paired with “To Speak is to Blunder”

Li’s essay braids several threads that resurface at different points in the essay. This structure is rather similar to magazine features and can often feel unusual to students. Grouping together paragraphs of similar threads can help students see the collective impact of a thread.

Introduction

ET: Since “To Speak Is to Blunder” presents many contradictions and resists offering readers a sense of mastery over the message of the essay, it can be challenging to isolate the impact of some of her compositional choices at a “mid-shot” level. Isolating six threads in her essay lets readers grapple with the development and impact of a theme in the essay.

While the New Yorker’s framing of the essay is simply “choosing to renounce a mother tongue,” Li ultimately circles around several themes to flesh out an impression of why she abandons Chinese without making direct statements as to her motives for such a drastic divide in her own personal timeline from her thoughts and memories. To give some dimension to this indirectness, she brings her thinking to several major themes: (1) Phone calls, dreams, and memories; (2) Sister, mother, and singing; (3) Hospitals, patients, and suicide; (4) Reflections on her own writing; (5) Reflections on the writings of others; and (6) Manifestoesque statements about language itself. These threads are widely dispersed throughout the essay, making a sort of mosaic of impressions that bleed into one another to create a hallucinatory overall effect, one we even called “lilting” in our early readings of the essay. Isolating the threads might help steady the boat for a moment and help students before a reread.

Guide

Set-Up

After students had an introduction to the essay in a previous class and were assigned to read it for homework, we started discussion activities with an exploration of themes. I read out the selection below (paragraph numbers from the original essay) to introduce students to the six main threads of the essay. I then asked for volunteers to “adopt” a thread to look at closely. I also emphasized that these are threads I noticed and that there are surely other ways to slice up the essay.

7) In the summer and autumn of 2012, I was hospitalized in California and in New York for suicide attempts, the first time for a few days, and the second time for three weeks.^[1] During those months, my dreams often took me back to Beijing. I would be standing on top of a building—one of those gray, Soviet-style apartment complexes —or I would be lost on a bus travelling through an unfamiliar neighborhood.^[2] Waking up, I would list in my journal images that did not appear in my dreams: a swallow’s nest underneath a balcony, the barbed wires at the rooftop, the garden where old people sat and exchanged gossip, the mailboxes at street corners—round, green, covered by dust, with handwritten collection times behind a square window of half-opaque plastic.^[3]

18) WHEN KATHERINE MANSFIELD was still a teen-ager, she wrote in her journal about a man next door playing “Swanee River” on a cornet, for what seemed like weeks. “I wake up with the ‘Swannee River,’ eat it with every meal I take, and go to bed eventually with ‘all de world am sad and weary’ as a lullaby.” I read Mansfield’s notebooks and Marianne Moore’s letters around the same time, when I returned home from New York. In a letter, Moore described a night of fund-raising at Bryn Mawr. Maidens in bathing suits and green bathing tails on a raft: “It was Really most realistic … way down upon the Swanee River.”^[4]

19) I marked the entries because they reminded me of a moment I had forgotten. I was nine, and my sister thirteen. On a Saturday afternoon, I was in our apartment and she was on the balcony. My sister had joined the middle-school choir that year, and in the autumn sunshine she sang in a voice that was beginning to leave girlhood. “Way down upon the Swanee River. Far, far away. That’s where my heart is turning ever; That’s where the old folks stay.”^[5]

31) When one remembers in an adopted language, there is a dividing line in that remembrance. What came before could be someone else’s life; it might as well be fiction.^[6]

I then handed out pages by thread. I assigned the first five threads to groups, reserving the last one on manifesto-esque statements on language for the longer writing activity. Email etakehana@gmail.com with “Li by themes” in the subject line and I’m happy to send you the handouts by compiled threads. Otherwise, I divided the essay thusly:

1. Phone calls, dreams, and memories – paragraphs 1, 2, 8, 21, 36, 37
2. Sister, mother, and singing – paragraphs 19, 20, 26, 38
3. Hospitals, patients, and suicide – paragraphs 14, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28
4. Reflections on her own writing – paragraphs 3, 4, 12, 13, 23, 25
5. Reflections on the writings of others – paragraphs – 5, 10, 11, 18, 29
6. Manifestoesque statements about language – 6, 9, 22, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39 (32-34 can go with thread 3 as well)

Close Read

Read the paragraphs on the theme your group chose. Mark connections and conflicts you see across those paragraphs. Look for repeated words and phrases. Seek out contradictions Li introduces in the different ways she addresses the theme. Underline phrases that you think resonate with some of the other themes other groups are focusing on or that connect with your broader understanding of the essay. Discuss your findings with your groupmates and prepare a 1-2 minute oral report to share with the whole class that answers the question: What is the collective impact of this theme on how Li sees language?

Write

From the paragraphs on the sixth theme on manifesto-esque statements about language, select one paragraph or phrase from a paragraph to put in conversation with your observations about the team your group was assigned. What does your theme illuminate about Li’s statement on language that you chose?