by Yiyun Li
15.
One’s intuition is to acquire immunity to those who confirm one’s beliefs about life, and to those who turn one’s beliefs into nothing. The latter are the natural predators of our hearts, the former made into enemies because we are, unlike other species, capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves.
16.
I had this notion, when I first started writing this, that it would be a way to test—to assay—thoughts about time. There was even a vision of an after, when my confusions would be sorted out.
Assays in science are part of an endless exploration. One question leads to another; what follows confirms or disconfirms what comes before. To assay one’s ideas about time while time remains unsettled and elusive feels futile. Just as one is about to understand one facet of time, it presents another to undermine one’s reasoning.
To write about a struggle amid the struggling: one must hope that this muddling will end someday.
17.
But what more do you want? You have a family, a profession, a house, a car, friends, and a place in the world. Why can’t you be happy? Why can’t you be strong? These questions are asked, among others, by my mother.
There was a majestic mental health worker in the second hospital where I stayed who came to work with perfect lipstick, shining curly hair, and bright blouses and flats of matching colors.
Young lady, she said every time she saw me; don’t lose that smile of yours.
I had liked her, and liked her still after she questioned my spiritual life. I could see that the godless state of my mind concerned her, and that my compliance made me a good project. Don’t mind her, my roommate, a black Buddhist, said; she has an evangelical background. I don’t, I assured my roommate; being preached to did not bother me.
Then I had a difficult day. At dinnertime, the majestic woman asked, Young lady, why did you cry today?
I’m sad, I said.
We know you’re sad. What I want to know is, what makes you sad?
Can’t I just be left alone in my sadness? I said. The women around the table smiled into their plates. The good girl was having a tantrum.
18.
What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask them oneself again and again.
I know you don’t like me to ask what’s brought you here, my roommate said, but can you describe how you feel? I don’t have words for how I feel.
I had several roommates—another revolving door—but I liked the last one. Raised in a middle-class African American family, she was the only adopted child among her siblings. She married for love, and on her wedding day, she realized she had made the mistake of her life. For the whole first dance he didn’t look at me once, she said; he looked into every guest’s face to make sure they knew it was his show.
By the time she told me this story, her husband was confined to bed and blind from diabetes. She took care of him along with a nurse. She watched TCM with him because he remembered the exchanges in old movies. Still, she said she was angry because everything in their life was about him.
Have you ever thought of leaving him? I asked.
She said she had throughout the marriage, but she would not. I don’t want my children to grow up and think a man can be abandoned in that state, she said.
Yet she had tried to kill herself—an attempted abandonment of both her husband and her children. But this I did not say because it was exactly what many people would say to a situation like that. One has to have a solid self to be selfish.
19.
There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing.
This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?
20.
One day my roommate said she noticed I became quiet if she talked about Buddhism with me. I don’t mean it as a religion, she said; for instance, you can try to meditate.
I did not explain that I had read Buddhist scriptures from the ages of twelve to twenty-three. For the longest time they offered the most comforting words. The teaching of nothingness diluted the intensity of that emptiness.
My father taught me meditation when I was eleven. Imagine a bucket between your open arms, he told me, and asked me to listen to the dripping of the water into the bucket and, when it was full, water dripping out from the bottom. “From empty to full, and from full to empty,” he underlined the words in a book for me. “Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.”
21.
My father is the most fatalistic person I have ever known. He once admitted that he had not felt a day of peace in his marriage and expressed his regret that he had never thought of protecting my sister and me from our mother, who is a family despot, unpredictable in both her callousness and her vulnerability.
But the truth is, he tried to instill this fatalism in us because it was our only protection. For years I have been hiding behind that: being addicted to fatalism can make one look calm, capable, even happy.
22.
For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line. It reminds me of the boy from years ago who could not stop sending the designs of his dreams in his letters. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. 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.
23.
It’s not fatalism that makes one lose hope, I now understand. It’s one’s rebellion against fatalism; it’s wanting to have one’s time back from fatalism. A fatalistic person cannot be a dreamer, which I still want to become one day.
24.
“The train stopped. When a train stops in the open country between two stations it is impossible not to put one’s head out of the window and see what’s up,” Mansfield wrote at the end of her life. This is the inevitability of life. The train, for reasons unknown to us, always stops between a past and a future, both making this now look as though it is nowhere. But it is this nowhereness that one has to make use of. One looks out the window: the rice paddies and alfalfa fields have long been the past, replaced by vineyards and almond groves. One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.
Amongst People
A heat wave was general all over Ireland the day I arrived in County Leitrim. Everyone I encountered—the border control officer, the woman who drove me across the country from Dublin, the hotel receptionist who handed me a bronze key with gold tassels—commented on the extraordinary weather. Shortly after I checked in, a county councilman and a photographer met me in the lobby, and they too started talking about the heat wave.
Children, unlike their elders, do not converse about weather. It is a fact to them, connected to the present only. Is it because weather can represent too much that it is often reduced to small talk? Weather gives experiences a place in time: a mood in which to inset a memory, a variable or a constant when comparing now and then. Two days later there would be a wedding at the hotel. Lucky bride, people said, as the good weather held, and I could see that it would be reminisced about for years to come.
In a corner store the photographer, a man in his sixties, asked for a betting ticket and three i
ce cream cones. I tried to decline, but he wouldn’t allow it—the ice cream cones were the best and only a euro each, he said. We then climbed over a brick wall that guarded a private dock. No trespassing, a sign warned. I want you to look as though you’re carried away by your reading, the photographer said, directing my position, legs dangling over the water, a book open in my lap, for which the ice cream cone was neglected. Now turn to me and smile, I want County Leitrim to see how happy our guest is. It was late May, and the ice cream melted fast. I watched it drip onto the wooden planks. Weather not forgotten is that which is lived through with effort.
Afterward I took a walk through town, past a few pubs, a florist’s, a betting shop painted blue. There were not many people in the street. Eventually I came to a local attraction the photographer and the councilman had insisted I visit. It was the smallest chapel in Ireland and said to be the second smallest in the world. Nevertheless, it had all the solemnity I imagined: stone facade, stained glass, marble altar, iron gate. The chapel was built for a Mary Costello by her husband after her death, and later he was laid to rest next to her. The thick opaque glass covering the two coffins was an unsettling yellow, and in between there was enough space for a visitor to turn around. I lingered because there was no other place I wanted to go in town, and I had been advised to avoid the isolation of my hotel room and seek out even the most basic human interactions.
My mind was in poor shape. The week before there had been the thought of admitting myself to a hospital, but Ireland had seemed more sensible. I traveled often during this time, as with every trip, there was the hope of returning a different person. Amid the unraveling I did not foresee the peril of misjudgment. The week after Ireland would end in an emergency room.
On the layover in the Amsterdam airport, I had caught a glimpse of myself unconscious on the floor of a freight elevator, the door of which had been left open. The thought was a comfort. One could die on a trip. I had been keeping a journal. If my mind was losing control, I wanted it to be a process that could be understood by words, but I did not record this moment in Amsterdam. I did not understand, nor did I want to, the encounter in the airport. The journal was—and remains—a long argument with myself: a lucid voice questioning judiciously, and a more forceful voice speaking defiantly, sometimes in reply, other times in digression. The experience is like a confrontation between George Eliot and Dostoyevsky. The former counsels self-restraint through self-improvement, and the latter interrupts with monologues on impassioned and imprisoned souls; when the latter strives to be coherent or even sincere, the effort, under the gaze of the former, seems ludicrous. One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life.
Can one live without what one cannot have—the question appeared repeatedly in my journal. To say no was to give in; to say yes was surrender, too, though masked as bravado. What is it that cannot be had—this I avoided putting into words. Any explanation would be too specific and too small. But the understanding was never far from me.
Against my intuition I have formed attachments—to a few people, to a profession, to an adopted language—but I have yet to learn to live with them. Instead, the pain of being close to another person and the pain of isolation invalidate each other. To be able to write and to write in English are a lifeline, and a lifeline must be dismissed as extraneous, even illicit. Again and again my mind breaks at the same spot as though it is a fracture that never fully heals: I fear taking you—you, my life, and all that makes it worth living—seriously.
In Leitrim I did not run into the phantom seen in Amsterdam. Outside a bookshop I read a poster advertising a symposium on Rūmī. A laundromat had a handwritten note taped to the door, saying it would stay open only three days a week due to the recession. In the hotel lounge I sat with a pot of tea and counted passersby. A woman who reminded me of a friend prompted me to look up the name of an island off the coast of County Mayo, where her father had been buried on a rainy day, the coffin lowered into a foot of water. The tangible often possesses a kind of eloquence. Distractions bring momentary clarity.
—
THE TRIP WAS for a festival celebrating the Irish writer John McGahern. When the invitation came I could not claim much connection beyond admiration, but I wanted to visit the River Shannon and the country lanes in Leitrim and Roscommon. To see the setting of an autobiographical author is to hold fleetingly another person’s reality.
I am not an autobiographical writer—one cannot be without a solid and explicable self—and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?
Though I had read McGahern’s memoir before, and knew that it would not provide an answer, I brought it for the trip. A painful childhood, losing his mother at a young age, growing up under a violent and volatile father, his exile from Ireland and his return—all of this he writes about plainly, showing off none of the literary ventriloquism of many of his countrymen. No one’s vulnerability is more devastating than the next person’s, no one’s joy more deserving. What happens to McGahern is only life, which happens to us all.
Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured: a reminder that one is not far from who one was. Why write to open old wounds. Why relive a memoir, when that too is an indulgence.
—
A WORD I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we. Living is not an original business.
Certainly in every era there are visionaries and revolutionaries and eccentrics, but they, conscious of—or, even more predictable, living for—their images, tend to be tedious. Stripped of audience, originality would be much less at ease with itself.
To bear the lack of originality: even the least ambitious among us have to invent some way to believe we are distinctive and irreplaceable. One wonders if this desire, humble and presumptuous though innately human, gives the permission for the use of I. Yet for months after the hospital stays I tried to explain to those around me that anyone can be, and should be, replaceable. What does this I matter to you when it means so little to myself?
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.”
She had been raised in a military family, deferential to anyone superior, genuinely believing in the power bestowed on her by the army, trusting Communist teachings (how I had made her suffer and rage by insisting on talking about the Tiananmen massacre).
The note was written without malice, but it mortified me. I always feel grateful to her for letting me see how tedious a person can be when striving to impress the world with personality. It’s fortunate, too, that my boringness was shown to me in such a gentle manner. Had she seen through me and written out of sarcasm, I might have become defensive about my foolishness. But she was too young to realize she was more real than the poseur I had become, and I was not experienced enough to feel guilt. A person, by dismissing her own self with a morbid carelessness, could easily bulldoze another person
’s beliefs.
—
A FEW MONTHS after the Leitrim trip, when I was in the hospital for a second time, I had a roommate with the bluest eyes I have ever seen. She asked me whether she should go to another facility or stay there. I didn’t understand her question, and she rephrased it: Should she be cured of her disorder before going to rehab, or the other way around? I had no professional opinion but ventured to say perhaps it was not a bad thing to be drug free. You don’t understand, she said, and explained that she would use drugs until she died.
I didn’t know what else to say so I listened. She talked—about her childhood; the New York City subway; friends she had grown up with, none of whom acknowledged her existence now; her father and brothers, who had refused to loan her money; the halfway house that had let her down. Soon I had to excuse myself from the room. She was too insistent in demanding an answer. I was sad to lose the seclusion, however limited, behind a half-closed door. Your roommate, several women said to me, eyeing her torn paper gown and oblivious half-nakedness when she moved about in the hallway, where we all sat on sofas or chairs, socializing as we had been encouraged to do.