by Yiyun Li
The second time Woolf appears in Mansfield’s journal she is not named but only referred to as one of “that publishing couple in cane chairs.” Of course it can’t be said for certain that the couple are the Woolfs. The description—a character portrait done in dispassionate observation, which was Mansfield’s forte—reminds us of them. 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.”
What did Mansfield mean by that? No matter, it does not change the strange satisfaction of a spectator. These two extraordinary women would never know what they had (or had not) said about each other in their private papers. Not knowing transforms them into characters. To see the context of other people’s lives when that context is kept away from those who live in it: a reader always wins in the end; a reader has infinite time to interfere with the characters’ lives.
Oh, she did put me in her book, but only those quirky moments.
—A writer’s mother
Now you’ve all grown up I don’t have anyone to make pancakes for.
—A friend’s mother
Everyone can resort to an omniscient voice to tell another person’s stories. There is, however, one omniscient voice I cannot live with, yet it is the only voice that continues to drown out others.
Writing is the only part of my life I have taken beyond my mother’s storytelling. I have avoided writing in an autobiographical voice because I cannot bear that it could be overwritten by my mother’s omniscience. I can easily see all other parts of my life in her narrative: my marriage, my children, my past. Just as she demands to come into my narrative, I demand to be left out of hers. There is no way to change that; not a happy ending, not even an ending is possible.
At a reading given by two writers and attended by their mothers, I watched them occupy the same space with an ease that I envied. There were many things I could have asked them, about reading their children’s work and being written into their books. But what I really wanted to know was: What kind of food do you cook for your children?
For as long as I can remember, my mother has never cooked a meal for me. It is a story that cannot be told right in any voice.
Take a young man, ardent as an Arabian horse, let him marry, he is lost. First of all the woman is proud, then she is weak, then she faints, then he faints, then the whole family faints.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
I was reading Kierkegaard while waiting to pick up my children from school. I wished I could wave some mother out of her idling vehicle and show her the passage. Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.
When you read a name on an epitaph you are easily led to wonder how it went with his life in the world; one would like to climb down into the grave to converse with him.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
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.
These stories are dull and tedious as autumn, monotonous in tone, their artistic elements inextricably entangled with the medical, but none of this prevents me from having the temerity to approach you with a humble request for your permission to dedicate this little book to you.
—Anton Chekhov to Pyotr Tchaikovsky
In October 1889, Chekhov, not yet thirty years old and fairly new to his writing career, wrote to Tchaikovsky about a soon-to-be-published collection. The title was Gloomy People.
Under what circumstance can a writer and a reader become contemporaries? Chekhov’s invitation was a gesture to abolish the temporal divide. To cross the boundary so that another person’s name will remain with one’s words—it is almost an inappropriate request, yet the extraordinary justifies the inappropriateness. No friendship can be posthumous.
Reading William Trevor
In retrospect little makes sense—perhaps all stories, rather than once-upon-a-time, should start this way.
Shortly after my first book was published, I asked an Irish friend to send a copy with a thank-you note to William Trevor. I considered the note necessary—without his stories mine would not have been written. I wanted to be well mannered, too, so the note was brief and courteous. A few months later, a reply came, graciously written. I framed the letter and hung it in my study. It was uncharacteristic of me—to assign meaning to an object presumes an attachment. It was there as inspiration, I told myself, from someone I aspired to be.
The story might have ended here. I would have continued reading Trevor as I did Turgenev or Hardy: from a distance, which is a prerequisite for unabashed connection. But Turgenev and Hardy could not have written and raised the possibility of meeting in person one day.
The next November, traveling to London for an event, I wrote to Trevor about the possibility of visiting him. It is inconceivable now to think I behaved in such a way, as Trevor is among the most private writers, which was not difficult for me to deduce. I myself would have been taken aback by the inappropriateness of such a request.
—
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. No one seems to mind the absence of Miss Havisham or Mrs. Rochester. A father in a Jean Stafford novel walks out of a cobbler’s workshop and is never seen again. Maidens from Dream of the Red Chamber or The Tale of Genji, when heartbroken or abandoned, humiliated or disillusioned, become Buddhist nuns, their stories ending long before their lives do. An uncle, my mother’s eldest brother, vanished on the eve of the Communist victory over the Nationalist army, and an orphan girl, half maid and half daughter in the family and raised as his future bride, had to be married off to another man. The aunt in Nanxun, we called her; no other relative was known by the place where he or she lived. In an album there were family pictures she sent each year to my grandfather, all her children having inherited her remarkable beauty, growing up effortlessly in front of my eyes each time I flipped the pages. The aunt in Nanxun was mentioned often because of the unmentionable, an uncle presumably alive in Taiwan on optimistic days, presumably killed in action when optimism could not be sustained. (I learned of his existence and the conjecture of his fate by eavesdropping on my mother and my aunt once. Foolishly I told a friend at school, who then wrote a note to inform the teacher about this uncle of mine in Taiwan. The note was passed on to my mother. The teacher was her colleague, thoughtful enough to intercept a secret that could bring harm, though I could not find gratitude for the teacher nor forgiveness for my friend. It was because of their meddling that I received a beating.)
Forty years later the uncle appeared as unexpectedly as he had disappeared, in a long letter that had taken more than a year, through many hands, to reach his father. My grandfather, with a few months to live, hoped for a reunion with his lost son, but the travel ban across the Taiwan Strait would not be lifted for another two years.
We now live in an ever-connected world, allocated only the wishful thinking of privacy and solitude. Once, when my green card application was denied and it was reported in the news, a man calling himself Doctor S— kept phoning my workplace with a marriage offer, saying it would secure a green card for me. Once a woman said to me at a cocktail party the moment I entered the well-groomed garden: I want you to know, had my mother had your success she would not have killed herself. At a festival in East Sussex I watched a man come up to Trevor afterward and ask if he could stop by for tea, describing Trevor’s house correctly and in detail.
—
IN NOTES SENT to my publisher and to the hotel, Trevor asked me to phone once I arrived in London. A meeting was proposed, not in Devon, where he lives, but in Bath, more easily accessed by train for both parties. It was
considerate of him, I knew, but it also occurred to me that Bath would be safer for him to meet a stranger. I could be a character in a Trevor story, quiet and nondescript yet possessing inexplicable malevolence. Can a mistrustful person, who is capable of dissecting herself with ruthless imagination, be trustworthy at all?
It turned out that I could not travel to Bath. There was publicity lined up for the day. I was disappointed but relieved. External interference pardons one from ambivalence. My wish to meet Trevor was as strong as the fear that it might happen—there was no way to rid the doubt that had begun to plague me: Who are you? What makes you think of yourself as innocuous?
I phoned back, with the hope that Trevor would be relieved, too. We chatted about the weather—rain in London and rain in Devon—for a minute. He told me there would be other opportunities. Next year he and his wife were planning to visit America. By ship, he said; I can guarantee you it’s a more pleasant way to travel.
—
JULY 2015. WE visited China for the first time since my husband and I became American citizens. While in Baishan, my husband’s hometown, my mother called and said her brother had died that morning.
Years ago, I had written a novel set in Baishan without having seen it. Baishan, White Mountain, used to be Muddy River, named after the river running through town. In the 1990s the city government had deemed the name a hindrance to its prosperity and rechristened the city. With a novelist’s opportunism I had claimed the unwanted Muddy River. My husband had drawn a map of the city circa the 1970s, and I had followed people’s footsteps in it.
When we entered the city I noticed the bridge where two of my characters met for the first time, the foot of the mountain where a trusting dog was poisoned, the cooling tower of the electricity plant where a murderous janitor worked, and the river itself, befittingly muddy, fast flowing after days of rain. I had wondered if I would notice things about the place and its people that I had not imagined while working on the novel. I did not, which was a disappointment. I do not mind that my imagination is limited; I do mind when the world is not bigger than what one can imagine.
Until the phone call about my uncle’s death, I had been dispirited. Please, I ordered my eyes, find one thing that is not anticipated, but everything in China seemed only to confirm. The cabdrivers told political jokes that I had heard twenty years earlier. The pushing crowd made me impatient, and I elbowed queue cutters with an aggressiveness that came back as easily as the rude slang I hurled at them. My children, Western tourists, were continually amused by the inept English translations of public announcements and signs, but to me they were stale jokes. Only once did I stop to appreciate a message. At the Beijing international airport, a woman on a bulletin board encourages her audience to enjoy life. “Take a look at this wonderful life unfolding in front of you,” she exhorts in Chinese, but sounds skeptical (or subversive) in the English translation: This wonderful life lies as you see it.
—
THE FIRST STORY I ever read by William Trevor was “Traditions,” set in an Irish boarding school. It was published in The New Yorker with a photo of young scholars in dark suits as illustration. Its reality was far from mine. I was in a science program then, uncertain if I should continue. My doubt was that I could easily see my life unfurl in front of me: a degree in a year, a few years of post-doctorate training, a secure job in academia or the biomedical industry, a house and children, a dog because a dog rollicking in a neatly maintained yard had always appeared to me to be the pinnacle of an American life.
I checked out The Hill Bachelors, Trevor’s newest collection, after reading the story, and trudged through the snow from the university library to the student union, where I sat on a green sofa next to a movie theater where films in foreign languages drew a limited crowd every night. Details preserved by memory can be dull, significant only to the one remembering, but it is the mundane that remains mysterious.
It would be presumptuous to claim that a connection was made during that first encounter; it would not be as presumptuous to say a space that had not been known to me was made possible through reading Trevor. From The Hill Bachelors I moved on to his other books. A few weeks later I discussed with my advisor the possibility of leaving science. Stay, he said; you have a bright future in this country. Yes, I said, but I can already see myself at the end of that future; I know I will regret it if I don’t try this.
This, as I explained to him, was to become a writer. To write is to find a new way to see the world, and I did not doubt, as I was reading Trevor, that I wanted to see as he does.
—
LETTERS WERE EXCHANGED a few months ahead of Trevor’s visit to America to set the date of the meeting. In October 2007, I took a red-eye flight from California to Boston to meet him for lunch. I had three hours, as I was to catch the evening flight back.
Many things were talked about during the lunch: a trip the previous year Trevor and his wife, Jane, had taken to meet the letterer who would carve their gravestones; a conversation decades ago with his father about becoming a letterer himself; a funeral during which religious music had been played against the will of the dead and the alive; a conversation with Graham Greene, another with V. S. Pritchett; descriptions of Molly Keane’s work and the graveyard she was buried in, which I would visit the next year. Halfway through the lunch, a woman in an orange blouse walking past the restaurant patio caught Trevor’s attention. There was something incomprehensible about her in that moment, he explained. Such moments may pass, he said, though I sensed that often they did not.
After lunch Trevor showed me the work of Henry Moore near his hotel. I followed him, or my eyes followed where I thought he was looking, feeling apprehensive. I could describe the sunny New England afternoon in October and the bronze sculptures surrounded by the trees that were changing colors, but they would be clichés. The truth is, I did not know what I was supposed to see.
—
THIS APPREHENSION REPEATS itself, in museums and galleries and movie theaters. Once a friend pointed out that a sentence I had written describing a chrysanthemum felt wrong. It’s not bad, I said, defending it, not doubting at all that I had made every word right. It was not that the sentence was poorly written, she said, but that it was written not from perception but its absence.
This art of seeing—a painting, a sculpture, a film—is an elusive one to me. In Trevor’s novella Nights at the Alexandra, a cinema in a provincial Irish town offers the setting of a tale of love and loyalty. In Trevor’s memoir, days are whiled away in cinemas, the boredom of youth compensated by the wonders on screen.
I have never felt the attraction to films. The movie theaters in Beijing—Workers’ Clubs they were called in the 1970s and early 1980s, which held over a thousand people—offered little wonder. The newsreels about King Sihanouk and his comrade General Pol Pot were repetitive, and the movies, which we were often required to see as part of school, did not interest me as much as the people sitting nearby, a woman cracking sunflower seeds or a man gurgling while drinking tea from a mug. Often someone would be summoned during a movie. A handwritten note, saying Comrade So-and-So was requested due to an emergency, would be projected onto the dark column next to the screen. These interruptions felt like riddles to which the answers were withheld forever. Obligingly I offered scenarios to satisfy myself. I wished that my name would appear.
One of my most dreaded activities in the army was the weekly movie, an enrichment activity to raise morale. I established a competition with the girl who sat next to me to see who could sleep through these movies longer—I was the more frequent winner. But my feats were not as admirable as those of the girl in another squad, who could stand in the most perfect military posture but doze off confidently.
The girls who slept during the daytime were your allies. After lights-out and before reveille they occupied storage rooms and toilet stalls and memorized English vocabulary. There were other night wanderers, too. Once a girl was found weeping in the darkness; she was lat
er sent home. Once my bunkmate, reputed to be one of the top young mathematicians in China, was stopped by a girl when she went to use the bathroom. The girl had spent hours after lights-out trying to solve a well-known mathematical problem and asked for her help. Crazy, someone commented, but obsessions demanded respect, too. A petite girl in my squad regaled us with stories from her village, where women took their own lives with weed killer and pesticides as readily as—in her exact words—apples dropped from apple trees. The same girl read and marked a few notices in a magazine where young women advertised their wishes to seek soul mates in the army. Lecherous, she called the women; all they want is to marry a solider for practical gain. I was doubtful but persuaded—don’t question me, she said; these are people I’ve grown to know—to draft replies. I made up male names and ranks and combined them with solid knowledge about military life, and mailed the letters in army-issued envelopes to ensure that a reply would come to our fictional selves. For days and weeks we waited. No love letter ever found its way into our hands.
—
ON THE PHONE, reporting my uncle’s death, my mother informed me that toward the end of his life he had become violent, beating his children and grandchildren. Your cousins said it was dementia, she said; but do you think what he really had were mental problems?
My mother has a way of talking about mental illness and suicide that makes me uneasy. The day I arrived in Beijing she reported that the father of an elementary-school classmate had died. 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. Do you remember him? my mother asked. Yes, I said. He was active in the retirees’ choir, my mother said; a good tenor. He looked happy, she said; why would he do it? I had no answer, so my mother asked me if she had told me about the death of our former neighbor Mrs. Xiao. Yes, I said, but that did not stop her from telling it again: the woman had jumped from her eighth-floor apartment the year before. Courteous, aloof, elegantly dressed at a time when most women wore gray and blue Mao jackets, she was one of the most graceful people I had known as a child. She had refused to join the neighborhood gossip (and so became a subject); she had never meddled with my or any child’s business.