Yiyun Li - Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You

Copyright 2017 by Yiyun Li All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life was originally published in A Public Space and reprinted in The Best American Essays 2014. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred Music: Excerpt from Five Hundred Miles, words and music by Hedy West, copyright 1964 (Renewed) Unichappell Music, Inc., and Atzal Music, Inc. All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite. Philip Larkins letters copyright 2010 by the Estate of Philip Larkin; Monica Joness letters copyright 2010 by the Estate of Monica Jones; selection, introduction, and editorial matter copyright 2010 by Anthony Thwaite. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited. Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.: Excerpts from All Will Be Well: A Memoir by John McGahern, copyright 2005 by John McGahern. Rights in Canada are controlled by A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Li, Yiyun, author. Title: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life / Yiyun Li. Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017675| ISBN 9780399589096 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399589119 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Li, Yiyun, 1972 Mental health. | Authors, American21st centuryBiography. | Depressed personsUnited StatesBiography. | Autobiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Depression. Classification: LCC PS3612.I16 Z46 2017 | DDC 813/.6 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017675 Ebook ISBN9780399589119 randomhousebooks.com Cover design: Rachel Ake v4.1 ep

Contents

There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless. Amy Leach, Things That Are 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 Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

My first encounter with before and after was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America. I duly followed their adviceI had an anthropologists fascination with America then. I had never seen a glossy magazine, and the print and paper quality, not to mention the trove of perfumes waiting to be unfolded, made me wonder how the economics of the magazine worked, considering I paid no more than a dollar for an issue.

My favorite column was on the last page of the magazine, and it featured celebrity makeovershairstyle and hair color, for instancewith two bubbles signifying before and after. I didnt often have an opinion about the transformation, but I liked 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 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 pronouncementfor each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer beboth 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 ones self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

2.

I was leaving to teach class when an acquaintance who lived across the country in New Hampshire called my office. She had traveled to a nearby city. I talked to her for no more than two minutes before telling my husband to go find her. He spent twelve hours with her, canceled her business appointments, and saw to it that she flew back home. Two weeks later her husband called and said she had jumped out of her office on a Sunday evening. He asked me to attend her memorial service. I thought for a long time and decided not to.

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 dont want the present to judge the past, so I dont want to ponder my absence at her memorial service. We had come to this country around the same time. When I told her that I was going to quit science to become a writer, she seemed curious, but her husband said that it was a grave mistake. Why do you want to make your life difficult? he asked.

3.

I have had a troublesome relationship with time. The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The presentwhat is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved. Unless the right actions are taken, one seems never to pass the test to reach the after.

4.

After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would sayweeping, shaking, or dry eyedthat he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again.

I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.

I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldnt have been there in the first place.

Do you want to share anything, I was prompted when I had little to offer. By then I felt my hope had run out. I saw the revolving door admitting new people and letting old people out into the world; similar stories were told with the same remorse and despair; the lectures were on the third repeat. What if I were stuck forever in that basement room? I broke down and could feel a collective sigh: my tears seemed to prove that finally I intended to cooperate.

I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

5.

I have been asked throughout my life: What are you hiding? I dont 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.

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