Her novels offered more than an education in literature. They showed me how language protects history.
The fact that I had read Toni Morrison before I left China in 1996 seems a miracle in retrospect. I was a college student in the early 1990s, and a frequent visitor to Beijing Foreign Language Bookstore. I had collected the works of the American authors available on the shelf: Hawthorne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Roth, Updike and Bellow. These books, published by Chinese presses, were accompanied by a translation or at least footnotes to explain the cultural references. Toni Morrison’s books were not among them.
An English teacher from America introduced the name Toni Morrison to me, but it took some maneuvering to find her books. The best place to try was the Peking Library (now the National Library of China), which had started to exchange books with the Library of Congress in 1979. That library was not open to the public. Through a friend’s father, a rocket scientist who was privileged enough to be granted access, I got a copy of “Beloved,” the American edition.
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The woman in the house knew it and so did the children.” My English was decent enough that I did not need a dictionary to read these opening lines, yet there was something beyond language, which I didn’t grasp.
The history of American slavery was taught in Chinese schools when I grew up, but only minimally. The American Civil War, in our textbook, was driven purely by the greed of capitalists in the North, who were seeking to turn black slaves into cheap labor for maximum profit.Twentieth-century African-American lives offered a useful tool to attack America. I once read a newspaper article about a black American orphan dying from hunger and cold, paired with a story in which a Chinese orphan prospered among people who loved him. These contrasting tales, no doubt an easy creation for a politically alert propagandist, appeared in the weekly Young Pioneers’ News, under the headline “Good Is Communism; Bad Is Capitalism.”
In middle school our music teacher, a man prone to melancholy, pedaled on a pump organ and taught us “Old Black Joe” — a parlor song by Stephen C. Foster that was considered a successful example of a white writer truthfully depicting African-American life — in English and in Chinese. I liked the song, sad and heavy, a contrast to the propaganda music we grew up with.
Sometimes when I washed dishes I would sing the song in the kitchen. I did not know who Old Black Joe was, or where the cotton fields were.
By the time I emigrated to the United States I had read “Beloved,” “Sula,” “The Bluest Eye” and “Song of Solomon” — the rocket scientist never tired of making trips to the library for hungry young minds like mine. It was through Ms. Morrison’s novels that I first learned an important part of American history, which until then had been largely unknown to me.
I had sought to educate myself, but reading her was more than an education of literature or history. Her writing showed me, and continues to show me, that history, vulnerable to the attacks of misused and misleading language, can be protected by the language that achieves the purity of truth. History can be manipulated, whitewashed and rewritten, but people who have lived in history all have their stories, which no single dictator or censor can rob. Memories, kept in stories, keep history alive. And who, among American writers, is a fiercer and braver keeper of the memories that have made America the country it is today, in the most beautiful and powerful language?But not everyone sees the relevance of history. The desire to forget history seems universal, and one sees people with such agendas, in America and in China.
My earlier books, mostly set in China, have led to some readers to send me furious emails. A novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution especially touched some nerves. “What right do you have to write about events that occurred before you were a grown-up?” people demanded to know. (I was 4 years old when the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976.)
Once, at my local bookstore, an impassioned woman from Beijing said how much my writing hurt her pride. “Yes, the Cultural Revolution is in our history, but why not write something that makes us feel great about China?” Another time, at an American college, a young man from China asked, “Why do you have to write about the dark side of the country instead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to make us feel proud?” Both times I asked my questioners: “Would you also go to Toni Morrison and say to her: ‘You were born after slavery was abolished, so why do you have to hold onto that history and write about it? Why can’t you write something about a culturally and racially integrated and harmonious America to make Americans feel great and proud?’” They might or might not have given a sensible answer. But that is hardly my concern. In “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am,” a 2019 documentary, she says something that makes any writer’s doubt about his or her independence a dispensable part of the career: “History has always proved that books are the first plain on which certain battles are fought.”No one had the right to tell Toni Morrison what to believe and what to write. No one should have that right over me, either.
She gives and continues to give many minds the necessary space to exist, and to expand. I am not alone in my debt to her.
Yiyun Li is a novelist, short story writer and an essayist. Her most recent book is “Where Reasons End,” a novel.