This is a season of memoirs by Chinese writers. A month ago Xiaolu Guo published Once Upon a Time in the East, an account of her dramatic transformation from foundling to prodigy to rebel. Now the Chinese-American Yiyun Li has published one too. Given that Li escaped China as soon as she could and has refused translation into Chinese, it’s likely she has a comparably dramatic coming-of-age story. However, Li has chosen to write a book that tells us little about China or, circumstantially, about herself.
She has written about China in her fiction. The Vagrants was an emotional depiction of the ignorance and cruelty of a Chinese community in 1979. But there is little of that here. We learn almost nothing about Li’s childhood and hear hardly anything about her personal experience of the communist regime. There’s also very little about her career in America or relationship with her husband and children.
Instead, this is a book about reading and thinking. The writers Li includes are western and tend to think hard and unsentimentally about feelings: Elizabeth Bowen, Ivan Turgenev, Philip Larkin, William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield, whose phrase provides the book’s title. Her interest is in reading as a mode of survival. The impetus seems to have been a period spent in a mental hospital, following a failed suicide attempt. While there, Li was chided for failing her “loved ones” by giving up on life, and encouraged to let her love for her family restore her will to survive. However, she seems to have been sustained less by the living than by the dead.
Li is frightened by love and its attendant responsibilities. “I fear taking you – you, my life, and all that makes it worth living – seriously.” But she can allow herself intimacy with dead writers and their characters because “to read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence”. Indeed, this desire for anonymous intimacy motivated her decision to give up science (she moved to America as an immunologist) and write, seeing writing as a chance for peopled solitude. “What is a more secretive way to struggle than struggling along with people to whom I remain unknown and unseen?”
She is perplexed by autobiographical novelists. “What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?” This might lead us to wonder why she chose to write a memoir herself. The answer appears to be both that she came to distrust her own reticence following her hospital stay, and that there was something about the peculiar intimacy of reading that she needed to articulate in as rationally restrained a mode as possible.
In hospital, a doctor asked her why, when she could articulate her thoughts, she was unable to articulate her feelings. “I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts,” she writes. It was these ungovernable feelings that led to her suicide attempt, an act she thinks cannot be explained intellectually: “One never kills oneself from knowledge or understanding, but always out of feelings.”
What we are witnessing, then, is a struggle to verbalise experiences that for Li naturally resist verbalisation. She remains the scientist, enjoying the precision of dissection, and this provides the satisfaction required to keep going. The method is aphoristic: she observes and then generalises. I sometimes found the generalisations problematically definitive. Statements like “great fiction is inevitably a study of selfishness” or “the moment one feels anything one feels fatal” seem easily open to contradiction. But then I realised that these statements were being tested; that both Li and her reader can encounter them provisionally and that experimenting with schematisation can lead us towards the precision she seeks.
The subjects tested in this way are wide-ranging, taking us from time, to melodrama, to suicide. The emotions she elaborates most readily are her emotions about reading, which emerge here as a feeling act legitimised by its isolation and thoughtfulness. What do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life, she asks, only to respond: “when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings than we are able to, can we still call her a stranger?”
Some of the most powerful passages describe Li’s encounters with William Trevor. This is the only real relationship she talks about openly, perhaps enabled to do so because it was a relationship between a writer and his reader. He remained Mr Trevor for her, and they didn’t meet often, but she was able to tell him that it was because of him that she wrote. He abandoned his own customary reticence and began a friendship characterised by respectful tenderness on both sides. There’s a revealing scene where, talking about their work, they compared the lingering sadness they felt for the characters in past novels.
Li is right to feel sorry for her characters; her readers do as well. At the end of The Vagrants, the disappointed Teacher Gu makes an observation that takes on the status of the final word: “they were all sufferers in their despicable pain, every one of them”. But for Li herself, there seems to be a pleasure in thought that renders the suffering bearable both for herself and her readers. This makes it enough to keep reading, thinking and writing, fuelled by what Trevor characterised in himself as a mixture of “curiosity and bewilderment”.
Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury). Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, by Yiyun Li, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
