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

by Yiyun Li

I often forget, when I write, that English is also used by others. English is my private language. Every word has to be pondered over before it becomes my word.

In my relationship with English, in this relationship with its intrinsic distance that makes people look askance, I feel invisible but not estranged. It is the position I believe I always want in life. But with every pursuit there is the danger of crossing a line, from invisibility to erasure.

When one remembers in an adopted language, there is a dividing line in that remembrance. What came before could be someone else’s life; it might as well be fiction. Sometimes I think it is this distancing that marks me as coldhearted and selfish. To forget the past is a betrayal, we were taught in school when young; to disown memories is a sin.

It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible to do that in my native language.

OFTEN I THINK that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living.

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.

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.

Nostalgia does not always align with politics.

Worse than people who refuse to come into one’s stories are those who insist on taking a place.

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

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.

I have finally come to the point where I know the answers I look for are not in any book.

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield had an intense and uneasy friendship, as is often found between two rivals who also understand each other.

A sentence, presumably a compliment to Woolf, stands out: “She was one of those women—one of those women who still exist in spite of everything.”

In retrospect little makes sense—perhaps all stories, rather than once-upon-a-time, should start this way.

their stories ending long before their lives do.

I do not mind that my imagination is limited; I do mind when the world is not bigger than what one can imagine.

When his wife was out grocery shopping, he made a detailed list of bank accounts and passwords, bills to be paid and already taken care of, and then hanged himself.

IN INTERVIEWS TREVOR says that he writes “out of curiosity and bewilderment.”

At each farewell the question not asked is always there: Will I see you again?

Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. It had not occurred to me, until I met Trevor, to ask: Will I see you again? What had precluded me from asking is this: Perhaps I won’t see you again, and if so, goodbye for now and goodbye forever. —

A woman from Canada wrote to me, noting the chapter and page number where she had read a sentence that she said she would never want to lose. Her brain had been damaged from radiation, she wrote; she had not been able to concentrate because she fell asleep so often. She felt isolated but did not wish to seek out others. “This is something I have long considered and now I think I have my answer,” she said of the sentence. “Perhaps I will never sleep again.”

Love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity. Failure too, measured by effort, would be the failure he would have to make peace with one day.

My great-grandfather died in that war, I said, and immediately regretted sounding like the cabdrivers easily offering inherited family dramas.

“You may be less confused than you imagined,” in a letter Trevor wrote. “Stories are a hope, and often they obligingly answer questions.”

I have learned, during these past few years, that a small misstep can lead to an unraveling,

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.

I want one day to be able to say to myself: Dear friend, we have waited this out.