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

by Yiyun Li

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 have had a troublesome relationship with time. The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The present—what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved. Unless the right actions are taken, one seems never to pass the test to reach the after.

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

Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.

if one seeks kindness from time, it slips away tauntingly, or worse, with indifference. How many among us have said that to others or to ourselves: if only I had a bit more time…

If my relationship with time is difficult, if time is intrusive and elusive, could it be that I am only hiding myself from time?

Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.

He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.

Still, that one possesses a dreamer’s personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.

Time will tell, people say, as though time always has the last word. Perhaps I am only hiding from time as I have been hiding from those who want the power to have the last word about others.

Check out this quote.

Timeliness may be one thing that separates ambitions from real dreams.

What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

“Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.”

our mother, who is a family despot, unpredictable in both her callousness and her vulnerability.

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.

I traveled often during this time, as with every trip, there was the hope of returning a different person.

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

As a body suffers from an autoimmune disease, my mind targets every feeling and thought it creates; a self dissecting itself finds little repose.

The possessiveness in human nature turns loving or arguing into something entirely different: winning, conquering, owning, destroying.

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

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.

the crippled beggars she, having at last mastered the art of not looking, no longer gives money;

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.

One lives more feelingly in a borrowed life.

Practitioners of that vanishing act develop the belief—illusion, really—that one can exist unobserved.

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.