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

by Yiyun Li

But external misfortune—illness, epidemic, war, natural disaster—is not melodrama. Melodrama is absolute loyalty to the original moment.

It has been pointed out by some critics that my fiction is not political enough. A young man confronted me at a reading, questioning my disinterest in being a political writer. A journalist in China told me that most writers believe in their historical responsibility toward our time. Why can’t you live up to that expectation? they ask, and my reply, if I were to give one, is this: I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.

A narrative catering to others is not far from memories revised for ourselves: both move us away from the quicksand of feelings.

More damaging than becoming a victim of political or historical turmoil is becoming the casualty of someone else’s memory.

I am wary of the damage a person’s memory can do.

There is a defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is.

Pancake had a habit of giving presents to everyone in his life. “He loved to give but never learned to receive. He never felt worthy of a gift,” his mother wrote

People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body.

The understanding between two people, and the alienation because of it—the friendship between McPherson and Pancake upsets me. It is one person’s melodrama avoiding another person’s melodrama; it is silence that does not prevail.

Mansfield’s last note, from an unfinished story, ends with an observation that only the dying Mansfield would make: “It was an exquisite day. It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.”

That McPherson is not widely known and is largely forgotten now is not surprising. He rebelled all his life against what others wanted to make him into—an obedient serf, a political warrior. His refusal would be a futile battle in any era and in any country.

I know that the word haunt has a connection to home. Etymologically, it is from the Middle English hauten (to reside, inhabit, use, employ), from Old French hanter (to inhabit, frequent, resort to), from Old Norse heimta (to bring home, fetch). When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our old home we’re experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

May God spare you the feeling that life has passed by and at the same time has not begun yet,” wrote Turgenev

In War and Peace, Prince Andrei, after losing his first wife in childbirth, “thought 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.

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.

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.

“WE WRITE TO narrate, not to prove,” Turgenev advised a young writer in a letter. I wish I had learned that earlier,

Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing and lost nothing.

unless shut away in a journal that will be safely and timely burned, one’s words will always be read, by design or by accident.

To remember is my instinct. The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me—it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential.

The word asthma is from Greek, meaning “panting.” But in ancient Rome, the doctors nicknamed it “rehearsing death.” I took note of this detail while reading Seneca’s letters. Seneca, like Dickens, Proust, Dylan Thomas, E. B. White, Elizabeth Bishop—the list could go on—was afflicted with asthma.

Do you, a friend asked me years ago, understand that you are in people’s real lives? I remember feeling shocked—at the time, the only real people were my characters.

Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.

To say nothing matters is to admit that everything matters. Like Portia, I too struggle with a lack of depth perception.

I feel the necessity of confronting her when I write, as though only by matching what she does can I protect myself from her.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening,” Seneca wrote in a letter. The terror of that statement is why I write myself into a battle against Bowen—not to converse, which seeks understanding; not to argue, which is intellectual; not to confront, out of artistic disagreement, or misunderstanding, or even jealousy, but to hold on to something essential. “[I am] a writer before I am a woman,” she said of herself. Easily I could assert a more absolute position, being a writer before I am a person, or being a writer and nothing more.

One prefers anyone—a mother, a lover, a friend—who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness.

I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I “do” anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on “time”—it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not….Perhaps you take more naturally to doing nothing than I do.

It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.

This is the question that unsettles me more: Is suffering selfish?

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life’s necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character—depending on the charity of memory.

A writer’s cruelty is to exile a real person to fiction.

It is no surprise we continue to see writers become characters: Hemingway, Woolf,

A reader’s cruelty is to return writers to characters. And reading their journals and letters is the reliable first step.

Any word is the wrong word when it is too close to the unspeakable.

I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence.

When I started writing, my husband asked if I understood the implication of my decision. What he meant were not the practical concerns, though there were plenty: the nebulous hope of getting published, the lack of a career certainty as had been laid out in science, the harsher immigration regulations. Many of my college classmates, as scientists, acquired their green cards under the category of national interest waiver. An artist is not of much importance to any nation’s interest. My husband’s question was about language. Did I understand what it meant to renounce my mother tongue?

Yet I have never dreamed about Iowa City, where I first landed in America. When asked about my initial impression of the place, I cannot excavate anything from memory to form a meaningful answer. During a recent trip there I visited the neighborhood I used to walk past every day. The one-story houses, which were painted in pleasantly muted colors, with gardens in the front enclosed by white picket fences, had not changed. I realized that I had never described them to others or to myself in Chinese, and by the time English was established as my language they had become everyday mundanities. What happened during my transition from one language to another did not become memory.

TO OWN—A HOUSE, a life on a quiet street, a language, a dream—is to allow oneself to be owned, too.

People often ask about my decision to write in English. The switch from one language to another feels natural to me, I reply, though that does not say much,

Yes, there is something unnatural, which I have refused to accept. Not that I write in a second language—there are always Nabokov and Conrad as references, and many of my contemporaries as well; nor that I impulsively gave up a reliable career for writing. It’s the absoluteness of the abandonment—with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.

My decision to write in English has also been explained as a flight from my country’s history. But unlike Nabokov, who had been a Russian writer, I never wrote in Chinese. Still, one has little control over how one’s work is received, and one cannot avoid having a private decision, once seen through a public prism, become a metaphor.

But my abandonment of my first language is personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation—political or historical or ethnographical.

A professor in graduate school told me I should stop writing, as English would remain a foreign language to me. Their concerns about ownership of a language, rather than making me impatient like Nabokov, allow me secret laughter. English is to me as random a choice as any other language. What one goes toward is less definitive than that from which one turns away.

Before I left China I destroyed the journals I had kept for years and most of the letters written to me (what I could not bring myself to destroy I sealed up and have never opened);

To kill time—an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.

We can kill time, but language kills us.

I marked the entries because they reminded me of a moment I had forgotten. I was nine, and my sister thirteen. On a Saturday afternoon, I was in our apartment and she was on the balcony. My sister joined the middle-school choir that year, and in the autumn sunshine she sang in a voice that was beginning to leave girlhood. Way down upon the Swanee River. Far, far away. That’s where my heart is turning ever; That’s where the old folks stay. The lyrics were in Chinese. The memory too should be in Chinese. But I cannot see our tiny garden with the grapevine, which our father cultivated and which later was uprooted by our wrathful mother, or the bamboo fence dotted with morning glories, or the junk that occupied half the balcony, years of accumulations piled high by our father, if I do not name these things to myself in English. I cannot see my sister, but I can hear her sing the lyrics in English.

Over the years my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. And memories—not only those about America but also those about China; not only those carried on but also those archived with the wish to forget—are sorted in English. To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, a crucial decision. Would you ever consider writing in Chinese? an editor from China asked, as many had asked before. I said I doubted it. But don’t you want to be part of contemporary Chinese literature? he asked. I have declined to have my books translated into Chinese, which is understood by some as odiously pretentious. Once in a while my mother will comment, hinting at my selfishness, that I have deprived her of the pleasure of reading my books. But Chinese was never my private language. And it will never be.

That I write in English—does it make me part of something else? The verdict of my professor in graduate school was that I was writing in a language that did not belong to me, hence I would not, and should not, belong. But his protest was irrele...