Quote

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Women
Opposite
Pang
Littles
Opposites
Nanny
Little
Loving
Nannies
Great
Exactly
Spoils
Way
Whose
Orphan
Would
Effort
Spoil
Love
Success
Imagined
Mother
Earn
Kindhearted

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
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The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.
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Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.
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She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.
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Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.
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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
Yiyun Li