Июнь Ли - Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Time will tell, people say, as though time always has the last word. Perhaps I am only hiding from time as I have been hiding from those who want the power to have the last word about others.

11.

I would have liked to be called a dreamer had I known how to dream. The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasionally feel so I find untrustworthy. I would not mind being taken as many things I am not: a shy person, a cheerful person, a cold person. But I do not want to be called a dreamer when I am far from being a real one.

12.

What I admire and respect in a dreamer: her confidence in her capacities, her insusceptibility to the frivolous, and her faith that the good and the real shall triumph and last. There is nothing selfish, dazzling, or preposterous about dreamers; in everyday life they blend in rather than stand out, though it’s not hiding. A real dreamer has a mutual trust with time.

Apart from feeling unqualified to be called a dreamer, I may also be worrying about being mistaken for one of those who call themselves dreamers but are merely ambitious. One meets them often in life, their ambitions smaller than dreams, more commonplace, in need of broadcasting and dependent on recognition from this particular time. If they cause pain to others, they have no trouble writing off those damages as the cost of their dreams. Timeliness may be one thing that separates ambitions from real dreams.

13.

The woman in New Hampshire was neither a dreamer nor an ambitious person. She had hoped for a solid and uneventful life in an American suburb, but loneliness must have made her life a desert.

My dead friend in Beijing was ambitious because he understood his talents; he had dreams, too. I must have been part of his dreams once—why else would he have written if not to seek kinship with another dreamer.

14.

I came to this country as an aspiring immunologist. I had chosen the field—if one does not count the practical motives of wanting a reason to leave China and of having a skill to make a living—because I had liked the working concept of the immune system. Its job is to detect and attack nonself; it has memories, some as long lasting as life; its memories can go awry selectively, or, worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistake self as foreign, as something to eliminate. The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in - + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

15.

One’s intuition is to acquire immunity to those who confirm one’s beliefs about life, and to those who turn one’s beliefs into nothing. The latter are the natural predators of our hearts, the former made into enemies because we are, unlike other species, capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves.

16.

I had this notion, when I first started writing this, that it would be a way to test—to assay—thoughts about time. There was even a vision of an after, when my confusions would be sorted out.

Assays in science are part of an endless exploration. One question leads to another; what follows confirms or disconfirms what comes before. To assay one’s ideas about time while time remains unsettled and elusive feels futile. Just as one is about to understand one facet of time, it presents another to undermine one’s reasoning.

To write about a struggle amid the struggling: one must hope that this muddling will end someday.

17.

But what more do you want? You have a family, a profession, a house, a car, friends, and a place in the world. Why can’t you be happy? Why can’t you be strong? These questions are asked, among others, by my mother.

There was a majestic mental health worker in the second hospital where I stayed who came to work with perfect lipstick, shining curly hair, and bright blouses and flats of matching colors.

Young lady, she said every time she saw me; don’t lose that smile of yours.

I had liked her, and liked her still after she questioned my spiritual life. I could see that the godless state of my mind concerned her, and that my compliance made me a good project. Don’t mind her, my roommate, a black Buddhist, said; she has an evangelical background. I don’t, I assured my roommate; being preached to did not bother me.

Then I had a difficult day. At dinnertime, the majestic woman asked, Young lady, why did you cry today?

I’m sad, I said.

We know you’re sad. What I want to know is, what makes you sad?

Can’t I just be left alone in my sadness? I said. The women around the table smiled into their plates. The good girl was having a tantrum.

18.

What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask them oneself again and again.

I know you don’t like me to ask what’s brought you here, my roommate said, but can you describe how you feel? I don’t have words for how I feel.

I had several roommates—another revolving door—but I liked the last one. Raised in a middle-class African American family, she was the only adopted child among her siblings. She married for love, and on her wedding day, she realized she had made the mistake of her life. For the whole first dance he didn’t look at me once, she said; he looked into every guest’s face to make sure they knew it was his show.

By the time she told me this story, her husband was confined to bed and blind from diabetes. She took care of him along with a nurse. She watched TCM with him because he remembered the exchanges in old movies. Still, she said she was angry because everything in their life was about him.

Have you ever thought of leaving him? I asked.

She said she had throughout the marriage, but she would not. I don’t want my children to grow up and think a man can be abandoned in that state, she said.

Yet she had tried to kill herself—an attempted abandonment of both her husband and her children. But this I did not say because it was exactly what many people would say to a situation like that. One has to have a solid self to be selfish.

19.

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.

This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

20.

One day my roommate said she noticed I became quiet if she talked about Buddhism with me. I don’t mean it as a religion, she said; for instance, you can try to meditate.

I did not explain that I had read Buddhist scriptures from the ages of twelve to twenty-three. For the longest time they offered the most comforting words. The teaching of nothingness diluted the intensity of that emptiness.

My father taught me meditation when I was eleven. Imagine a bucket between your open arms, he told me, and asked me to listen to the dripping of the water into the bucket and, when it was full, water dripping out from the bottom. “From empty to full, and from full to empty,” he underlined the words in a book for me. “Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.”