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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
Thinking
China
People
Memories
Revised
Fact
Rewritten
Individual
Wiped
History
Recent
Also
Isolation
Well
Collective
Think
Constantly

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.
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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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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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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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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.
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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li