What a Trip to the Psychiatric Ward Taught Me about the Nature of Reality
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Novelist and author Yiyun Li tells deeply felt stories from her stay in a psychiatric hospital, after two suicide attempts. The patients Li shared space with taught her a great deal about living in a world that is sometimes lacking in apparent meaning, and how close reality and unreality truly are. For anyone who has ever felt that "patients running the asylum" is an apt analogy for human society, Li shares the stories behind individuals too readily dismissed or forgotten about. Whether in the field of psychology or politics, tension between orthodoxy and imagination will continue to exist. But if we can find ways to keep our imagination alive, we can thrive in a world that is calling out for answers. Yiyun Li's newest book is Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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YIYUN LI:
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Heminway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Yiyun Li: A few months ago my teenage son told me, he said, “I had an exhausting dream.” And I said, “Oh? What happened?” And he said, “I dreamed that I was a negative number and I couldn’t figure out my square root.” And to comfort him, and also to alleviate this existential crisis, I said, “Well there is a way. Wait until you know the imaginary number.” And he said, “Mom, I’m not stupid. I know imaginary numbers.” He said, “But I just don’t like that troublesome ‘i’.” And I thought, “You know, that troublesome ‘i’, who would blame him?”
So, during the 16th and 17th centuries, when imaginary numbers were first introduced, some of the mathematicians looked down upon imaginary numbers as fictitious or useless. So here’s a cartoon I borrowed from my younger son’s math room. It says: Pi says, “Get real.” And the imaginary number says, “Be rational.”
I feel like-I’m sorry, I just have to add-I feel like Sean Spicer now, you know.
Rational versus real. This is, of course-there is a lot to say about that pair. We can go to philosophy. We can go to psychology, neuroscience and many other branches to study this confrontation. The conflict and the affinity between the two.
Coming from a writer’s point of view I want to share a few stories. A few years ago I was hospitalized twice for suicide attempts. And here are a few stories I brought from the hospital.
The first woman I saw when I entered the ward, I’ll give her a name: Lena. She was in her late twenties and she had a budding career in the fashion industry. My first impression of her was that she moved very slowly. Every gesture, every step. Why, I didn’t know. And in a place where people are oftentimes cloaked in paper gowns carelessly, she dressed as impeccably as she could. But Lena was the quietest, most un-self-assuming, and most elegant person there.
During the following weeks we befriended each other and she told me a little about her childhood. She was born in a family of five siblings. He father was in the Serbian army. Her mother was an Albanian orphan from Kosovo and was said to walk around begging until she met Lena’s father and married him.
After the...
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16 сен 2024
