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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
People
Chinese
Justice
Freedom
Care

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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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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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