In late May 2012, the Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li read her story Kindness at the John McGahern Seminar in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim. A few years earlier, she had recorded a story by William Trevor for the New Yorker series of iPods, and her first volume of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, had won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, have won many awards internationally, but nothing in her work or in her interest in Irish writing prepared me for this collection of essays.
Li’s fiction is written in an impersonal style, neither self-expressive nor autobiographical, she has insisted, and indeed her acute observation of China situates the local in perspectives that suggest it is human nature itself that interests her rather than her own or the historical past. This new book might be described as a memoir, and certainly the strands of her childhood experience in Beijing, her reflections on her parents, her decision to settle in the US in 1996, and allusions to her current life as a wife and mother, as well as her breakdown, all probe her individual sense of self.
Although the essays do not follow the chronology of her migration or her development into a celebrated writer, the lasting imprints of China in the era of Mao are pervasive.
Turmoil
In contrast to the fiction, Dear Reader is an intense and intimate appeal to the reader to enter her personal world and understand its turmoil and suffering, over which, so far, writing fiction had given her a measure of control. What is shocking here is that her major preoccupation is suicide, and the essays reflect a raw inner debate.
It is the fragile nature of selfhood and the point of attaching herself to others that test her resilience. The fatalism of her father and the self-absorption of her mother undermined her faith in relationships, and from them, in turn, she absorbed much of a cruel culture. She has needed to seek help by checking herself into hospital on a number of occasions, although she continued to read literature extensively – Katherine Mansfield, Turgenev, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, and, in particular, William Trevor – and also to write.
The title of the book, taken from a letter of Mansfield, affirms that writing is a source of hope and conviction, a way of gaining access to the inner life that is not necessarily dramatised in the fictional characters. The selfhood of characters is set off against the selfhood of the writer, and a judgment of selfishness is frequent, although she insists on viewing suicide as a courageous act rather than a selfish one. Many of her subjects chose not to go on living, notably here Stefan Zweig and his wife, Lotte (to whom a whole essay is devoted), and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
The essays are written with both sympathy and distance, and the reality of China, expressed aphoristically here, is embodied in loneliness and powerlessness.
Jolt
I was present at the McGahern Seminar in Leitrim where she read so calmly and movingly, and so it was a jolt to be told in the second essay, Amongst People, that within a week she had checked herself into hospital. The dismal world of doctors and patients is described in passages that interrupt her response to McGahern's memoir and his Shannonside landscape. It is as if he is subjected to the most demanding of all readings – to provide a reason for living.
Li writes of her days in the town and of the solidity of self she discovers in the people she meets. From the opening sentence, “A heatwave was general all over Ireland”, with its appropriate melancholic echo, she notes how the weather is referred to as a kind of guarantee that people share a solid sense of belonging in the same place and in the same time.
She is moved to find herself "amongst people", although she herself is "absent inwardly", and it is this paradox that she probes in reading Memoir – "an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live forever". It is what McGahern found.
But the writer who is most frequently mentioned throughout the book is William Trevor. She believes that he inspired her to become a writer, and with his kindness continued to sustain her.
The book closes with a kind of elegy for Trevor and the revelation of what bound them over his final decade. He is a “solitary traveller” from cruelty to kindness. This tribute to Trevor’s created world and to his own presence is heartfelt, for together they offer her “a haven” in a dark world, a freedom from “intolerable ruminations”.
Denis Sampson's The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings was published last year and the memoir A Migrant Heart in 2014
