Our speaker is the author Yiyun Li. She comes to us most recently from UC Davis
where she teaches writing for the English Program there but she has made
several other much longer journeys which I suppose we're all in the middle of all
our journeys right? None of them are completed. For example her journey from immunology to
fiction writing or her journey from China to America.
So we're particularly happy to have her here to speak to us about this moment
this time in these journey she's been taking. She is the author of two
collections of short stories and two novels as well as this most recent work
"Dear friend, from my life I write to you your life", which
perplexes people in bookstores who want to know where to put it.
It's perhaps memoir perhaps something else and all of these have
been very highly acclaimed. The journey I think that is most interesting
to us. I think many people in this room will have been on a journey or are in a
journey which somehow parallels some of the journeys that Yun Li has taken.
Many people in this room have taken a similar geographic or linguistic or
cultural journey and so I I think that her talk will be interesting to you
about what I want to say is that in her writing and so perhaps tonight her
talk you may find that some of what she says is jarring, is unexpected, is
always thought provoking and is always crafted with great precision. She has won
many awards and I could list them Pen Hemingway Award, MacArthur Foundation
Fellowship etc. but better than telling you all those awards I would say
this to you she's here tonight so let's listen, let's talk to her and ask questions and tomorrow let's find something from her to read.
I give the lecture's title called "To speak is to blunder but I venture" which is a
chapter's title in the book but when it was printed in The New Yorker
they ran out of space they couldn't put the second half of the title so they use
the title "To speak is to blunder" which to me sounds Chinese you know. It sounds
very much like the moment you open your mouth you're blundering but I
really want to emphasize I have the second half - to speak is to blunder but
I venture. I did open my mouth and I started talking so I'm going to start
reading this essay. To speak is to blunder but I venture. In a dream the
other night I was back in Beijing at the entrance of my family's apartment
complex where a public telephone - a black rotary-had once been guarded by the old
women from the neighborhood association. They used to listen without hiding their
distinct curiosity. Well I was on the phone with friends. When I finished they
would complain about the length of the conversation before logging it into
their book and calculating the charge. In those days I accumulated many errands
before I went to use the telephone lest my parents noticed my extended absence.
My allowance which was what I could scrimp and save from my lunch money was
spent on phone calls and stamps and envelopes. Like a character in a
Victorian novel I checked our mail before my parents did
and collected letters to me from friends before my parents could intercept them.
In my dream I asked for the phone - two women came out of the front office. I
recognized them. In real life they are both gone. No, they said, the services are
no longer offered because everyone has a cell phone these days. There was nothing
extraordinary about the dream - a melancholy visit to the past in this manner
is beyond one's control but for the fact that the women spoke to me in English.
Years ago when I started writing in English my husband asked if I understood
the implication of the decision. What he meant was not the practical concerns
though there were plenty - the nebulous hope of getting punished, published.
The lack of a career path as had been laid out in science - my first field of
postgraduate study in America, the hardship of immigration regulation. Many of
my college classmates from China as scientist acquired their green cards in
the national interest waiver. An artist is not much of importance to any nation.
My husband who writes computer programs was asking about language. Did I
understand what it meant to renounce my motherland, mother tongue? Nabokov once
answered a question he must have been tired of being asked. My private tragedy
which cannot, indeed, should not be anyone's concern is that I had to
abandon my natural language, my natural idiom. 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 and claims understanding and empathy
do people call it a tragedy. One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy,
to others. I often feel a tinge of guilt when I imagine Nabokov's woe.
Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting
and irreplaceable yet it can also demand more than what one is
willing to give, more than one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to
be honest, my private salvation which cannot and should not be anybody's
concern is that I disowned my native language. So that's the first part I
think it's hard when you come out and say I disowned my mother tongue like
this because it's such a loaded word- mother tongue, motherland,
mother so I want to play a song a short song by Dvorak. The song's title is
"Songs my mother taught me".
That's the song called "Songs my mother taught me" by Dvorak.
The lyric goes like this: "Songs my mother taught me. In the days long
vanished. Seldom from her eyelids. Where a teardrop banished. Now I teach my
children each melodious measure. Often the tears are flowing. Often they flow
from my memories' treasure. I mentioned the song you know for
several reasons. One is it's it's it's a story for every generation. It's a story
for all nationalities. We used to have a babysitter who was this lovely young
woman she would sing these Irish sounds to my children that she actually did not
understand the words and she said she sang us the songs because her mother used to
sing these Irish songs to her. Her mother also did not understand the words.
Her mother memorized the songs from her mother
and in every generation we want to sing the songs to our children.
But I actually realized when I was listening to the Dvorak recording the other day
I realized I have never sung songs to my children and for very specific
reasons. I'm going to read a little part from the book. My mother who loves to
sing often sings the songs from her childhood and youth, many of them
propagandas from 1950s and 1960s but there's one song she reminisces all
her life because she doesn't 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. I grew up listening to her talking about
well this song started with description of an end and that's it and then she
would sing the first line and then she would say I don't remember and I
thought the songs we don't sing to our children that's probably more
interesting. Sometimes the reason I also hesitate to sing the songs to my
children. I grew up really in the propaganda songs. I had often
times moved myself to tears when I sing them. One time I was driving through Texas,
that's a long drive through the whole state. I was by myself.
I was very bored and I tried to keep myself awake so I started to sing all
the Communist songs starting from kindergarten until I was you know a
young person and every song really moved me and I was in tears and I thought even
propagandas can move people into this state but I don't think I can't give
those songs to my children so I've never done that and I'm going to read
and it's not only about songs. It's not only about singing it's the language
used in those songs so I'm going to read the next passage. 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 as to why someone's hair turns gray on one day but
not on another but this is an inane analogy, I realize, because I do not want
to touch the heart of the matter. Yes, there is something unnatural which I
have refused to accept. Now the fact of writing in a second language. There is
always Nabokov and Conrad as references and many of my contemporaries as well or
that I impulsively give up a reliable career for writing. It's the absoluteness
of my abandoning of Chinese and they're taken with such determination that it is
a kind of suicide. The tragedy of Nabokov's sloth is that his
misfortune was easily explained by public history. His story of being driven
by a revolution into permanent exile became the possession of other people. 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
published Russian writer I never wrote in Chinese. Still one cannot avoid the
fact that a private decision once seen through a public prism becomes a metaphor.
Once a poet of East 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 language 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 Asian poets I'd grown up memorizing but instead it
was arranged for me to read poetry by a political prisoner. A metaphor desires to
transcend, diminishes any human story. Its ambition to illuminate blinds those who
create metaphors. In my distress of metaphors I feel a kinship with George
Eliot: "We all of us grave or light get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and
act fatally on the strengths of them". My abandonment of my first language is
personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation, political or
historical or ethnographical. This I know is what my husband was questioning
years ago. Was I prepared to be turned into a symbol by
well-intentioned or hostile minds? Chinese immigrants of my
generation in America sometimes criticize my English from not being
native enough. A compatriot after reading my work pointed out in an email how my
language is neither lavish nor lyrical as a real writer's language should be. You
write only simple things in single English, you should be ashamed of
yourself, he wrote in a fury. A professor, an American writer in graduate
school told me that I should stop writing as English would remain a
foreign language to me. Their concerns about ownership of language rather than
making me as impatient as Nabokov allow me secret laughter. English is to me as
random a choice as any other language. What one goes towards is less
definitive than that from which one turns away. So I think a
lot of people question my being or not being a political writer. Once at
a bookstore - this is my local bookstore, really my neighbourhood bookstore, I was
giving a reading and a woman came in and she said your father was a nuclear
physicist, my father was a nuclear physicist too.
Did you grow up in this complex? I said yes I did and she said she said I want
you to know I'm not happy with you because I want to be proud of China
and you're not writing to make me being proud of my being a Chinese and I was a
little surprised because if I read about America I would not make any people feel
like proud of being American either and then afterwards it's so much a very
Chinese story. She came to me the first question she asked me was what's your
father's name and I said what's your father's name and
I realized you know when we meet when we met in that bookstore we were all of
sudden going back to that Chinese moment we were determined or defined by who the
fathers were but on the other hand I give another reading in Asia Society in
San Francisco and there's this young American very lovely American man and he
came. He was also curious for another reason.
He lived in America he lived in China for years and he said I just can't I
can't I can't understand why you refuse to be a political writer. You're not
writing politically and I thought what's an interesting concern and I just want
to read one-part. This is such a political moment in China and if you are
a Chinese writer if you're Chinese coming from China from my generation
always people would ask about Tiananmen Square massacre and so I'm going
to read those journal entry in June 2014 this was 25 years of Tiananmen massacre.
June 2014 when I'm writing today the world is inundated with images of and
opinions on Tiananmen Square Massacre from 25 years ago. Everything seems to be said
with certainty. People, especially those watching a
tragedy from afar, talk with such eloquence. I cannot help but suspect a
similarity to Mann's arrogance. This is Thomas Mann commenting on
Stefan Zweig's suicide. When people expressed strong feelings about what
they may not understand, the story becomes about themselves yet if this
output, anger, grief, idolization and idealization of a historical event full
of discrepancies, untrustworthy characters, calculating on both sides
with people's lives as betting chips, farces even, were only meaningful
narratives to the public, life would be a less interesting business, literature a
less worthwhile pursuit. When I was reading the news earlier a random memory
which I had forgotten hit me. My sister was in medical school then and went with
her classmates to Tiananmen Square to help the students on hunger strike. From
one of the visits she brought back a sun had for me made of thin white
muslin and shaped like a Victorian bonnet. It was called Jane Eyre hat in the 1980s
in China. I had always wanted a Jane Eyre hat when I was little.
After the massacre the hat vanished. No doubt my father who went to
the hospital to count bodies was the one to have purged it. It was a donated
item to the protest and it might incriminate my sister. To make sense of
the Jane Eyre hat I would have to go through decades of history I would have
to intrude into other people's past. Nevertheless it would be a futile effort.
I could parse tragedy and comedy on all levels, national, familiar and
personal yet the Jane Eyre hat would remain elusive.
I will never be able to explain why its memory made me weak. Certainly I see
another possibility. That flimsy object could be turned into something more than
it really was, a symbol or a metaphor. In the meantime it would become
much less than what it was so I think that's my, that's always my thinking is,
you can't explain the historical moment or political moment in a simple way
and when I was writing the book I thought I'm just going to explain this
one thought is you cannot ask me to I got so upset on that day because I got
all these interviews and radio stations and TVs they would call in. What they
really wanted was not a human story what they really wanted was some sort of
statement and I don't think I'm interested in giving these
statements which is why I refuse to be a political writer and I think I have that
line in my book. I have spent much of my life turning away from the script even
to me in China and in America. My refusal to be defined by others' will is my one
and only political statement. I think it's hard to say I don't want to say
what you want me to say but one almost always has to do that to be true to
oneself so I'm going to read the next part. Running away.
Yes I need to tell this story. My older son, he's 15 and he, I think
young people's anxiety dreams are most fascinating so he woke up the other day
he said I had a nightmare. I said what was your nightmare. He said I dreamed
that I was a negative number. He said I couldn't figure out my square root.
And then I just laughed. I thought that's a great metaphorical dream and
then he said you know imagine number in a mess he said, well I had such a hard
time in my dream because all those troublesome problem with the I and I
said I'm going to borrow your story and I asked his permission
you always have to add a teenager's permission and then he agreed for me to
share because a lot of what we do has to do with that troublesome I.
One crosses the border to become a new person. One finishes a manuscript and
cuts up the characters. One adopts a language.
These are forced and these are false forced frameworks providing illusory
freedom at times, provides illusionary leniency when we in anguish let it pass
monotonously, to kill time, an English phrase that still chokes me. Time
can be killed. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time. I
want to frame the book was written after serious events including
hospitalization so it's all in the book and I don't feel it's okay for me to
talk about it so during my second hospital stay in New York a group of
nursing students came to play bingo. One Friday night a young woman, another
patient, asked if I would join her bingo. I said I've never in my life played that.
She pondered for a moment and said that she had played bingo only in the
hospital. It was her eighth hospitalization when I met her. She had
taken middle school courses for a while in the hospital when she was younger
and once she pointed out a small patch of fenced-in green where she and other
children had been led out for exercise. Her father often visited her in the
afternoon and I would watch them sitting together playing a game not attempting a
conversation. By then all words must have been inadequate, language doing 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 that an abyss
is a moment of despair becoming interminable but any moment even the
direst is bound to end. What's abysmal is that
one's erratic language closes in like quick sand. We can kill time, but language
kills us so running away I think it's running
away from the language that kills us. However we all remember maybe
some of you know that story in Zhuangzi, the man who is afraid of his
shadow, so he needs to run away from his shadow. The faster he runs, the faster the shadow
catches on, and for each step, the shadow follows and - you know I think in one
version I read actually it was a version for children when I was little until he
felt so tired he had to take a rest under a tree. Yes the shadow was gone
you just need to find that magic tree but I think that the shadow that we
run away from each person has a different shadow. For me as the word
I as my child says the troublesome I a word I hate to use in
English is I. It's a melodramatic word. The one's effort to avoid it only goes so
far. In Chinese-a language less grammatically strict-one can construct a
sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip embarrassing I
or else replace it with we. When I came to America people say Americans
don't have that we voice, America is a country of individualism so
we all have to stand up and say I, and I still I think this is a personal thing I
still don't feel comfortable saying I. However I also noticed I think maybe we
have all noticed that lately, "we", that word "we", is coming to America more and more.
Everybody is using that it's. I had I had a students in from Iran years ago and
when I was telling her I said you know in China oftentimes we don't say I,
you just skip that I or you sometimes say we even if it's just you or yourself
and she said oh it was the same it was exactly the same in Iran. She said the
reason we don't say I as we try to avoid responsibility. We don't we don't want to
be caught and I think that's that's interesting yes so so I came from
Chinese to English thinking I could run away from my mother tongue thinking I
could abandon my mother tongue and thinking I could take up a new language
to become a new person but I will say it's probably not a good idea to think
that way so this is the opening opening chapter of opening paragraphs of the
book. My first encounter was before and after, was in one of the fashion
magazines my friends told me to subscribe when I came to America.
I did follow their advice. I had an anthropologist fascination with America
then. I'd never seen a glossy magazine and the quality of the paper in the
printing not to mention the troll for perfumes waiting to be unfolded made me
wonder how the economy worked for the magazine
to make a profit considering I paid no more than $1 for an issue my favorite my
favorite column was on the last page of the magazine and it featured celebrity
makers hair style and hair color for instance with two bubbles signifying
before and after. I didn't often have an opinion about the
transformation but I like the definitiveness of that phrase - before and
after with nothing muddling the in-between. After years of living in
America I still feel a momentary elation when I see an advertisement for weight
loss programs, teeth whitening strips, hair loss treatments or even plastic
surgery with the contrasting effects shown and their before and after. The
certainty in that pronouncement for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation,
there is a solution to make it no longer be both attracts and perplexes me. Life
can be reset, it seems to say. Time can be separated but that logic appears to me
as doubtful as traveling to another place to become a different person.
Altered sceneries are at best distractions were or else new settings
for old habits. What one carries from one point to another geographically or
temporally is oneself. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently
himself. I was teaching the other day and and this is an undergrad creative
writing class and one student said well you know I think for each story
something has to happen and something has to change and from the beginning to
the end the character has to change by the end. I mean we hear these we hear
these conversations in creative writing classes and I was
a little surprised I said well I said in fact you know I think it's an American
idea it's a very American idea that we're going to have a before and after
by the end of the story something is going to change there's a narrative arc
and I said well actually life is not lived by arc we don't have a narrative
arc in life and in fact I say I said to my student I said you know if you I said
if you live long enough like me I said you will understand people don't
change, people are only becoming themselves more
and more and I think that's the that's the danger of before and after
because there's really no before and after and there's only this now we're
living and so I like what Robyn said we're on a journey that journey is
always ongoing we're not going to transform in any way so I'm going to
skip one page. Well I can't skip this - this is
about language so I'm going to talk a little bit more about language because I
talked about changing to English so when I was having a hard time I I was in
the bookstore and I run into this copy of Katherine Mansfield notebooks.
She kept years of notebooks and very detailed account of her life including
what she spent on stamps letter papers and telegrams all these little things
boot polish for her husband, I love that. Curtain, seamstress fees, all these
things and going on so I really love that book and for a while I was reading
that book mostly because I had a hard time and I was just reading her to
distract myself. When Katherine Mansfield was still a teenager she wrote
in her journal about a man next door playing Swanee River on a cornet
for what seemed like weeks. I wake up with the Suwannee River
“I wake up with the ‘Swannee 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 so this is another writer I've been reading around
the time and Marianne Moore's letters around the same time when I returned
home from New York in the letter Moore described a night of fundraising 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
9 and my sister 13 on a Saturday afternoon I was in our apartment and she
was on the balcony. My sister had 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 translated into Chinese. The memory too should be in Chinese but I
cannot see our tiny garden with the grapevine which our Father cultivated
and which was later uprooted by our wrathful mother,
or the bamboo fence dotted with morning glories
or the junk that occupied half the balcony.
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. I can seek to understand my mother's
vulnerability and cruelty but language is the barrier I have chosen. Over the
years my brain has banished Chinese. I dreamed in English. I talked to myself in
English and memories - not only those about America but also those about China,
not only those carried away with me but also those archived with the wish to
forget - are sorted in English. To be orphaned from my native language felt
and still feels like a crucial decision. When you say you're
orphaned from your language, from your mother language, that also means a lot.
You're orphaned from your motherland and but I think for some of us for some of
us when I sort of say for some of us including some of the writers I have
written in the book including Maryanne Moore, I think to go to extremes is a way to
survive and to read. So we talked a little bit about my science background
and I really loved when I was in the science I was doing experiment on little
mice and I was, I was studying asthma so I would put ragweed I would inject
ragweed to induce these asthma reaction from the mice and I would put into the
glass chamber and measure their breathing pattern and look at their, look
at everything including the dissection. The one thing we could not see is how
much they suffer and I realized suffering is not measurable
scientifically and asthma the word asthma is from Latin it means panting
but in Ancient Rome the doctors nicknamed asthma rehearsing death which means when
you are panting you're rehearsing how to die you're rehearsing how to draw your
last breath and I thought that's an interesting concept because we have
you know if you look at literature we have literature about writers and
artists who have mental illnesses or who have drinking problems but nobody has
ever looked at artists who has who have asthma and the list could go on forever.
If you do study asthma a lot of artists they have asthma and you realize what
they do in their art in a way either to write or to paint or to to play music
it's a way to rehearse death and I came to this country as an aspiring
immunologist. This is what I love about immunology. I had chosen the field if one
does not count practical motives of wanting a reason to leave China and
having a skill to make a living because I had liked a working concept of the
immune system. Its job is to detect and attack its non-self. It has memories - some
as long lasting as life. Its memories can go awry selectively or worse,
indiscriminatingly, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to
eliminate. The word immune from the Latin immunis - im plus munis - service, obligations -
is among my favorite in the English language. The procession of
immunity to illness to follies to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts
and unalleviated pains - a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself
knowing all the same the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be
immune to life so there's really no immunity and but for a while I thought I
could be immune to life by not writing about my life and once I was in Beijing
of course this happened in Beijing. Someone asked, "Are you an
autobiographical writer". I said no no no never and she said, "I noticed in
two of your stories the father was a nuclear
physicist and your own father is a nuclear physicist too. Why are you not an
autobiographical writer" and I said, "Hmm that's laziness on my part but I think
if any writer says I'm not an autobiographical writer or if
anyone says it as strongly as I do I think you should always suspect
there's something wrong with that. There's always a lie somewhere. So the
reason I would say a little bit one cannot be an adept writer of one's own
life tale, one can hardly be a discerning reader of that tale, not equipped with
novelist's tools to create plots and the maneuver of pacing, to speak omnisciently
or abandon an inconvenient point of view for another, to treat the linearity
of time and splice the less connected moments. The most interesting
people among us, I often suspect, are flatter than the flattest characters in
a novel. Not only do we not have alternatives, we discredit them. We
convince ourselves that the alternatives are not ours in the first place. It has
to be so. This indisputable conviction is often at the foundation of
our decisions including the most impulsive or the most catastrophic.
It is easier to be certain of one thing than to be uncertain of a
hundred. Either to be one than many have-beens and I think that's when I said I
was not I said well I was not an autobiographical writer I feel that with this
book I'm coming out of the closet in a way and saying yes. What you don't tell
what you withhold from people is equally important as what you do tell in
a book and I think the case in point is Marianne Moore who was not an autobiographical
poet and if you read her poetry
you could not detect any self in her poetry and if you read her letters you
could hardly detect anything but I think it was all these things withheld in
her I mean she had really, to me, she became an autobiographical writer. She
had a very controlling mother. I think it's interesting and she's an
interesting case because she had a
controlling mother and the mother lived with her all her life and the mother
never left her for a moment. Not only the mother read her poetry, would edit her
not only the mother read her and the mother would
scrutinize her body every day and just imagine living with that mother and
one time they got a little cat, kitten, and they named the kitten Buffalo and
Maryanne Moore was in love with that Buffalo, a little kitten and when she
was working in the library her mother brought a jar of ether and killed a
kitten because of her love for that kitten.
And even that she wrote in the letter she said well you know she broke my
heart but she had to do so I understand she had to do so and I thought well
that's, you know, that's the mother well that's the mother language or that
motherland you know that mother that we have to escape but not everybody could
escape. When we enter a world, a new country, a new school, a party, a family or
a class reunion, an army's camp, a hospital, we speak the language it
requires. The wisdom to adapt is the wisdom to have two languages. The one
spoken to others and the one spoken to oneself. One learns to master the public
language not much differently from the way that one
acquires a second language, assess the situation, construct sentences with the
right words in the correct syntax, catch a mistake if one can avoid it or else
apologize and learn the lesson after blunder. Fluency in the public language
like fluency in the second language can be achieved with enough practice.
Perhaps the line between the two is it should never be fluid. Sorry.
Perhaps the line between the two is and should be fluid. It is never so for me. I
often forget while I write that English is also used by others. English is my
private language. Every word has to be pondered before it becomes a 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 was the intrinsic distance between a non-native speaker and an
adopted language 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's the danger of crossing a line from
invisibility to erasure. There was a time when I could write well in Chinese. In
school my essays were used as models. In the army where I spent a year of
involuntary service our squad leader gave me the choice between drafting
speech for her and cleaning toilet of the pigsty. I always chose to write. Once
in high school I entered an oratory contest. On stage I saw that many of my
listeners were moved to tears by the poetic and insincere lies I had made up. I
moved myself to tears too. It crossed my mind that I could become a successful
propaganda writer. I was disturbed by this. A young person wants to be true to
herself and the world but it did not occur to me to ask, can one's
intelligence rely entirely on the public language? Can one form a precise thought,
record an accurate memory or even feel a genuine feeling with only
the public language? I actually forgot that my squad
leader now teaches at Cornell. She's a physicist here, isn't that interesting?
I didn't tell her I was coming because it's hard to encounter another past.
That's very cowardly of me. When one
thinks in an adopted language, one arranges and rearranges words that are
neutral, indifferent even. When one remembers in an adopted language there's
a dividing line in that remembering. What came before could be someone else's life
it might as well be fiction. What language, I wonder, does one use to feel
or does one need a language to feel? In a hospital in New York one of my doctors
asked me to visit a class studying minds and brains. Two medical students
interviewed me following a script. The doctor who led the class, impatient with
their tentativeness sent them back to their seats and posed questions more
pointed and unrelenting. To answer him I had to navigate my thoughts and I
watched him and his students closely as I was being watched. When he 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, the doctor said. It took me a year to
figure out the answer. It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is
impossible in my native language. Often I think 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.
After the dream of public telephone I remember the 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. It was the same type of black rotary phone as we
had back at the apartment and my sister was on the line. It was the first
long-distance call I had received in my life and the next time would be four
years later back in Beijing when an American professor phoned to interview
me. I still remember the woman calling from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York
City asking questions about my interest in immunology, talking about her research
project and life in America. My English was good enough to understand half of
what she said and the scratching noises in the background made me sweat for the
missed half. What did my sister and I talk about on that New Year's Eve? In
abandoning my native language I have erased myself from the memory but erasing,
I have learned, does not stop with a new language and that, my friend, is my
sorrow and my selfishness. In speaking and in writing in an adopted language I
have not stopped erasing. I've crossed the line, too, from erasing myself to
erasing others. I'm not the only casualty in this war against myself. In an ideal
world I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking and thinking alone.
I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces
the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words.
To speak while one cannot is to blunder. I have spoken by having written this
book or any book for myself and against myself. The solace is with the language I
chose. The grief, to have spoken at all. That's the end of the reading. I'm sorry
it's so sad. I must tell you a joke so you don't feel so sad.
So when Rebecca West was young she went to - this has nothing to do with me - when Rebecca West
was young HG Wells took Rebecca Wells to see Thomas Hardy and Thomas Hardy was
old at the time and he just published a collection of poetry and all the
reviewers said he was so pessimistic and sad and dark and gloomy and all these
words and Hardy said he cannot understand. "Why, I thought
there were really good and cheerful poems"? And his wife said, "Oh dear that's
not what everybody thinks what hilarious is. And then Rebecca
West came back and said Mr. Hardy must have, one of Mr. Hardy's families must
have married a weeping willow before him so I'm not a weeping willow and
I don't come from a weeping willow but so I think I'm glad to take
questions if you have questions.