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

by Yiyun Li

Whatever the problem, we must elude the sense of being trapped—even if all one can say to one’s self is, “if not now, later.”…If nothing charms or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, “If not now, later” and not mope. I never fully succeed and am beginning to think I never shall; still, the automatic sense of participation, brings one along.

One writes about what haunts one.

Moore and her brother treated their mother as a child. I had known, long before I could put that thought into words, that the only child in our family was my mother. More than her rage I feared her tears.

My father had told me, when I was five, that a person was in danger only when another person was around. When nobody was near me, I was safe; I could even imagine a different life.

“WE WRITE TO narrate, not to prove,” Turgenev

Anyone reading one’s words is able to take something from one. Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing and lost nothing.

No real madness, no real art, he quoted an old Chinese saying, but I had refused to consider it an obstacle. If I had writing, what was there to fear?

How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves. My muddle, in retrospect, is clear: I had underestimated my aversion to wanting anything; I had overestimated my capacity to want nothing.

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.

I long to abandon myself entirely to someone else. The peculiarity of my character is that I never feel that there is any mingling—either I don’t “abdicate,” & the other person loses, or I do, and I lose myself. A monstrous infantile shell of egotism inside which I quietly asphyxiate. To read K.M.’s [Katherine Mansfield’s] dreams of a shared life with Murry—this perturbs me greatly….To live quietly and complementarily with another would be extraordinary—almost impossible—I don’t know, it’s only the fact that I do nothing for anybody that promotes these self-searchings.

If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. 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.

Is the wish to escape suffering selfish? It is considered so with suicide. But even less extreme escapes leave wounds in others’ lives.

This is the question that unsettles me more: Is suffering selfish? For as long as I can remember my mother has spoken of me as a selfish person. If I were religious, I would kneel nightly for salvation from this sin. There is no measure to quantify selfishness: how much of oneself is devoted to others, or even which part of life is to be lived and which part given up. All my life I have failed to prove myself unselfish.

Only the innocent, I now realize, have the right to denounce selfishness, as the innocent do not have a sense where their selves end and others’ start. In fact, their selves do not end. They have one world, complete and consistent. When we enter that world we are intruders; when we exit we are abandoners; when we don’t abide by the ruling of innocence, we are betrayers.

Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger.

“If no one ever read me, would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to stop writing in my head,” V. S. Pritchett said in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen.

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly—through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty.

How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.

To think that eager person—not wanting to miss a connection with the world—would grow up into the recluse I prefer to think of myself as today: there must be a part of everyone’s youth that later one avoids looking at too closely.

One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.

What one goes toward is less definitive than that from which one turns away.

Rarely does a story start where we wish it had, or end where we wish it would.

To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people’s lives; to call them loved ones is to fake one’s ability to love. One does not always want to subject oneself to self-interrogation imposed by a cliché.

Much of what one does—to avoid suffering, to seek happiness, to stay healthy—is to keep a safe space for one’s private language.

Is it possible that one can be held hostage by someone else’s words? What I underlined and reread: Are they her thoughts or mine?

I realise my faults better than anyone else could realise them. I know exactly where I fail.

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.

I have crossed the line, too, from erasing myself to erasing others. I am not the only casualty in this war against myself.

Too often people ask why I write about melancholy and loneliness and despondency while I appear to be such a happy person.

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. I never set out to write about melancholy and loneliness and despondency. I keep my self to myself and I do not impose on my characters’ fates; among them I am as private as I am in life. The posthumous reputation of one’s words, truthful or misleading, is a eulogy given by others.

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.

Perhaps the greatest pressure on the writer comes from the society within society: his political or religious group, even it may be his university or his employers. It does seem to me that one privilege he can claim, in common perhaps with his fellow human beings, but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty….Disloyalty is our privilege. But it is a privilege you will never get society to recognize. All the more necessary that we who can be disloyal with impunity should keep that ideal alive. —Graham Greene to Elizabeth Bowen

To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.

Not writing, like writing, can be disloyalty, too. If one turns away from the storytelling of one’s mother, is it worse than turning away from one’s motherland and mother tongue?

the past, having passed, always comes back to claim what it has no right to. Worse than people who refuse to come into one’s stories are those who insist on taking a place.

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.

It is an illusion that writing, like reading, gives one freedom. Sooner or later people come with their expectations: some demand loyalty; others, to be made immortal as characters. Only the names on the epitaphs remain silent.

THE EFFORT TO avoid isolation sometimes agitates me. The thought of disappearing from the world is an emergency exit, which I agreed to give up when I left the hospital. To think people used to be able to disappear easily: borders crossed, names changed, evidence destroyed, connections severed.

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

To write is to find a new way to see the world,

Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence.

Perhaps I won’t see you again, and if so, goodbye for now and goodbye forever.

One’s hope for strangers comes more naturally. Perhaps the child in Iowa, a teenager now, still has parents in love with each other. Perhaps the young woman and her boyfriend have settled down in the boardinghouse.

People like to be asked about their lives. Sometimes they only need someone to listen. There is not a safer way to be out in the world, until listening pulls one into an unsolicited story.

Struggled with being kind and evil constantly. Pursued happiness all these years and never found it.

Many drafts were written when things began to feel unbearable. Composing a sentence is better than composing none; an hour taken away from treacherous rumination is an hour gained; following the thread of a thought to the end is better than having many thoughts entangled. In a sense, writing becomes the effort of detecting a warning sign before it appears. There are moments when it must sound as though I am arguing against hope and happiness, against others and myself, but any attachment, even to the most fallacious idea, is an anchor when solidness cannot be felt.