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

by Yiyun Li

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.”