“To Speak is to Blunder”

Yiyun Li, 2016

Originally published in The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: The excerpt(s) in this chapter is considered a transformative fair use. Please see the annotations section in How to Use this Book for an explanation of the author’s pedagogy on creating conversation within a text.

Excerpts

WHEN WE ENTER a world^[1]—a new country, a new school, a party, a family or a class reunion, an army camp, a hospital—we speak the language it requires^[2]. The wisdom to adapt is the wisdom to have two languages: the one spoken to others and the one spoken to oneself. One learns to master the public language not much differently from the way that one acquires a second language: assess the situations, construct sentences with the right words and the correct syntax, catch a mistake if one can avoid it, or else apologize and learn the lesson after a blunder^[3]. Fluency in the public language, like fluency in a second language, can be achieved with enough practice.

Perhaps the line between the two is, and should be, fluid; it is never so for me. I often forget, when I write, that English is also used by others. English is my private language.^[4] Every word has to be pondered before it becomes a word^[5]. I have no doubt—can this be an illusion?—that the conversation I have with myself, however linguistically flawed, is the conversation that I have always wanted in the exact way I want it to be. In my relationship with English, in this relationship with the intrinsic distance between a non-native speaker and an adopted language that makes people look askance, I feel invisible but not estranged. It is the position I believe I always want in life. But with every pursuit there is the danger of crossing a line, from invisibility to erasure.

There was a time when I could write well in Chinese. In school, my essays were used as models; in the Army, where I spent a year of involuntary service between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, 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, I entered an oratory contest. Onstage, I saw 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. It crossed my mind that I could become a successful propaganda writer. I was disturbed by this. A young person wants to be true to herself and to the world. But it did not occur to me 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?^[6]

***

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.”

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.”

The lyrics were translated into Chinese. The memory, too, should be in Chinese. But I cannot see our tiny garden with the grapevine, which our father cultivated and which was later uprooted by our wrathful mother, or the bamboo fence dotted with morning glories, or the junk that occupied half the balcony—years of accumulations piled high by our hoarder father—if I do not name these things to myself in English. I cannot see my sister, but I can hear her sing the lyrics in English. I can seek to understand my mother’s vulnerability and cruelty, but language is the barrier I have chosen. “Do you know, the moment I die your father will marry someone else?” my mother used to whisper to me when I was little. “Do you know that I cannot die, because I don’t want you to live under a stepmother?” Or else, taken over by inexplicable rage, she would say that I, the only person she had loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not display enough gratitude. But I have given these moments—what’s possible to be put into English—to my characters. Memories, left untranslated, can be disowned; memories untranslatable can become someone else’s story.

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