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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.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Willing
System
Within
Work
People

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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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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
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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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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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No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.
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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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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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