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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.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Learn
Regarding
Culture
Heroism
Villain
Someone
Heroes
Way
Calling
Time
Hero
Grew
Heroine
Call
Heroines

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I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.
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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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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.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li