28 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
that I could proceed with two deaths,
my father’s and my son’s, and that I
would be weighed down but balanced,
not capsizing.
O
nce, when I was in middle school,
my father picked up a book of
Tang-dynasty poetry from my desk
and read a few pages. “Ah, poetry,” he
said, replacing the book. “One thing
I’ve missed and won’t ever understand.”
His statement, wistful, was an anom-
aly. He spoke very little about
himself. If I were his biogra-
pher, I could write no more
than a meagre page.
Here’s what I know about
his life:
He was born in Zhejiang
Province, in a mountain village
so poor that, contrary to what
we had been taught in school,
there had not even been an
evil-landlord class. His father
was a peasant, illiterate, but his mother
could read and write—and write well,
for I used to sneak her letters to my fa-
ther from his drawer and read them. This
was unusual for a peasant woman of her
generation, though where and how she
had received her education was unknown
to me. My father’s uncle and aunt—his
mother’s siblings—lived in a nearby town,
and when my father finished the village
school my grandmother made a sole re-
quest of her siblings, which was to ad-
vance my father’s education. They brought
him to town. After middle school, he
thought of enrolling in a normal school
and becoming a teacher, but his aunt in-
sisted that he be more ambitious. He
went to the nearest city for high school
and, having excelled, was selected to be
sent to a university in Moscow. But that
future was dashed when he was given a
diagnosis of tuberculosis. (Only once did
he explain to us how he had become in-
fected: he was a poor boarder, unable to
afford food, and a kindhearted teacher
often shared his food with him. Later,
the teacher was found to have TB.)
For two years, while convalescing,
my father taught mathematics at his
high school (where my mother, whom
he did not meet until years later, in Bei-
jing, had been a student). When he re-
covered, he studied theoretical physics
at university, and was chosen to work
for a core unit making nuclear weap-
ons. He seemed not to have enjoyed
that, and wanted to go back to do re-
search on quantum physics, a prospect
that for a moment looked possible, but
the offer from his dream institute was
rescinded—why that was one could have
many guesses, though all pointless. In-
stead, he was assigned to work at a place
called the Chinese Society for Dialec-
tics of Nature—doing what, I’ve never
understood. He was naturally reticent,
and his professional training required a
disciplined silence. He never
talked about any of his jobs.
My father had told us only
a few details of his early life.
He started at the village school
at such a young age that he
didn’t even know how to tie
his belt, and the teacher had
to help him. He saw an auto-
mobile for the first time when
he went to live with his uncle,
and he was so frightened that
he ran back indoors. When he graduated
from high school, my grandmother could
afford only a pair of new socks for him,
and he travelled north with a suitcase—
bought for him by the villagers—empty
but for the socks. His university provided
him with clothes and bedding. There, he
once ran into a classmate who believed
that he was going to fail a theoretical-
physics course. My father said a few
words—he said he forgot what—but
many years later he met the classmate at
a conference. He told my father that his
words had saved him from despair.
“Always be kind to people,” my fa-
ther said when he told me the last story.
“We don’t often know what could make
a difference to another person’s life.”
Be kind. Keep smiling. These princi-
ples have become my default mode, but
they are also effective in keeping people
at a distance. Make my house your inn,
and you’ll have my kindness and my smile.
“
T
here are many things you’ve got
right in your fiction,” Vincent told
me when he was in middle school. “But
you’ve forgotten one important thing:
people in life are not as complex as you’ve
made them in your fiction.”
I had always believed the opposite:
that people in life are infinitely complex,
and one can only approximate in fiction.
“I know I am right and you are
wrong,” he said when I disagreed. “Be-
cause once you read good fiction you’ll
find people in life disappointing.”
I admired his certainty, and I’ve taken
his criticism to heart. Though, is it true
that people are less complex in life than
in fiction? Perhaps complexity, sought
by characters or their creators, is more
often shunned in life.
Some years ago, my father asked
about my professional life: what I was
working on, where I travelled for my
books, what I taught at the university.
I gave perfunctory answers, and then
said that I didn’t want to talk about my-
self. He sighed and said, “You always
refuse to see that others like to know a
little more about you.”
Around the same time, I went to my
younger son’s class for an oral-history
project. I told my interviewers a few an-
ecdotes about my childhood, including
the fact that I hated the candies given to
me for the Lunar New Year. This made
me an odd celebrity among the second
graders. My son came home and said that
everyone knew that I didn’t like sweets
as a kid, and that they found it strange.
I did not explain to them the rea-
son for my distaste. It would be rude
for a child to refuse anything given by
adults, who, instead of placing a candy
in my hand, often insisted on peeling
the wrapper off and thrusting the sweet
into my mouth. When no one was look-
ing, I would spit it out and throw it be-
hind a heater.
What can be shared, a small frac-
tion, only underlines what cannot be
shared, or what one is unwilling to. Al-
though, my father would have said,
“Why not share a little more? In a math-
ematical sense, more would be better
than less, less better than nothing.”
But one cannot share without resort-
ing to words, and it is stoicism—silence
and restraint—that defined my father,
and it is silence and restraint that I have
inherited from him. I wish I could have
told him, without using my voice, with-
out using any words, about Vincent’s
death. Had I whispered to him right
before his surgery, I might have been
nearest to speaking the truth without
breaking my silence.
My regret, I now know, is not about
refraining from speaking on his last
conscious day but about not having
spoken in the previous fourteen months.
It was not out of consideration that I
