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?

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?”

It was during those few months when I was away from Saint Rémy that I began to realize something: I did not care much about what kind of future I had, as long as I was with Fabienne.

We had always lived, because others had died in our places: Fabienne’s mother and sister, my brother, a little boy we had tripped one day in the alley, who passed away the next day from some illness, the pigs and cows and goats and chickens and rabbits, new hatchlings dropped out of the nests, grasshoppers and katydids after the frost, M. Devaux’s wife, whose death left him in a craze of desire for Fabienne, M. Devaux himself, who no doubt would die, too, long before our time was over.