Launching a career as a novelist seems like an impossible dream to many ― let alone doing so in a second or third language. But that’s exactly what Yiyun Li did after she graduated from college, moving from Beijing to the U.S. to study immunology at the University of Iowa; once there, she wound up honing her fiction-writing skills at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
对许多人来说，要做一名职业小说家似乎就像一个不可能的梦想，更不用说用第二种语言或第三种语言来写小说了。但这正是李翊雲所从事的工作。大学毕业后，她从北京来到美国爱荷华大学学习免疫学。一到那儿，她就兴奋地来到享有盛誉的爱荷华作家工作室训练自己的小说写作技巧。
In a poignant essay for The New Yorker, Li, now the acclaimed author of several novels and short story collections written entirely in English, meditates on what leaving Chinese behind and embracing a new language has meant for her:
如今，李翊雲已创作了几部完全用英语写成的小说和短篇故事集，而她也成为了备受欢迎的作家。她曾在《纽约客》上刊载了一篇深刻的文章，在文中思考放弃汉语，使用一门新的语言对她来说意味着什么：
Over the years, my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. And memories—not only those about America but also those about China; not only those carried with me but also those archived with the wish to forget—are sorted in English. To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, like a crucial decision.
多年来，我的大脑已经摒弃了汉语。我用英语做梦，用英语自言自语。而我的记忆，不仅是那些关于美国的记忆，还有那些关于中国的记忆；无论是那些我记住的，还是那些我希望存档并忘记的记忆都是用英语来分类的。要放弃母语，不论是过去还是现在，我依然觉得像是做出了一个重大的决定。
Li writes that although she grew up in China, she’s only written professionally in English ― a fact that has caused some surprise and confusion. Though she notes it would be easy to assume that she left her home language for political reasons, as Vladimir Nabokov did, she delves into the thicket of personal history and emotional turmoil that motivated her. “Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting and irreplaceable,” she writes, “yet it can also demand more than what one is willing to give, or more than one is capable of giving.”
李翊雲写道，虽然她在中国长大，但她依然只用英语进行专业写作，而这一事实也使一些人觉得惊讶和困惑。虽然她表明，人们可能很容易认为她是因为政治原因才放弃母语的，就像弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫所做的那样，但她深入探究了那些激励她的个人经历以及情绪波动中的错综复杂。“就像所有的亲密关系，一个人和其母语之间的亲密可能会使人得到慰藉，且这种亲密是不可替代的，”她写道，“但这可能比一个人愿意给予，或者能够给予的，需要的更多。”
