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

by Yiyun Li

Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.

I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

I have been asked throughout my life: What are you hiding? I don’t know what I am hiding, and the more I try to deny it, the less trustworthy people find me.

One hides something for two reasons: either one feels protective of it or one feels ashamed of it.

She hadn’t wanted to mention it in person, but a boy who had been close to me when we were teenagers had committed suicide, along with a lover. My first reaction was wonderment, that my friend would wait until we were out of each other’s sight to tell me. My next reaction was still wonderment, as though I had always been waiting for this news.

Perhaps when I say I was expecting his suicide, it is only memory going back to revise itself. There is no reason an artistic and sensitive boy could not grow into a happy man.

A dreamer: it’s the last thing I want to be called, in China or in America.

The woman in New Hampshire and I, and many like us, came to this country with the same goal—to make a new life here. I wouldn’t call it a dream, not even an ambition.

The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasionally feel so I find untrustworthy. I would not mind being taken as many things I am not: a shy person, a cheerful person, a cold person. But I do not want to be called a dreamer

Apart from feeling unqualified to be called a dreamer, I may also be worrying about being mistaken for one of those who call themselves dreamers but are merely ambitious. One meets them often in life, their ambitions smaller than dreams, more commonplace, in need of broadcasting and dependent on recognition from this particular time. If they cause pain to others, they have no trouble writing off those damages as the cost of their dreams. Timeliness may be one thing that separates ambitions from real dreams.

She had hoped for a solid and uneventful life in an American suburb, but loneliness must have made her life a desert.

I had liked the working concept of the immune system. Its job is to detect and attack nonself; it has memories, some as long lasting as life; its memories can go awry selectively, or, worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to eliminate. The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

But what more do you want? You have a family, a profession, a house, a car, friends, and a place in the world. Why can’t you be happy? Why can’t you be strong? These questions are asked, among others, by my mother.

She married for love, and on her wedding day, she realized she had made the mistake of her life. For the whole first dance he didn’t look at me once, she said; he looked into every guest’s face to make sure they knew it was his show.

There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing. This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

My father taught me meditation when I was eleven. Imagine a bucket between your open arms, he told me, and asked me to listen to the dripping of the water into the bucket and, when it was full, water dripping out from the bottom.

being addicted to fatalism can make one look calm, capable, even happy.

For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line.

The books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life? What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

“The train stopped. When a train stops in the open country between two stations it is impossible not to put one’s head out of the window and see what’s up,” Mansfield wrote at the end of her life. This is the inevitability of life. The train, for reasons unknown to us, always stops between a past and a future, both making this now look as though it is nowhere. But it is this nowhereness that one has to make use of. One looks out the window: the rice paddies and alfalfa fields have long been the past, replaced by vineyards and almond groves. One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.

One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life.

Can one live without what one cannot have—the question appeared repeatedly in my journal. To say no was to give in; to say yes was surrender, too, though masked as bravado. What is it that cannot be had—this I avoided putting into words. Any explanation would be too specific and too small. But the understanding was never far from me.

I am not an autobiographical writer—one cannot be without a solid and explicable self—and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

No one’s vulnerability is more devastating than the next person’s, no one’s joy more deserving.

Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured: a reminder that one is not far from who one was.

A WORD I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we. Living is not an original business.

To bear the lack of originality: even the least ambitious among us have to invent some way to believe we are distinctive and irreplaceable.

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the entering class of our university was sent to the army for a year to prevent future insubordination. In the army, with youthful conceit, I presented myself as someone different from others: submitting obliquely subversive poetry when I was ordered to write propaganda, making cleverly insolent comments about the officers, taking every opportunity to undermine the authority of our squad leader. To defy any political authority, to endanger myself in a righteous way, to use my words to distinguish this self from people around me—these, at eighteen, were shortcuts to what I really wanted: confirmation that life, bleak and unjust, was not worth living. Before we left the army the squad leader wrote to me (it was a tradition to write farewell notes to one another): “Some people are commonplace, others are not. A day spent with the latter leaves enough memory, more than years spent with the former. As an ordinary person, I count it as my luck to have spent a year with you.”

The note was written without malice, but it mortified me. I always feel grateful to her for letting me see how tedious a person can be when striving to impress the world with personality.

You can’t talk about her that way; she’s like you and me; she’s ill, my new roommate said, which stunned me. I had not thought of myself as ill, but stranded.

In the army a blurrily photocopied edition of Gone with the Wind circulated among my peers. More than half the girls in my platoon—their personalities ranging from shy to chatty to outright mean—claimed they saw themselves in Scarlett O’Hara. Some of the girls were too interesting, others too boring, to be Scarlett. This collective longing must be part of self-making. There is little originality in this process; all the same, what a brave thing it is to do.

To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.

I wished then and I wish now that I had never formed an attachment to anyone in the world either. I would be all kindness. I would not have done anything ruinous.

If there are things lacking in my life—and there are, as is the case for everyone—I have resolved never to want them. This must be greed too; wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.

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.

Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.

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.

In every protester there is a heart capable of gleeful childishness.

This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.

it was the closest to clarity I felt on that trip. Not peace, but solidity.

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 landscape where I had grown up were like my breathing,” McGahern wrote toward the end of his memoir.

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.

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.

Everything is said with certainty. People, especially those watching a tragedy from afar, talk with such eloquence.

Those who speak without understanding have no trouble finding center stage.

I often saw in people’s efforts to make someone feel better a dismissal.

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.

there is no hierarchy in suffering.

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.