Read: 2026-02-23
Recommend: 8/10
I came to know her a bit from her interview with Anderson Cooper. I was curious why, after being trained as an immunologist, she decided to give up her scientific career to take up writing. I understand her brave decision to be orphaned from her mother tongue by choosing not to write in Chinese and refusing to have her books (published in English) translated into Chinese. It is a decision akin to suicide, a way to say goodbye to a part of her past. She reasoned that English is her private language, while Chinese is her public language. I suppose you can be honest with yourself when using a private language, but you have to please others when using a public one. It reminds me of what Gu Cheng said: “Modern Chinese is like soiled banknotes; I want to wash it clean.” (现代汉语就像用脏了的人民币，我把它洗一洗.)
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured: a reminder that one is not far from who one was. Why write to open old wounds. Why relive a memoir, when that too is an indulgence.
In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the entering class of our university was sent to the army for a year to prevent future insubordination.
The hospital reminded me of the army. Habitat-specific vocabularies form a prism through which the civilian world looks fantastical; jokes are shared property; one’s mind becomes a boundless maze, a compensation for the unavailability of physical space; to be seen by all is the easiest way to hide; to speak, and to speak someone else’s language, the best mode of silence.
I have learned, since then, that life is like that, each day ending up like a chick refusing to be returned to the eggshell.
Though freedom, like originality, is curious only as a universal fantasy. How people endure the lack of freedom is more interesting to me than their pursuit of it. Besides, those who clamor for freedom, like those who pose for originality, can be rather predictable, too.
I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.
ONCE IN A while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. “You may not remember me,” these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten. Sometimes out of mere mischief I reply with a detailed account of our encounter. People are joyfully surprised when they are remembered, but I have not been honest with them. There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.
The word asthma is from Greek, meaning “panting.” But in ancient Rome, the doctors nicknamed it “rehearsing death.” I took note of this detail while reading Seneca’s letters. Seneca, like Dickens, Proust, Dylan Thomas, E. B. White, Elizabeth Bishop—the list could go on—was afflicted with asthma. (Lotte Zweig’s unalleviated suffering from asthma was given by Stefan Zweig as one reason for her suicide.) Everyone, sooner or later, draws a last breath. Sometimes I think how tiring it is to read about artists with their mental illness. Wouldn’t it be curious to study those who rehearse their deaths?
Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.
When I started writing, my husband asked if I understood the implication of my decision. What he meant were not the practical concerns, though there were plenty: the nebulous hope of getting published, the lack of a career certainty as had been laid out in science, the harsher immigration regulations. Many of my college classmates, as scientists, acquired their green cards under the category of national interest waiver. An artist is not of much importance to any nation’s interest. My husband’s question was about language. Did I understand what it meant to renounce my mother tongue?
Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can demand more than one is willing to give, or what one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, I would borrow from Nabokov for a stronger and stranger statement. My private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language.
It’s the absoluteness of the abandonment—with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.
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.
Over the years my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. And memories—not only those about America but also those about China; not only those carried on but also those archived with the wish to forget—are sorted in English. To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, a crucial decision. Would you ever consider writing in Chinese? an editor from China asked, as many had asked before. I said I doubted it. But don’t you want to be part of contemporary Chinese literature? he asked. I have declined to have my books translated into Chinese, which is understood by some as odiously pretentious. Once in a while my mother will comment, hinting at my selfishness, that I have deprived her of the pleasure of reading my books. But Chinese was never my private language. And it will never be. That I write in English—does it make me part of something else? The verdict of my professor in graduate school was that I was writing in a language that did not belong to me, hence I would not, and should not, belong. But his protest was irrelevant. I have not been using the language to be part of something.
There was a time I could write well in Chinese. In school my essays were used as models; in the army, our squad leader gave me the choice between drafting a speech for her and cleaning the toilets or the pigsties—I always chose to write. Once in high school, several classmates and I entered an oratory contest. The winner would represent the class in a patriotic event. When I went onstage, for some mischievous reason, I saw to it that many of the listeners were moved to tears by the poetic and insincere lies I had made up; I moved myself to tears, too. That I could become a successful propaganda writer crossed my mind. I was disturbed. A young person wants to be true to herself and to the world. But what did not occur to me then was to ask: Can one’s intelligence rely entirely on the public language; can one form a precise thought, recall an accurate memory, or even feel a genuine feeling, with only the public 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.
The collective feelings of a group are oftentimes more fragile than an individual’s feelings. I feel little remorse when a group of people, out of hurt feelings, accuse me of any sin. Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.
Having not been in touch with any of them for years, I was taken aback by the malevolence of the messages: jeering at a present person they don’t know, mixed with mocking the teenager I was. The man who sent me the email had once asked me to kiss him. Why? I had asked, being eighteen and having not the remotest inclination to do so. I forget what reason he gave me or how I declined, but the past, having passed, always comes back to claim what it has no right to. Worse than people who refuse to come into one’s stories are those who insist on taking a place.
Compared with the internal, the external becomes insignificant and of no consequence. The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is constantly in search of its object; the searching is the unrest of sorrow and its life. —Kierkegaard, Either/Or
From The Hill Bachelors I moved on to his other books. A few weeks later I discussed with my advisor the possibility of leaving science. Stay, he said; you have a bright future in this country. Yes, I said, but I can already see myself at the end of that future; I know I will regret it if I don’t try this. This, as I explained to him, was to become a writer. To write is to find a new way to see the world, and I did not doubt, as I was reading Trevor, that I wanted to see as he does.
I don’t understand why Trevor still writes about the Troubles, someone in Ireland once said to me. They are old stories, and Ireland has moved on. I can tell you your books have hurt my feelings, a reader, who turned out to have grown up in the same apartment compound I did, announced at a bookstore reading; why do you have to write about China’s history; why can’t you make me feel proud of being Chinese? But cruelty and kindness are not old stories, and never will be.
In fact, I still do ask myself: What made you think suicide was an appropriate, even the only, option? Various hypotheses have been offered by this or that person at this or that moment: genes, lack of mental strength or maturity, selfishness, cell signals gone randomly awry. There are more practical explanations too. I was once ambitious—or greedy—enough to want to excel at being a mother and a writer while holding a full-time job. For almost ten years I wrote between midnight and four o’clock in the morning. Would I have deprived myself of such a basic necessity had I known it would leave such damage? I think so. I do not see another way to manage what I wanted to do.