Li

She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them.

—Rebecca West, This Real Night

After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see advertisements for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or plastic surgery with the contrasting effects shown under 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 unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.

I have been asked throughout my life: What are you hiding? I don’t know what I am hiding, and the more I try to deny it, the less trustworthy people find me. My mother used to comment on my stealthiness to our guests. A woman in charge of admission at the public bathhouse often confronted me, asking what I was hiding from her. Nothing, I said, and she would say she could tell from my eyes that I was lying.

Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.

There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing. This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line. It reminds me of the boy from years ago who could not stop sending the designs of his dreams in his letters. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. The books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life? What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

A word I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we. Living is not an original business.

To bear the lack of originality: even the least ambitious among us have to invent some way to believe we are distinctive and irreplaceable. One wonders if this desire, humble and presumptuous though innately human, gives the permission for the use of I. Yet for months after the hospital stays I tried to explain to those around me that anyone can be, and should be, replaceable. What does this I matter to you when it means so little to myself?

Before we left the army the squad leader wrote to me (it was a tradition to write farewell notes to one another): “Some people are commonplace, others are not. A day spent with the latter leaves enough memory, more than years spent with the former. As an ordinary person, I count it as my luck to have spent a year with you.” She had been raised in a military family, deferential to anyone superior, genuinely believing in the power bestowed on her by the army, trusting Communist teachings (how I had made her suffer and rage by insisting on talking about the Tiananmen massacre).

The note was written without malice, but it mortified me. I always feel grateful to her for letting me see how tedious a person can be when striving to impress the world with personality. It’s fortunate, too, that my boringness was shown to me in such a gentle manner. Had she seen through me and written out of sarcasm, I might have become defensive about my foolishness. But she was too young to realize she was more real than the poseur I had become, and I was not experienced enough to feel guilt. A person, by dismissing her own self with a morbid carelessness, could easily bulldoze another person’s beliefs.

I must have inherited this respect for things from my father, who is a hoarder, though I have resisted forming an attachment to any object, or any place. I wished then and I wish now that I had never formed an attachment to anyone in the world either. I would be all kindness. I would not have done anything ruinous. I would never have to ask that question—when will I ever be good enough for you?—because by abolishing you, the opposite of I, I could erase that troublesome I from my narrative, too.

When I left the auditorium, I wondered when and where and how I had gone astray from that intuition. Why are we told to seek out people? In forming attachments, does one become more than oneself, or does one lose an essential means of preserving oneself? The danger of forming an attachment—to a person, to a place, to a profession, to a cause, even to one’s own life—is that one can trick oneself into believing that an attachment has a reason, and worse, that the reason can be mistaken as a right.

When I gave up science I had a blind confidence that in writing I could will myself into a nonentity. I had for a few years relished that status, living among the characters who did not know my existence. But how does one remain forever an emotional hanger-on when one wants the characters to live, if not better, or more honestly, or more wisely, at least more fully? Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.

Death, except for someone entirely isolated, is always a personal moment made public. Suicide, among the most private decisions one can make, is often taken over by the public. Those who express strong feelings mistake themselves as the center of a story. The intense emotions around suicide—anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation—demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.

One’s wish to die can be as blind and intuitive as one’s will to live, yet the latter is never questioned. A suicide can be dismissed as a drama gone awry and entering the realm of melodrama.

In life we seek like-minded people despite—or because of—the limit of knowing and understanding. We do so to feel less lonely, though it brings a different kind of loneliness. In seeking others, inevitably we try to control an interaction. We insist on being known only as the version we prefer to attach to ourselves. A narrative catering to others is not far from memories revised for ourselves: both move us away from the quicksand of feelings. And those who do know us beyond our chosen version—by proximity, by intuition, by observation—must provoke similar discomfort in us as melodrama does. Does our wariness of melodrama contribute to our wish to escape their eyes, or is it the other way around, that in avoiding meeting those who have more access to our interior world than we are willing to allow, we can feel momentarily protected from our own memories?

To be more than one, to be several, and to live with the consequence, is inevitable. One can err the opposite way, and the belief in being nothing used to seem to me the most logical way to live. Being nothing is being invisible and replaceable; being nothing to others means remaining everything to oneself. Being nothing is one way to battle the autoimmune condition of the mind, and this is closest to my friend’s silence. Yet silence is not melodrama, or at least it is not presenting itself to be.

The woman accuses the man of “almost inhuman forgetfulness,” yet the necessity to forget is only human. What is truly inhuman is the woman’s refusal. She has the courage to keep her melodrama intact; the callousness to imprison another person in it. This is the cruelty of melodrama—like suicide, it neither doubts nor justifies its right to be.

More damaging than becoming a victim of political or historical turmoil is becoming the casualty of someone else’s memory. At the end of the novella, the man shudders. Who, then, lives in a real sorrow: the woman, who has maintained melodrama as the only form of her memory, or the man, who has been, and will always be, imprisoned by another person’s remembering?

Or else she would be taken over by an inexplicable rage, saying that I, the only person she loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not love her enough. Why did you curse me so, Mother; why did you not stop her cursing, Father? Though the truth is, I do not want to know the answers. I resent even thinking about the questions—what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.

Unlike the woman in Zweig’s novella, Pancake did not let the melodrama in him transgress. He gave more than he had, more than he ought to, but he did not trap anyone. People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments—Mann’s or anyone’s—on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.

Sometimes I suspect that I am drawn to those who don’t converse with me because I have not outgrown a childish wish that they will teach me how to live. Or, a slightly more complicated version: I wish that they would teach one how to die.

All people lie, in their writing as much as in their lives. It frustrates me that I hold on to an unrealistic belief: there is some irrefutable truth in each mind, and the truth is told without concealment or distortion in a letter or in a journal entry. My obligation is to look for that truth; finding it will offer me the certainty I don’t have in me. With that certainty I will find a way to build a solid self. This burden I never take on while reading or writing fiction.

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents’ memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory’s melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

I shiver when reading about a mother full of wrathful and possessive love. The thought that not all mothers are like that more and more is becoming a solace to me. There was Chen Duansheng’s mother, who raised her two daughters as poets at a time when education was considered damaging to feminine virtue. It was reassuring to see that John McGahern was buried next to his mother. When I met a friend’s parents, despite my theoretical understanding, it was extraordinary to see them interact with natural closeness. The fact that I had found it extraordinary made me cry afterward.

But one cannot have a different biography. One cannot find consolation in revision. One cannot relive age twelve to unread Turgenev. On the phone my father suggested, with a quantum physicist’s mystic illogic and a fatalist’s pure logic, that our difficulties be put into a new light. Who knows what we did in our past lives to others, he said; what we have is what we deserve.

Both busyness and idleness make people fidget. The busy scatter themselves around, refusing to be occupied by only one thing at a time; the idle are engaged with a thousand trifles. The worst kind of fidgeting is that of one’s mind. In London, the more agitated I was internally, the calmer I remained physically. I did not have to fight the urge to turn a dark hotel room into a tomb as I had in Ireland months earlier. The stillness I carried was enough to make the world retreat.

You’re impatient with yourself, with your work, with others, a friend said to me around this time; you’re the most impatient person in the world.

Impatience is an impulse to alter or impose. Suicide is a kind of impatience people rarely understand, I replied to the friend, and quoted an Elizabeth Bishop letter in defense.

Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.

Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision. (In college and as a young scientist the tasks I had most enjoyed were the peripheral activities: to peel everything away and leave only the neural system intact in an insect; to harvest the bone marrow from a mouse’s femur until the bone became nearly transparent; to carefully flush out a mouse’s lungs. Perhaps my deficiency as a scientist, a lack of ultimate purpose, is why I love writing. Precision gives me more pleasure than the end result.)

If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. One prefers anyone—a mother, a lover, a friend—who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness. Twenty-two years after comparing himself to Portia’s Eddie, Larkin was not in any better place.

It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.

Is the wish to escape suffering selfish? It is considered so with suicide. But even less extreme escapes leave wounds in others’ lives. The Death of the Heart is not only a study of selfishness, but also a study of the struggle to escape suffering. To whom the damage is done no one wants to ask.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A writer and a reader should never be allowed to meet. They live in different time frames. When a book takes on a life for a reader it is already dead for the writer.

It is preposterous for the writer or the reader to trespass, yet both sides often dismiss the border set by the characters: when a writer insists on his presence (on the page, between the lines) to dictate how his work is to be read; or when a reader reads without true curiosity about the characters, but with a goal of judging the writer.

You may be less confused than you imagined,” in a letter Trevor wrote. “Stories are a hope, and often they obligingly answer questions.”