Writer Li Ge: How I Read With My Daughter (and Wrote Her Into a Book)

We talked with writer Li Ge about her new book, reading with her daughter, and much else

The book critic Li Ge has published her first book that is not criticism: A Little Bird Sleeps Beside Me (《小鸟睡在我身旁》). On the title page she notes that it is dedicated to the "two women" she loves most — her mother and her daughter. They are, she writes, "where my blood comes from and where it goes," and the people who gave her "the courage to hold on through life's moments of panic."

Most of what the book records are scattered details of daily life. A "date day" at the botanical garden with her daughter on a fine autumn weekend, with pickle sushi and sliced fruit packed along. On a fretful, sleepless night, her daughter reaching out two small arms to hold her and saying, "There's nothing to be afraid of." The first high-speed train ride with her daughter to see the sea. The little notes her mother sticks up around the house. The ginkgo nuts her husband and her daughter pick up together on the way home from school.

The tone is light. Setbacks and tender moments alike pass by quickly, in a few short lines.

That gentleness is a long way from the "sharp" style of Li Ge's early years. Her daughter's birth, she thinks, worked on her in ways she never planned: "You become better able to feel the beauty in ordinary life, a bit more inward."

Her daughter, Pipi, is the book's most important collaborator. Nearly everything in it involves her. From the pregnancy onward, Li Ge collected the funny things she said and did, and the illustrations and ceramics printed in the book are all Pipi's work. After it came out, Li Ge gave her a share of the royalties, out of respect for her labor.

The book began as a private record. Before the publisher approached her, Li Ge had no plan to publish it. She wanted to print it as a small booklet and give it to Pipi when she grew up, so she could see how lovable she had been as a child.

Once she decided to publish, Li Ge cut it down to "strike a balance." "From a mother's point of view, every moment of a child is precious, but a reader may find it all petty and dull. So you look for a middle point — things that might move the reader a little, not the tiniest fragments. The tiniest fragments I keep for myself," she said in the interview.

The night the advance copies arrived, both Li Ge's mother and Pipi wanted first look. "My daughter cleverly coaxed my mother to sleep, then hid off in a corner reading it alone, and I could hear her giggling. There are details in there that embarrass her but are very funny — she must have forgotten them herself. Like hiding under the bed to pee," Li Ge said.

Rare among books about parents and children, Li Ge shares a great deal about reading alongside her daughter. At first they read different books by the same writer; later their reading lists began to overlap. Recently, needing to add reviews of Russian literature, Li Ge started rereading Dostoevsky, and her daughter came along for Chingiz Aitmatov. Because her daughter loves animals and plants, they also read Michio Hoshino together.

Their verdicts on the same writer, and the same book, often differ. Li Ge's rule is that each of them "plays her own game" and stays "on her own track."

She applies that policy of non-interference across the whole of life, even when it offends her taste. "The worst disaster in a life is someone who interferes with you in the name of love. Once you have felt that, you certainly don't want to impose it on anyone else. A life that isn't respected is better not lived at all — that's how I see it," she said.

She spends several pages on what it means to be a mother: "Mother is only one of my identities. I don't need authority over my child to know who I am. I have my world, she has hers. So I never use my child's photo as my avatar, and I never call myself 'so-and-so's mom.' That lightens the load on the child too — nobody wants to live as somebody else's substitute. The more you love a child, the harder you have to work on yourself, build up your own inner world, and pull yourself away from her, so that you don't crush her without meaning to, don't trample another person's life. Chinese families generally lack this boundary between self and other."

What follows is part of QDaily's interview with Li Ge:

Q: QDaily

L: Li Ge

Q: Going by publication dates, a lot of your books came out after your child was born. It gives the impression that you got more productive once you became a mother.

L: I came to writing very late. I was about 27 when I started writing, 29 when I had my child, and the books followed after that — it's a coincidence. You write for a year or two, someone asks you for a book, and the timing just happens to overlap. Four books this year: two are reissues and two are expanded editions. Private Words (《私语书》) has been selling for eight years and has gone through three editions — that counts as publishing too.

Q: When you look back at the reissued books now, what do you make of what's in them?

L: It's a middle-aged person looking at a young one. I really did have nerve on the page back then — a talent that comes with youthful energy. I dared to speak, dared to put forward opinions even when they weren't fully worked out. There was a gleam to it, like a blade. I don't have that now. But I may go deeper now, be more forgiving and more compassionate. That's a middle-aged person's view of the young.

Q: Do you think losing that blade is inevitable with age, or was it a change particular to you?

L: I think that as you get older you see more people, more kinds of life, and slowly you come to feel for them. You can no longer stand on some absolute standard and judge others. That's probably part of it. Mostly it's a sense of understanding toward your own kind. Even so, I still like young people; I think it's good that they dare to speak.

Q: You read widely — architecture books, for instance.

L: All the art forms connect. Take architecture: of the seven arts it's one of the most social. To persuade a client to hand him a project, an architect needs real powers of persuasion and expression. You find that many architects, like film directors, combine personal talent and social skill perfectly.

The only difference is that they express their ideas through space. Many architects write extremely well — Kengo Kuma, or someone like Louis Kahn; their command of language is astonishing. And they're not writers in the literary sense. Literary writers describe, feel, evoke, and at most add a little argument. Architects have the cool, precise, dry expression of an engineer, and I find that fascinating.

There's a lesson in it for literature. Plenty of architects' ideas transfer straight over. Kengo Kuma says a building is never an isolated building; he rejects Le Corbusier's modernism and says, "I don't like isolated buildings." He likes the connection between people and nature. He thinks architecture is a form of connection. Well, isn't that literature? Literature shouldn't be an isolated work of the spirit either; it should be a connection between people and their lives. It's the same thing. The art forms all connect.

Q: Do the books you chose when you were younger differ from the ones you choose now?

L: They do, and I suspect that's common. Young people like novels. In my twenties I read English, American and Russian novels like a madwoman. Later I read fewer and fewer novels, and now I read all over the place. When you're young you're curious about the outside world and about other people's minds, so you want to pry into their lives and moods. When you're older you get very interested in the history and knowledge of the world and want to learn. So it shifts.

Q: Is your daughter like you were then — does she prefer storybooks?

L: Every child has her own reading lineage. People ask me to put together reading lists for their children and I tell them I honestly can't. That list has to grow slowly out of living with your child and feeling your way; it's made to measure. My daughter likes small animals and natural science — astronomy, geography, plants and animals.

Q: Is that an inborn preference, rather than something formed by exposure to a lot of science books?

L: Our home has a fairly complete reading environment, so her range of choice is probably wider than most. But you can clearly see that she reaches for one kind of thing, and then you know she really does like it.

Q: Since she likes natural science, do you steer her toward books outside that field on purpose, to widen her view?

L: Balance, you mean? I leave her room to choose, but I don't restrict her. She's very curious, interested in everything. And not just her — children are all like this. You rarely meet a listless child who is interested in nothing.

Q: You read different books by the same writer, and now your reading lists overlap. What have you read together?

L: We've reread a lot lately. Right now it's Michio Hoshino. He wrote a great deal about polar animals; my daughter loves him, and his prose is simple and easy to follow.

I may need to add a Russian book soon, so I'll reread old Dostoevsky, and Aitmatov, and she reads along. I recently bought her the Duku classics series for children, which includes Dostoevsky's The Honest Thief (《诚实的贼》). I'd never paid attention to that story before, but it's quite good. She was reading it, so I read it too.

There's also Paustovsky's A Basket of Fir Cones (《一篮云杉果》). I'd read The Golden Rose and The Story of a Life, but I didn't know this one existed. My daughter was reading it, so I read along.

Q: Do you discuss the books afterward?

L: It's a natural secretion of the mind. You don't set out to exchange anything, but of course you want to share with whoever is around — sharing is a human instinct. She tells me what she thinks and I find it funny and interesting. She's plain about it, naturally; she can't produce elaborate ideas.

She's reading Shen Fuyu's Traces of the Gods (《诸神的踪迹》) at the moment. I haven't read it.

Q: How does she pick the books you haven't read?

L: Whatever she's interested in, I buy her a pile of it. She never runs short of books. And in my line of work, friends send me books too.

One we both love is Confessions of Life and Death at the Zoo (《动物园的生死告白》), written by a zookeeper. Adults and children both love it. I recommend it strongly.

Q: Do you love it for the same reasons?

L: She likes watching how the animals live. I like what the keeper understands about life from being with them, the philosophy of it. My reading is probably more abstract.

Q: When you tell her what you took from a book, how does she react?

L: I genuinely think understanding has little to do with age. Her father is 50, and his grasp of a lot of things falls well short of the child's — slow and numb. This child is extremely sensitive; she understands a great deal.

Q: That may just be a person's nature.

L: Right. But for exactly that reason the two of us live in more pain than he does. We're both sensitive, we notice everything, we react strongly. On most things, his resolution is lower than ours.

Q: Has she had thoughts about a book that never occurred to you?

L: I'm sure she has. Some books she introduced to me — Return to the Wolf Pack (《重返狼群》), for instance, which I'd completely overlooked. When it first reached me it looked terrible: a big book with loose, sprawling type. It was nowhere near my taste and I had no intention of reading it. Then my daughter read it and kept telling me about it, the story of the wolf cub Gelin taken in by people. She described it to me in detail — how the cub was bullied from the start by the family's nasty dog, how the dog tricked it into eating pepper so that it sneezed and sneezed. I thought it was wonderful.

Q: Do the two of you ever judge the same writer very differently?

L: Of course! It happens constantly. What I like she doesn't, what she likes I don't. Things I can't get through at all she devours. I can't think of a specific case offhand. Novels, say: I like Dream of the Red Chamber, she likes Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms — she likes a chivalric world with clear black and white. I prefer the wistful, tender things.

Q: When you disagree, what do you do?

L: Each plays her own game. She plays hers, I play mine. We each stay on our own track.

Q: Parents sometimes want to talk a child round, to get her to believe what they're sure of.

L: I don't approve of that kind of pressure from above. A child is an independent being with her own values; she doesn't need it. Children spend most of their time at school, and among themselves they were passing around some haunted-castle series — coarse, frightening stuff, the kind that gives children nightmares. I didn't interfere even with that, and later she dropped it herself: too ugly, too vulgar. She prefers the better-made books at home. She can weed things out on her own. I read Chiung Yao's romances when I was young; I couldn't get through one now. There's a natural weeding-out, a growing up. You don't need to force it.

Q: In the book you also say you worry she'll get hurt because of her independence.

L: That's bound to happen.

Q: Do you prepare her for anything, to soften it?

L: I don't think that's within a parent's control. Take Michio Hoshino. He loved Siberia and polar animals from childhood; in his teens he worked to pay his own way and went off around the United States, not phoning his parents for three months. As an adult he went to Alaska to photograph bears and the rest, and in the end a bear killed him. His parents certainly wouldn't have wanted their child to die that way, but was it theirs to control? A child bears the consequences of her own choices, and to me that's enough — it's free will, unmanaged by parents. The uncertainties are beyond what we parents can weigh. If she chose it and is willing to bear it, that's fine.

Since the new book came out I've had many letters. One young woman wrote to me in the middle of the night. Her parents love her very much, she said, and she has been trying every way she can to get away from them. She wrote: "I saw in a video call that my mother's hair is thinning. I know she worries about me, but I really can't be that close to her. After reading your book, it all became clear." That's what a sense of boundaries is. Many people never see the problem — that they are forcing themselves on someone. And all the while they feel, I love you.

Cover image from Unsplash; in-text images courtesy of Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House