneasy friendship, as is often found between two rivals who also understand each other.
A shadowy shape cut out and placed in front of one’s own eyes is not a character, but a ph
antom. To merge into things—there is a Chekhovian echo in Mansfield’s phrase. After Mansfield’s death, Woolf criticized that Mansfield could not “put thoughts, or feelings, or subtleties of any kind into her characters, without at once becoming, where she is serious, hard, and where she is sympathetic, sentimental.”
She [Katherine Mansfield] said a good deal about feeling things deeply: also about being pure, which I wont criticise, though of course I very well could. But now what do I feel about my writing?—this book, that is, The Hours, if thats its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense— But here I may be posing….Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it….I daresay its true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer these questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, & still there remains this excitement.
—Virginia Woolf’s diary entry after Mansfield’s death (this is often quoted as it talked about The Hours, which was later renamed Mrs. Dalloway)
One can go on quoting Woolf’s comments from her letters and diaries on Mansfield. There were plenty, some astute or sympathetic, others unfair, even petty. But of all Mansfield’s notebooks, Woolf only appears twice. In July 1920, there is a simple note, “Virginia, Wed. afternoon.” According to Woolf’s diary, the date refers to a lunch at which the two disagreed on Joseph Conrad’s latest book, The Rescue. “I still maintain that I’m the true seer, the one independent voice in a chorus of obedient sheep, since they praise unanimously,” Woolf wrote. (One cannot help but wonder whether she would relish her own future of being in Conrad’s position.)
