by Yiyun Li
When I was growing up, my family never once traveled together. The summer I was seven, my uncle, who lived four hours by train from Beijing, brought my sister and me to his home, the first time I had been on a train or set foot in another city. Perhaps it is his death that makes me modify the memory, but it seems those two weeks at my uncle’s belonged to the happiest time of my childhood. Though I know, in retrospect, that the summer must have been difficult for his family. Our eldest cousin had taken the college entrance exam and scored third in his province, but he had a noticeable limp from polio, so no college would admit him. He was quiet. Still, he showed us around town like a dutiful host, carrying four children on a bike with twenty-eight-inch wheels and reinforced for agricultural use. As he rode across town, my sister and I and our two cousins waved at people as though we were a troupe of acrobats.
My uncle played for hours on a pump organ every evening. I did not understand his music, but I was mesmerized by the pedals going up and down.
When I was in high school, my uncle wrote a long letter to his three nieces narrating his grievances. He was six when the Japanese invaded his hometown, and when his parents evacuated, he was left behind. (Wrong, my mother and my aunt said. The right version, they explained, was that he had been playing with a servant’s son, refused to leave, and said he would go to their grandfather’s house for a few days; but their grandfather was soon killed by the Japanese, and a few days became a few months.) His parents, he wrote in the letter, never cared for him, and as a teenager he had been forced to seek a future in the army. (Wrong, my mother and my aunt said. Their big brother, an officer in the Nationalist army, had helped him enroll as a cadet.) Both brothers fought against Mao’s army in the civil war. When they lost, one of them crossed the Taiwan Strait, while the uncle who missed the boat was sent to a factory to be reformed. Eventually he became a music teacher in an elementary school. By the time he wrote the letter there were more reasons to wail against life’s injustice: his elder brother’s prosperity in Taiwan (he himself could’ve had the same good life had he left China), his son’s disability, which made it hard for him to find a wife, his only daughter’s stillborn baby. Disappointment after disappointment: Did anyone ever try to understand him? The question upset my aunt and my mother. They decided that he must have gone mad like many before him. Why else would he write such untruths? Doesn’t he already have three children to inherit his woes?
—
IN INTERVIEWS TREVOR says that he writes “out of curiosity and bewilderment.” What does not make sense is what matters. What motivated my uncle to write the letter? Is it fascination or devotion that makes my mother start her conversations with the news of someone’s suicide? Is it selfish of me to react coolly, as though it were irrelevant? Why did Trevor agree to meet me? Why was the lunch with Trevor not a merely courteous meeting where gratitude was properly expressed and accepted? Come and visit before too long, he said, and spoke of the garden he wanted me to see. At the metro station, the man behind me on the escalator turned around to look at Jane, who had joined us, and Trevor. They waved until I was out of sight. A goodbye, isn’t it? the man said, and I said a goodbye indeed. More leave-taking would follow in the coming years, at the Exeter train station; at London Victoria; at the sunny garden of a restaurant in Devon. At each farewell the question not asked is always there: Will I see you again?
Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. It had not occurred to me, until I met Trevor, to ask: Will I see you again? What had precluded me from asking is this: Perhaps I won’t see you again, and if so, goodbye for now and goodbye forever.
—
DO YOU THINK of your characters after you finish the books? I asked Trevor the next time I visited him, when he was driving me from the train station to his house.
I do, he said. I don’t reread them but I remember the characters. I still feel sad for them sometimes. Do you?
I remember your characters and feel sad for them, too, I said.
He looked at me. No, what I mean is, do you think about your characters? Do you feel sad for them?
I knew that was what he had asked, but to admit that characters, having left, still kept me a hostage seemed silly.
It was nearly spring—February, though warm and sunny—and flowers in the garden were already blossoming. At lunch, Trevor placed me on the side of the table facing the window so I could see outside. He sat down, and rose again, pulling the curtain ever so slightly. This way, he explained to me, I could enjoy the garden without the sun shining into my eyes.
Sometimes people ask me what they should read if they want to start reading William Trevor. To say anything about Trevor’s work is also to speak about memories—they are in English, and I know where they start. There is “The Piano Tuner’s Wives”: the pain of seeing the characters struggle with cruelty they do not know they are capable of is not alleviated by familiarity. There is “Reading Turgenev”: once in Pennsylvania I was driven by a poet in the moonlit countryside, and she told me that she had been working on a poem called “Reading Turgenev” as a homage. There is Nights at the Alexandra, which traveled often with me. Once on a trip to New York, I watched a middle-aged woman and a child on the subway, the girl no more than thirteen, her head on the older woman’s shoulder, the latter caressing the child’s inner thigh. I could not tell if they were mother and daughter or a pair of lovers. Not knowing disturbed me as much as either possibility. Later in the hotel I started the first paragraphs of a novella. The narrator, a middle-aged woman living by herself in Beijing, tells her story with the same opening lines used by the narrator in Trevor’s novella, an older bachelor in a provincial Irish town. A person living in isolation does not speak from solitude, but loneliness; that Trevor’s narrator decided to speak to the world makes it possible for the woman to do so.
Trevor’s books—Other People’s Worlds, Fools of Fortune, Elizabeth Alone, The Story of Lucy Gault, and many more—offer me a haven. But even to explain that is to intrude: there is the privacy of Trevor, who has built that space; there is my privacy, too—in writing and in life one is often sustained by memories unshared.
—
AFTER TREVOR GAVE his last public reading—I had flown to England for it—he told Jane and me about an old man at the end of the book-signing queue. The man had come not for Trevor’s signature, but to thank him. His wife had loved Trevor’s stories, and when she had become too sick, he read to her. It was a Trevor story he had been reading to her as she died.
In time I would learn what it meant to understand one’s own writing through the eyes of a dying reader. A woman from Canada wrote to me, noting the chapter and page number where she had read a sentence that she said she would never want to lose. Her brain had been damaged from radiation, she wrote; she had not been able to concentrate because she fell asleep so often. She felt isolated but did not wish to seek out others. “This is something I have long considered and now I think I have my answer,” she said of the sentence. “Perhaps I will never sleep again.”
I remembered writing the sentence. Defending my mind at that moment, which was considering death as the way out, I had trespassed the boundary and written about myself: Love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity. Failure too, measured by effort, would be the failure he would have to make peace with one day.
—
THE OTHER DAY I read through the letters from Trevor. I wish there were a way to write them into this book. But I also wish there were a way to leave him unnamed as two other friends are among these pages.
—
HOW OLD IS your baby? a young woman asked me when, years ago, I checked into my side of the hospital room we were to share. Three days, I said; he was running a fever when we
got home so he was readmitted. How old is your baby? I asked. He turned a month yesterday, she said; we’re waiting for him to reach five pounds. She was a high school student, and when she was not called away to nurse her baby she studied in bed. After school, a boy her age came to visit, and they huddled in her narrow bed, whispering and giggling. Two days later, the Twin Towers fell, and I spent the day between watching the news and visiting the quarantined baby. In the evening, when I returned to the room, they had changed the channel to the Cartoon Network, watching Tom and Jerry with the volume turned low.
The first time I went to Devon a young woman next to me on the train described the boardinghouse she would inherit one day from her grandparents. Her boyfriend was hoping to be hired by the old couple. I imagined them whispering and giggling behind her grandparents’ backs, like the new parents from years ago. 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.
A few years ago, on a flight to London, a woman next to me asked to see the book I was reading and what I was writing in it. I showed her what I had underlined in an Elizabeth Bowen story, when one character asked another: “Has there been anything you have never told me?” Frightening, I had written in the margin, and the woman insisted that I write down it’s not so frightening for Alex, which was her name.
A cabdriver on my latest visit to Devon asked me which was my local prison, Sing Sing or Alcatraz. Alcatraz, I said, and he expressed regret, as I would not have heard of his relative imprisoned in Sing Sing in the 1930s, who had a record of hosting house parties from which people kept disappearing.
It’s my Irish guilt that drove me to the West Coast, a cabdriver in California said to me; have you heard of James Michael Curley, my granduncle, the only mayor of Boston who was elected from prison? Take my card, the driver prompted me, and before I exited the car he reminded me to look up his family story, which I dutifully did.
One morning in Washington, D.C., I stood for half an hour with another woman, waiting for the airport counter to open at five o’clock. She was a single mother, and she and her three daughters were on the way to Disneyland. They had packed all their party clothes and gone over a list to unplug everything in the house. They had saved for years to make this trip, the woman said. It’s wonderful chatting with you, she said when the counter opened; we should exchange emails.
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. “I do not know how much time I have. I am wondering if you are willing to meet and to see if you are interested in my story,” a woman with cancer wrote to me. I had thought it was impossible to deny a dying person’s wish until the woman wrote again, predicting I would cancel the appointment because she was “inspired by serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter character to become a psychiatrist. Had suicidal and homicidal ideation. Struggled with being kind and evil constantly. Pursued happiness all these years and never found it. Quite often I wish I had a button to push to kill the entire human race.”
You must protect yourself, a friend warned me. But to write one has to give up protection fundamentally.
—
I HAVE NOT forgotten a person who has come into my life, and perhaps it is for that reason I have no choice but to live as a recluse. The people I carry with me have lived out not only their own rations but mine too. To remember is the due a recluse owes the world.
My father and I used to plant string beans in our yard, their tendrils reaching higher each day on the bamboo fence. When summer ended an old woman in the neighborhood would snap the beans a few days before we were ready to harvest. The first time I caught her stealing I was furious, but my parents said that I shouldn’t be because she had sewn a cotton jacket for me when I was a baby. Year after year the old woman harvested our beans, and every time my parents reminded me to be grateful for the jacket. Then she stopped coming: she had died, and I had no more reason to feel anything.
Once my grandfather, taking a walk along Garden Road, felt unwell and was helped by a young soldier. He became part of the family, an adopted grandson who visited on weekends. After my grandfather’s death, he traveled to Beijing with his new bride and stayed with us. My sister and I adored his bride, who was pretty and mild-mannered. The day before their departure, he had to stay overnight in a queue for train tickets, and I caught her crying in the morning when he had not returned. He was only delayed, and they went home happily married. After they left I found a writing pad, the top page ripped away, though I could see the trace of what had been written: an anxious monologue of the bride’s, asking herself what his absence meant, why she was left in this vacancy, and how the marriage had come into being in the first place. Years later I underlined in a Bowen novel a passage about a character’s “emphatic” pencil, which had left a trace for her daughter to decipher.
—
WHAT’S THIS ABOUT? my older son asked me when I was watching on the Internet a military parade in Beijing. A celebration of the end of World War II seventy years ago, I said. My great-grandfather died in that war, I said, and immediately regretted sounding like the cabdrivers easily offering inherited family dramas. Which year was that? my son asked. Nineteen thirty-eight, I said. That was the end of the discussion. I did not want to describe the man’s death as it had been described to me. He, a fabric merchant in a small town, was forced into hard labor for the Japanese army; he had a limp that made him unable to keep up with the other laborers, and was killed summarily, his torso cut open by a sword. (Having not met the man and not witnessed his death, I had spent much time thinking about him when I was young. His limp reminded me of my limping cousin.)
I don’t understand why Trevor still writes about the Troubles, someone in Ireland once said to me. They are old stories, and Ireland has moved on. I can tell you your books have hurt my feelings, a reader, who turned out to have grown up in the same apartment compound I did, announced at a bookstore reading; why do you have to write about China’s history; why can’t you make me feel proud of being Chinese? But cruelty and kindness are not old stories, and never will be.
In elementary school, a girl’s father died suddenly. The next morning, on cleaning duty, I swept my side of the schoolyard and watched her sweep the other side. (It did not occur to me to question why cleaning duty was more important than a father’s death or why I did not offer to help her.) She was weeping, her tears falling into a pile of leaves. I wanted to say something to her but did not know what, all the time plagued by a glum concern. She was the other plump girl in my grade; even the meanest boys would leave her alone now, and I would be the only plump girl to be made fun of. I did not recognize the frivolousness of my worry. Though I remember my subsequent thought while watching her: at least she had a reason to cry, and people would understand.
Did I tell you Teacher Sun died? my mother asked me recently. Nobody is going to miss him, she said; bedbound for ten years and nobody felt bad for him then, either. There was no malice in her words. The dead man, my fifth-grade math teacher, had once been known to beat boys in class and put his hands the wrong way on girls’ bodies. No parents or teachers or school officials ever intervened. He was a violent man, capable of doing anything to anyone who offended him. One less evil person in the world, my mother said. Her words reminded me of something I had nearly succeeded in forgetting. This teacher used to write problems on the board at the beginning of class and ask me to solve them while he walked between aisles, taking his time to pick out ears to wring. When I finished the problems, having already inflicted pain on a boy or two he would return to the board. Beautiful, he would remark. Despite his cigarette-stained fingers and the sour breath of a smoker behind his sadistic smile, I did not feel repulsed by his approval. Then he would turn and launch a piece of chalk at someone—we all knew it would happe
n. You, the teacher would say, yes, I’m talking to you, he would stare at the boy marked by the chalk; you’ll never understand the beauty of a mind. With those words I was dismissed and sent back to my seat.
Cruelty and kindness, revisited, are not what they appear to be.
When I visited my parents this past summer, in the same apartment I grew up in, I saw a photo of me, taken on my fifth birthday, next to a photo of my mother, taken when she was sixteen. There were other photos of the family, though those two, older than the rest by decades, their subjects captured at a much younger moment, were prominently displayed. I flinched at this shrine of innocence, when neither girl in the pictures had yet caused much damage. My mother had a dreamy laugh, beautiful in a romantic and glamorous way; I was smiling as ordered by the photographer, not precociously but dutifully. What if I had not known either of them? I would have looked at them more closely, my curiosity not different from my curiosity about any stranger. No better and no worse than others, these two are fools of fortune, too.
“You may be less confused than you imagined,” in a letter Trevor wrote. “Stories are a hope, and often they obligingly answer questions.”