by Yiyun Li
In my dream I asked for the phone. Two women came out of the office. I recognized them. In real life they are both gone. No, they said; the service is no longer offered because everyone has a cellphone these days. There was nothing remarkable about the dream—a melancholy visit to the past is beyond one’s control—but for the fact that the women spoke to me in English.
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?
Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language.” That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.
I feel a tinge of guilt when I imagine Nabokov’s woe. Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can demand more than one is willing to give, or what one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, I would borrow from Nabokov for a stronger and stranger statement. My private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language.
For a while, when I was unwell, my dreams often went back to Beijing, standing on top of a building—one of those gray, Soviet-styled apartment buildings—or being lost on a bus running through an unfamiliar neighborhood. Waking up from these dreams, I would list in my journal memories that did not appear in my dream: a swallow nest underneath a balcony, the barbed wire on the rooftop, the garden where old people sat and exchanged gossip, the post bins at street corners, round, green, covered by dust, with handwritten collection times behind a square window of half-opaque plastic.
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.
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TO OWN—A HOUSE, a life on a quiet street, a language, a dream—is to allow oneself to be owned, too. The moment the present slips into the past owning starts to be replaced by disowning. Why wait for the inevitable?
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, just as one can hardly give a convincing explanation why someone’s hair turns gray on this day but not on the other, or why some birds fly south when the temperature drops. But these are inane analogies, used as excuses because I do not want to touch the heart of the matter. 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.
The tragedy of Nabokov’s loss is that his misfortune was easily explained by public history—his story became other people’s possession. 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. Once a poet of Eastern European origin and I—we both have lived in America for years, and both write in English—were asked to read our work in our native languages at a gala. But I don’t write in Chinese, I explained, and the organizer apologized for her misunderstanding. I offered to read Li Po or Du Fu or any of the ancient poets I grew up memorizing, but instead it was arranged for me to read the poems of a political prisoner.
A metaphor’s desire to transcend diminishes any human story; its ambition to illuminate blinds those who create metaphors. In my distrust of metaphors I feel a kinship to George Eliot: “We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” This, I know, is what my husband was questioning years ago. But my abandonment of my first language is personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation—political or historical or ethnographical.
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CHINESE IMMIGRANTS OF my generation in America criticize my English for not being native enough. A compatriot emailed, pointing out how my language is neither lavish nor lyrical, as a real writer’s language should be; you only write simple things in simple English, you should be ashamed of yourself, he wrote in a fury. 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); my letters to others I would have destroyed too, had I had them. But one’s relationship with a native language is similar to that with the past. There is not a moment one could point to and say: this is the beginning of my past, or this is the beginning of my relationship with my mother tongue, up until that moment I was free. What comes before—other people’s past, other people’s relationship with that language—claims a right against one’s will. Rarely does a story start where we wish it had, or end where we wish it would.
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ONE CROSSES THE border to become a new person. One finishes a manuscript and cuts off the characters. One adopts a language. These are false and forced frameworks, providing illusory freedom, as time provides illusory leniency when we, in anguish, let it pass monotonously. 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.
In the hospital, a group of nursing students came to play bingo one Friday night. A young woman asked if I would join her. Bingo, I said; I’ve never in my life played. She thought for a moment and said that she had only played bingo in the hospital. It was her eighth hospitalization; she had been schooled for a while in the hospital, and once she pointed out a small patch of fenced-in green where she and other children had been let out to exercise. Often her father visited her in the afternoon, and I would watch them sitting together playing a game, not attempting conversation. By then, all words must have been inadequate; language does little to help a mind survive time.
Yet language is capable of sinking a mind. One’s thoughts are slavishly bound to language. I used to think an abyss is a moment of despair becoming interminable, but any moment, even the direst, is bound to end. What is abysmal is that one’s erratic language closes on one as quicksand. Yet what is spoken by others—truth as cliché, cliché as the only truth—is as indisputable as the retreating solid ground, getting further and further beyond reach. The abyss is that ti
me is annulled by language. We can kill time, but language kills us.
“Patient stated that she felt like a burden to loved ones”—much later, when I read the notes from the emergency room, I did not have any recollection of the conversation. A burden to loved ones: this language must have been provided to me. I would never use the phrase in my thinking or writing. But my resistance has little to do with avoiding a platitude. 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.
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WHEN KATHERINE MANSFIELD was still a teenager in New Zealand, she wrote in her journal about a man next door playing for weeks on a cornet “Swanee River.” “I wake up with the ‘Swanee River,’ eat it with every meal I take, and go to bed eventually with ‘all de world am sad and weary’ as a lullaby.” I read Mansfield’s notebooks and Marianne Moore’s letters around the same time. Moore in a letter described a fundraiser at Bryn Mawr, maidens in bathing suits and green bathing tails on a raft: “It was really most realistic…way down upon the Swanee river.”
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 irrelevant. I have not been using the language to be part of something.
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WHEN WE ENTER a world—a new country, a new school, a party, a family or a class reunion, an army camp, a hospital—we speak the language it requires. The wisdom to adapt is the wisdom to have two languages: the one spoken by others, and the one spoken to oneself. One learns to master the public language not much differently from the way one acquires a second language: assess the situations, construct sentences with the right words and the correct syntax, catch a mistake if one can avoid it, or else apologize and learn the lesson after a blunder. Fluency in the public language, like fluency in a second language, can be achieved with enough practice.
Perhaps the line between the two languages—the public and the private—is, and should be, fluid; it is never so for me. 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. I have no doubt—can this be an illusion?—that the conversation I have with myself, however linguistically flawed, is the conversation that I have always wanted, in the exact way I want it to be.
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.
There was a time I could write well in Chinese. In school my essays were used as models; in the army, our squad leader gave me the choice between drafting a speech for her and cleaning the toilets or the pigsties—I always chose to write. Once in high school, several classmates and I entered an oratory contest. The winner would represent the class in a patriotic event. When I went onstage, for some mischievous reason, I saw to it that many of the listeners were moved to tears by the poetic and insincere lies I had made up; I moved myself to tears, too. That I could become a successful propaganda writer crossed my mind. I was disturbed. A young person wants to be true to herself and to the world. But what did not occur to me then was to ask: Can one’s intelligence rely entirely on the public language; can one form a precise thought, recall an accurate memory, or even feel a genuine feeling, with only the public language?
My mother, who loves to sing, often sings the songs from her childhood and youth, many of them propaganda from the 1950s and 1960s, but there is one song she has reminisced about all her life because she does not know how to sing it. She learned the song in kindergarten, the year Communism took over her hometown; she can only remember the opening line.
There was an old woman in the hospital who sat in the hallway with a pair of shiny red shoes. I feel like Dorothy, she said as she showed me the shoes, which she had chosen from the donations to patients. Some days her mind was lucid, and she would talk about the red shoes that hurt her feet or the medication that made her brain feel dead and left her body in pain. Other days she talked to the air, an endless conversation with the unseen. People who had abandoned her by going away or dying returned and made her weep.
I often sat next to this lonesome Dorothy. Was I eavesdropping? Perhaps, but her conversation was beyond encroachment. That one could reach a point where the border between public and private language no longer matters is frightening. 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. The automatic participation in life, however, can turn that space into a secured tomb. Those who have lost that space have only one language left. My grandmother, according to my mother and her siblings, had become a woman who talked to the unseen before being sent to the asylum to die. There is so much to give up: hope, freedom, dignity. A private language defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away.
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MANSFIELD SPOKE OF her habit of keeping a journal as “being garrulous…I must say nothing affords me the same relief.” Reading her journals presents a dilemma. Several times she directly addressed the readers—her posterity—in a taunting manner. I would prefer to distrust her. But it would be dishonest not to acknowledge the solace of reading them. Not having the exact language for the bleakness I felt, I devoured her words like thirst-quenching poison. 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?
There is nought to do but WORK, but how can I work when this awful weakness makes even the pen like a walking stick.
There is something profound & terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact.
It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it. I expect the bird knows it and feels immensely arrogant.
One only wants to feel sure of another. That’s all.
I realise my faults better than anyone else could realise them. I know exactly where I fail.
Have people, apart from those far away people, ever existed for me? Or have they always failed
me, and faded because I denied them reality? Supposing I were to die, as I sit at this table, playing with my indian paper knife—what would be the difference. No difference at all. Then why don’t I commit suicide?
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WHEN ONE THINKS in an adopted language, one arranges and rearranges words that are neutral, indifferent even, to arrive at a thought that one does not know to be there.
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.
What language does one use to feel; or, does one need a language to feel? In the hospital, I visited a class of medical students studying minds and brains. After an interview, the doctor who led the class asked about feelings. I said it was beyond my ability to describe what might as well be indescribable.
If you can be articulate about your thoughts, why can’t you articulate your feelings? asked the doctor.
It took me a year to figure out the answer. It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible to do that in my native language.
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OFTEN I THINK that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.
After the dream of the public telephone, I remembered a moment in the army. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were ordered to watch the official celebration on CCTV. Halfway through the program, a girl on duty came and said there was a long-distance call for me.