Yiyun Li

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

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

t is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had

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.

I am not an autobiographical writer—one cannot be without a solid and explicable self—and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Three days earlier I was in Saint Rémy, feeding the chickens and the pigs, sleeping on a makeshift mattress on the dirt floor. In Paris I was the young peasant girl who had written a book and who had slept in a hotel bed with fabrics softer than my own skin. What would I be in England?

Why would she laugh at him in her letter, and why would he talk about her in a disapproving manner?

I would not have left that life (the happiest life I have ever known) if not for Fabienne’s conviction that there might be something interesting out in the world

“You make a good story for many people, and everyone who writes about you or photographs you gets something in return. Your schoolmistress here probably benefits more than anyone else. I wouldn’t be surprised if her enrollment goes up in the next few years. But these people—I include myself in that category—we are like bees. You’re not the only flower for us. And how long can a flower stay in bloom? Do you see what I mean?”