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

by Yiyun Li

  —

  WHO ARE YOU? Trevor asked when I saw him this past spring. It’s okay, I said; I’m only coming to see you. Ah, we met in Boston, he said a minute later. Yes, we met in Boston, I said, but I could have also said: we are solitary travelers, having crossed paths in the land of stories.

  Afterword

  On Being a Flat Character, and Inventing Alternatives

  There are many ways to answer the question. Not everyone would ask, but some would if true curiosity—a genuine desire to understand—were allowed in place of good manners. I would, too. In fact, I still do ask myself: What made you think suicide was an appropriate, even the only, option?

  Various hypotheses have been offered by this or that person at this or that moment: genes, lack of mental strength or maturity, selfishness, cell signals gone randomly awry. There are more practical explanations too. I was once ambitious—or greedy—enough to want to excel at being a mother and a writer while holding a full-time job. For almost ten years I wrote between midnight and four o’clock in the morning.

  Would I have deprived myself of such a basic necessity had I known it would leave such damage? I think so. I do not see another way to manage what I wanted to do. In her notes on writing novels, Elizabeth Bowen emphasized alternatives:

  It’s the palpable presence of the alternatives that gives action interest. Therefore, in each of the characters, while he or she is acting, the play and pull of alternatives must be felt….By the end of a novel the character’s alternatives, many at the beginning, have been reduced to none….The “flat” character has no alternatives.

  —

  I WOULD LIKE to believe that there are as many alternatives in life as in fiction; that roads not taken, having once been weighed as options, define one as much as the irreversible direction of the chosen path. What would have become of you had you not left China? asks a friend; what would have become of you had you not landed in Iowa City, or had you stayed a scientist? What I can offer are not alternatives, only negatives. I would not have chosen English as my natural language; I would not have known one can go to school for writing; I would not have become a writer.

  But what would have become of me? When this friend asks a similar question about a character—how would her life have turned out had she not emigrated?—I have no trouble seeing her in Beijing: the overpass she crosses every day to get to her bus stop; the crippled beggars she, having at last mastered the art of not looking, no longer gives money; the cabdriver she halfheartedly engages in conversation when he, like all cabdrivers in Beijing, takes pleasure in mocking the government; the many keys on her key ring—one unlocking the wooden box next to her apartment door, in which is the daily delivery of fresh milk for her child (her child would not grow up knowing the joy of walking to the milk station every evening); another one for the mailbox (years ago all mail for the building was crammed into the same green box, an enticement because she always liked to see who were the lucky ones to receive letters); keys for the apartment and the office and the car and the security gates—keys, too many, representing privileges and responsibilities. In my Chinese life I had only one memorable key—the kind that could be found in any antique store in America—bronze, the length of my entire palm, which I carried around my neck on blue nylon twine.

  That this character has left Beijing does not change the fact that there is a space for her there. She may refuse to occupy it but it cannot be filled by others. The rowboat on the lake of the Summer Palace, which she could have rented for an afternoon, will stay idle, the oars unhooked from their hinges. Her local postman, the green canvas bag attached to the crossbar of his bicycle, will balance himself with a leg on the curb while sorting the mail, though she will not be there to chat with him. At a class reunion an old, one-inch school picture will be scanned and enlarged because she does not wish to attend or send a current photo to absolve her absence.

  Why will you not acknowledge you could be that person—I can hear my friend question me—in fact, you are that person? The answer, I think, is that I do not want a self watching itself and contemplating alternatives. One risks losing one’s privacy in fiction, and to be anti-autobiographical lessens that danger. I cannot possibly be any one of my characters; they have alternatives that I do not. And yet I don’t mind experiencing their loss of alternatives alongside them. One lives more feelingly in a borrowed life.

  Do you not worry about losing your privacy in these essays? again I hear my friend question, but the truth is, the privacy I cling to has little to do with others. Once I saw a preschooler, my son’s playmate, demonstrate that skill. He was bothered by a small disaster and, without complaining or crying, he made his body still; his eyes, grayish blue, became lifeless. I had never witnessed so closely a mind switched off by will. It took a few seconds—not long, though a gap nevertheless—for his eyes to turn from panic into glassiness, behind which I could sense that unwavering determination for absence. Practitioners of that vanishing act develop the belief—illusion, really—that one can exist unobserved.

  —

  ONE CANNOT BE an adept writer of one’s life; nor can one be a discerning reader of that tale. Not equipped with a novelist’s tools to create plots and maneuver pacing, to speak omnisciently or abandon an inconvenient point of view, to adjust time’s linearity and splice the less connected moments, the most interesting people among us, I often suspect, are flatter than the flattest character in a novel. Not only do we not have any alternatives, we discredit them. It has to be so—this indisputable conviction is often at the foundation of our decisions, including the most impulsive or the most catastrophic. It is easier to be certain of one thing than to be uncertain of a hundred; easier for there to be one is than many might have beens.

  You should be very careful every day for the rest of your life, a doctor told me. Why? I asked. (I could not help but think how bad that line was—every day for the rest of your life. Such absoluteness. In fiction a character should never be allowed to speak the line.) Things could sneak up on you, the doctor said; when you realize it you’d have already lost the solid ground underneath you. What do I do? I asked. The doctor answered that I should never go off medication. I understood it as there is nothing I can do.

  Does it have to be so? I often wonder.

  These essays were started with mixed feelings and contradictory motives. I wanted to argue against suicide as much as for it, which is to say I wanted to keep the option of suicide and I wanted it to be forever taken away from me. Writing this book has taken about two years now, as long as the period that led to it, a year of descending into the darkest despair and a year of being confined by that despair. The bleakness, which can be summarized with a few generic words—suicide attempts and hospitalizations—was so absolute that it sheds little light on things. A sensible goal is to avoid it.

  I have learned, during these past few years, that a small misstep can lead to an unraveling, in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. Wisdom or mental strength is not what is lacking when this happens. To acknowledge that it is not a failure does not mitigate the grief. The difficult moment is not when one gives up—giving up, in fact, brings certainty; relief and peace, too—but afterward, when the same pattern repeats itself. Why, one asks again and again and again, but to question is to confront the unchangeable. One can only accept that cell signaling works faster and in a less regulated manner than logic. Those few seconds before the boy’s eyes turned dim: that gap between clarity and confusion is where a mind, with the instinct of self-preservation, battles against itself. That gap is my privacy. Writing fiction has been my way to protect it, though not always effectively. Writing from the gap—this book—is an experiment in establishing a truce with what cannot be changed.

  Many drafts were written when things began to feel unbearable. Composing a sentence is better than composing none; an hour taken away from treacherous rumination is an hour gained; following the thread of a thought to the end is better than having many thoughts entangled.
In a sense, writing becomes the effort of detecting a warning sign before it appears. There are moments when it must sound as though I am arguing against hope and happiness, against others and myself, but any attachment, even to the most fallacious idea, is an anchor when solidness cannot be felt.

  —

  THE PARAGRAPHS IN Montaigne’s essays all bear a letter (A, B, or C) to indicate the different time points when he composed them—he often returned to work on the same essays. Without these markers, a reader “may write him off as irresponsibly inconsistent,” explains his translator Donald Frame, as the essays “are intended to be a record of change.”

  It would be presumptuous to mark my essays similarly, though the two years spent writing them have been full of ambiguities. Sentences and paragraphs were written and rewritten under different circumstances, arguments reframed, thoughts revised; most of these essays took a year or longer to write. Coherence and consistency are not what I have been striving for.

  There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless—my friend Amy Leach writes. A ladder is no longer what I am seeking. Rather, I want one day to be able to say to myself: Dear friend, we have waited this out.

  A Partial List of Books

  Persuasion, Jane Austen

  Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

  The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

  To the North, Elizabeth Bowen

  People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn

  Elizabeth Bowen, Victoria Glendinning

  Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  A Life in Letters, Anton Chekhov, ed. Rosamund Bartlett, trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips

  Autobiography of Maxim Gorky: My Childhood, In the World, My Universities, trans. Isidor Schneider

  Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene

  Ways of Escape: An Autobiography, Graham Greene

  Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

  Life’s Little Ironies, Thomas Hardy

  The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

  Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate

  Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker

  Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Søren Kierkegaard

  Letters to Monica, Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite

  Stories, Katherine Mansfield

  The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott

  Katherine Mansfield: Selected Letters, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan

  All Will Be Well: A Memoir, John McGahern

  Amongst Women, John McGahern

  By the Lake, John McGahern

  The Collected Stories, John McGahern

  Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson

  Hue and Cry: Stories, James Alan McPherson

  A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, James Alan McPherson

  The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame

  Marianne Moore: Complete Poems

  Marianne Moore: Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello

  Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, Linda Leavell

  Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov

  Jean-Christophe, Romain Rolland, trans. Gilbert Cannan

  Letters from a Stoic, Seneca, trans. Robin Campbell

  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  Dream Tales and Prose Poems, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Constance Garnett

  Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Richard Freeborn

  First Love and Other Stories, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Richard Freeborn

  Home of the Gentry, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Richard Freeborn

  Rudin, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Richard Freeborn

  Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Richard Freeborn

  Spring Torrents, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Leonard Schapiro

  The Gentle Barbarian: The Work and Life of Turgenev, V. S. Pritchett

  Turgenev: His Life and Times, Leonard Schapiro

  Turgenev’s Letters: A Selection, ed. and trans. Edgar H. Lehrman

  Letter from an Unknown Woman, Stefan Zweig, trans. Anthea Bell

  Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940–42, ed. Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall

  —

  AND I’M INDEBTED to William Trevor and all his books.

  This book is part of a conversation with Brigid Hughes.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude to Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh for being everything for me and my books: friends, readers, and advocates. I would like to thank the Wylie Agency, especially Charles Buchan and Jacqueline Ko, for their tireless work on my behalf.

  As always, I would like to thank Kate Medina for her faith in my books. I would like to thank Simon Prosser for his insight and precision.

  Friends whose support has been essential—Mona Simpson, Elizabeth McCracken, Duchess Goldblatt, Patrick Cox, Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, Stuart Dybek, Chen Reis, Rabih Alameddine, and Tom Drury—thank you for being my friends.

  Love to my parents and my sister.

  To Patricia and Patrick Hughes: you have shown me things I did not understand and things I thought impossible.

  Dearest Amy Leach: Where do I even start? Neither you nor I will, for all the tea in China, become a whateverist—what joy, what solace, what good fortune it is to be sensible and nonsensical together.

  What anchors you? This question has been asked again and again, and the answer has never changed: my husband and my children. You help me take myself seriously.

  BY YIYUN LI

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

  Kinder Than Solitude

  Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

  The Vagrants

  A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  YIYUN LI is the author of four works of fiction: Kinder Than Solitude, The Vagrants, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.

  yiyunli.com

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