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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.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
People
Memories
Revised
Fact
Rewritten
Individual
Wiped
History
Recent
Also
Isolation
Well
Collective
Think
Constantly
Thinking
China

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Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.
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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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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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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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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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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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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