Latest news with #VincentLi
Telegraph
21-05-2025
- Telegraph
Both of my sons took their own lives. But I'm still a mother – they're just not here any more
For more than 20 years, being a mother was the framework of Yiyun Li 's life. It was what she spent most of her time thinking about: what to feed her sons, how to entertain them when they were younger, and how to guide them as they grew into teenagers. While she would eventually become a novelist, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton, she was always a mother first. 'I still am. I just don't have my children here to be a mother,' says the 52-year-old with quiet acceptance. In 2017, her son Vincent died by suicide, aged 16. Seven years later, in 2024, her younger son, James, also died by suicide, aged 19. They were both found at the same railway spot. Ever since, life for Li has been experienced as a series of 'nows'. Time absorbed by one moment after another. Where can we live but days? 'I recite that Philip Larkin poem to myself nearly every day,' says Li over Zoom. Morning light streams in through the windows behind her, illuminating the spring-green leaves of the trees outside. Nature and its rhythms have been a source of grounding for the writer since she lost both her sons. How does one even begin to talk to a parent about such a terrible loss? It is something Li has thought about a lot. 'There's no good way to say this,' were the words uttered by the police officers on both occasions when they arrived at her home. It was a cliché, but actually Li admits: 'I don't think there's a better way to say those sentences.' 'Words fall short,' is another cliché now familiar to her. There are the bad clichés, too. The crusaders for 'silver linings' who told her, 'You will reach the end of the tunnel.' 'Those are not for the mourning parent. They are platitudes,' she states. To spend time with Li is to sit on the edge of the abyss of her grief. It's an awkward, but not unpleasant, place to be thanks to her generosity and warm spirit. Li has written a book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, an elegy for the two remarkable sons she lost to suicide. They were close but very different. Vincent was vivid, flamboyant and intelligent. The 'feeling' brother. James, the 'thinking' one, didn't draw attention to himself. He spoke eight languages, having taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian and Russian on top of the Spanish, Italian and Japanese he learnt at school. His phone was set in Lithuanian. However, he was extremely quiet, almost non-verbal. In his senior year at high school, he read the five major works of Wittgenstein, including the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. When someone loses two sons to suicide, there are obvious questions. Human curiosity demands to know how such a terrible tragedy could occur. The unease that suicide creates in others is now very familiar to Li. 'Suicide makes people uncomfortable,' she says. 'They think someone needs to be blamed. It's only human nature to say, 'Those parents must be monsters.'' She speaks from experience. Li and her husband have lost friends. Some of the harshest criticism has emanated from her home country of China. Mothers get even more of the blame, says Li: 'The urge people have to put me on a moral trial is sad, but fascinating too.' The one question people don't ask, she has learnt from talking to other parents who have lost their teenage children to suicide, is how much these parents have done for their children. The reality is that Li and her husband provided a safe and stable family environment for their two sons. Far safer than the ones they themselves grew up in. They each had a difficult parent. For Li, the experience of being raised by a physically and emotionally abusive mother meant that she was all too aware how harsh the world can be. By contrast, Vincent and James's childhoods were cocooned in love. The family travelled: to Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Croatia. The Li parental philosophy was that they would spare nothing to bring the children to see the world. As a society we talk about giving children the tools to live. Now, Li questions whether we have taught children how to suffer and go on living a meaningful life while tolerating those pains. 'Even I feel I didn't teach them well enough how to suffer,' she says. They were both sensitive and unusual children. 'People expect children to fall into the norm and I think my children happened to be very different,' explains Li. She recalls taking Vincent to soccer club when he was five years old. A normal thing for a boy his age to do. Vincent, though, had the words to penetrate the moment: 'You just want me to be like everybody else.' While the family resisted a formal diagnosis of depression, he struggled with being a teenager. For instance, how cruel a locker room can be for middle-school boys. 'He was extremely perceptive and articulate and sensitive and all these things were probably in the end against him,' says Li. 'That combination of traits does not necessarily mean the world is going to be kind and accepting.' Meanwhile, James, who had been uncharacteristically talkative with Vincent, and silent with the rest of the world, fell into a more pronounced silence after his brother died. Does Li think he would have taken his own life if Vincent hadn't died? 'My belief is that James would have lived,' she says. 'It was a tremendous loss in his life which we could not help. He was closest to his brother. They were best friends.' At the time, she and her husband couldn't understand quite how deeply he felt the loss. 'He was an introvert and did not interact with the world easily.' Regret isn't something that fits into Li's world view. Alternatives belong to the world of fiction where characters start out with alternatives at the beginning of a novel and as it progresses, lose those alternatives. 'I don't think that's how life works,' says Li. 'If you say you have regrets, that means we go into the realm of alternatives. What if we signed Vincent up to the soccer club? It's against my principle to treat life as alternatives.' Still, she admits, 'I wish I did this or that' thinking is inevitable for parents who have lost children. For her it is the moment she did not speak to James about a line in Camus' play Caligula that he read obsessively in the months before he died. 'The first line was about suicide and I did not ask him how he felt at the moment.' In the months since, she has chosen a path of radical acceptance. 'I let them grow and at some point, they sort of left this world. That's how I look at it, they made their decision to end their lives. It's very sad.' Li smiles, but the expression hums with pain. Her wish is that suicide were better understood, that there were less stigma about it being a selfish act. 'People who die from suicide, it's not that they don't love themselves or the people they leave behind. They are in such extreme pain that there's no way for them to end that pain except by ending their life.' Li speaks from experience. In 2017, she published Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a memoir of her own battle with suicidal depression. Even now, she must protect herself from that path: 'One thing I always say is you can be sad and depressed but you cannot be depressed and agitated at the same time. Agitation is not good for people.' Her new framework acts as such a defence. It is one filled with gardening, swimming and taking piano lessons. There are also hours of reading and writing, of course. 'I feel exceptionally fortunate that I am a writer. I know people who have been through these things and they don't have words for,' says Li. 'I like the notion of being able to process through my own words.' Loneliness is part of the deal. What she feels is something that only her husband can possibly understand. They have well-intentioned friends who want her to stop feeling sad. And those who can sit with her in her sadness without trying to fix things. 'I will feel sad every day for the rest of my life,' she says. But sadness is not unhappiness. She is not a dour person, 'heavy like a hippopotamus,' she smiles. 'I do take great pleasure in many things, accepting that I feel very sad about my life.' There are visits to the farmers' market, lunches with friends, where there will be laughter. One question she never asks herself is, 'How could this be?' 'I have come a long way in life and realise many things are possible. Sometimes, things happen that are inexplicable.' This is her habitat now. 'I don't want to waste my life, time and energy fighting my habitat if sadness is where I am at.' Instead she will remember her sons for who they were. 'Both my children had rich inner selves. They had such a deep understanding and feeling about the world. That will not be ended by their deaths. I always remember how they have lived so fully of being themselves.'
Telegraph
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Two sons lost to suicide – this writer's tale is deeply harrowing
'There is no good way to say this.' These were the words the police officers used, on both occasions, when they broke the news to the Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li of her two sons' suicides. Li agrees, and repeats the phrase in the opening pages of Things in Nature Merely Grow, her emotionally forensic memoir, before informing her readers that: 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at 16, James in 2024, at 19.' Both academically gifted young men died at railway stations near Princeton University, where their mother still works as a professor of creative writing. Li doesn't suggest that any particular events triggered their deaths. Rather, they both came to the conclusion that the pain and effort of living was unendurable. She believes that the flamboyant, artistic and extroverted Vincent 'died of feeling', while the more mysterious and introverted James 'died of thinking'. Born in Beijing in 1972, Li was a maths prodigy who moved to the US in 1996 to study immunology. She worked as a scientist until the creative writing classes she took to improve her English led to a literary career. She has always brought the unsentimental precision of science to her prose, recently in The Book of Goose (2022), repeatedly weighing old phrases and ideas against the starker emotional truths she observes. Not long before Vincent's death, she published a memoir exploring her own periods of suicidal depression, called Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Relentlessly belittled and beaten by her mother as a child, she had made one attempt to kill herself before leaving high school and two later attempts in 2012, when her children were still young. In this book she asks herself, bluntly, whether her own suicide attempts made death feel like a viable solution to life's problems to her sons. She spent much of Vincent's life worrying that his tempestuous feelings would get the better of him. He was a child who spent hours in his bedroom, aged five, after his best friend Mari said she might not marry him when they grew up. Here, she recalls him tearing a sheet from his piano book and writing, in block capitals 'O LOVE, O LOVE, O HEARTLESS LOVE. THROUGH YOUR HEART. FOR YOUR LIFE.' Mari's mother was in awe of this mature melodrama, but Li admits she 'despaired, really. I wished then – I still wish now – that Vincent had not been born with the capacity to feel what he felt in life.' While Vincent was reaching out for deeper connections with grand gestures, James appears to have been withdrawing from society. Before turning 10 he'd diagnosed himself with monophobia – an intense fear of solitude – yet he kept his innermost thoughts and feelings to himself. He identified strongly with the British autistic savant Daniel Tammet, and did little in his senior year of high school but read Wittgenstein. Li invites her readers into her family's world, as it was before the two boys were lost. We're given a glimpse of their erudite in-jokes, pancake breakfasts, European holidays and ageing dog Quintus (the fifth member). To those of us with more make-do existences, the household seems too gracefully civilised for the catastrophes about to befall it, which Li describes as taking her into 'the realm of Shakespearean dramas or Greek tragedies'. And yet, when those catastrophes come, she manages to retain some of her previous poise, unable to hurl herself to the ground and howl like a tragic character. 'One does not raise one's voice because the voice, once raised, speaks not of one's thinking mind but of a primitive pain that does not leave any space for thinking. Like James, I prefer to live by thinking.' She accepts the 'abyss' of her new life and keeps busy, taking piano lessons, studying Euclidean geometry and – always – writing. She resists anger or regret: she calls this 'radical acceptance'. The only anger in Things in Nature Merely Grow is directed at those who refuse to accept her raw, stoic response to her losses: Chinese journalists who write that her sons' deaths were a traitor's punishment for leaving her country, or a Christian friend who arrives at her home and stays for hours insisting that she 'needs' God, or acquaintances who compare her loss to the death of their pets, or strangers who try to 'distract' her from her pain by sending their unpublished novels and asking for advice. Li's book doesn't offer the consolation of wisdom gained, nor a triumphant arc of recovery. Where it finds reassurance is in its rigorous observation of reality. Although Li resists the idea that she might be offering advice or inspiration, her cool-headed clarity does remind readers that it is possible to say the words there is 'no good way to say'. In saying them, she finds a means of survival.
New York Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Writing Into the Abyss After the Death of Two Sons
'Sometimes there is no silver lining in life,' the novelist Yiyun Li observes toward the end of her new memoir, 'Things in Nature Merely Grow,' an elegant, somewhat aloof rumination on the suicide of her son James at 19, in 2024 — six years after the suicide of his older brother, Vincent, then 16. 'Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.' Li grew up in Beijing, where she was trained as a mathematician, and began her prizewinning literary career in English after moving to the United States in 1996. As befits a writer living in a culture that prefers the foggy euphemism of 'passed away' to 'died,' she wards off the easy sympathy of prospective readers and rejects platitudes about loss and grief. 'Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process,' she writes, 'and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.' She alludes instead to something she calls 'radical acceptance,' which seems to entail an awareness of being condemned to exist in the 'abyss' that is the aftermath of her sons' deaths while continuing to apply herself to dailiness, to getting out of bed at the regular time, brewing good coffee, reading — Euclid, Shakespeare, Henry James and Wallace Stevens — and writing. Li's new book comes in the wake of 'Where Reasons End' (2019), a memoir cloaked as a novel in which she wrote about Vincent (here called 'Nikolai'), 'an adamant advocate for the Oxford comma,' a baker, a knitter, a fan of the 17th-century English poet George Herbert, someone who hates people who confuse the oboe (which he plays) with the clarinet and, fatally, a seeker of perfection. Both books are written in unembellished, detached prose that is as involved with itself and its imprecision — 'One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words' — as it is with the obdurate fact of the suicides and the boys themselves. James, like his older brother, who was also his best friend (there are no other siblings), was a self-evident prodigy, a boy who could read fluently while still 'in a diaper,' taught himself Welsh, among a host of other languages, and read the Encyclopedia of the Human Body as a toddler, the better to understand the intricacies of sexual intercourse. Apart from a passing reference to Vincent and James's 'sensitivity and peculiarity,' Li writes about her preternaturally gifted sons as though they were no different from other children; they clearly were, given to witty ripostes and metaphysical asides. One (Vincent) lived 'feelingly,' the other (James) lived 'thinkingly.' Both seem to have inherited their mother's complex sensibility: a combination of 'keen attention' and 'profound indifference,' a mixture of 'intense emotion and an equally intense apathy.' Inculcated by her in a certain attitude of ambivalence — or, to put it another way, in a tenuousness about entering the fray — they were acutely aware of the likely failure of life to live up to its billing as an inherently meaningful affair and of the fragile nature of the whole earthbound enterprise. When, in 'Where Reasons End,' Nikolai's mother asks him what keeps people going, he answers, 'Rotational inertia.' Still, none of these speculations about their respective temperaments explains why the boys, seemingly deeply loved and flourishing, decided to opt out so early on. Despite James's abiding anxiety and loneliness — 'in first grade, he explained that his best skill was not to be noticed by anyone' — and a mention of his seeing a therapist, the brothers are not presented as particularly depressed. One wonders what anguish beyond the usual teenage existential despair they were escaping and why they chose the finality of suicide over less extreme expressions of unhappiness or more mediated courses of action. These are questions Li rarely directly poses but which the reader is inevitably impelled to ask. Were James and Vincent genetically primed for suicide? Li gives us select details about her own past — her childhood in China with a physically and emotionally abusive mother; her own severe depressions during her teenage years; two suicide attempts in 2012, when she was already a mother. (She addresses these events in a 2017 book of essays, 'Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life.') But there is also the reality of her careful, attentive mothering, which includes making customized breakfasts. I imagine she was demanding, perhaps overly ambitious on her sons' behalf, occasionally 'coldly detached,' as she describes herself during a severe depression, but there is no simple toting up of all the factors and arriving at a satisfactory explanation. 'This is not a book about grieving,' Li asserts early on. I would venture that it is instead a commemoration of her sons' brief lives, an elliptical documentation of their vivid, singular presences before they disappeared. 'James's retainers are in a box on his desk,' Li writes. 'Vincent's retainers are in a box on his shelf.' These prosaic details, coming three pages from the end, are shockingly poignant in their invocation of a familiar accouterment of upper-middle-class adolescence. This book is also about endurance — 'But do you really believe that things will get better?' Vincent asked his mother at 13 — and the limited ways of assuaging suffering. Most of all, I think, it is about the solace to be derived from reading and writing, even while living in an abyss. Lin quotes the poet Philip Larkin's wonderful line, 'Where can we live but days?' To which I would add: Where can we think about life in all its unforetold horror and moments of great happiness but in books? And so we have this disturbing, inconsolable tribute, a memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.
New York Times
16-05-2025
- New York Times
‘I Don't Ever Want to Be Free From the Pain of Missing My Children'
When four police officers arrived at Yiyun Li's home in Princeton, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon last February, she didn't wait for instructions to sit down. As soon as the detective spoke — 'There is no good way to say this' — she sank into a chair in her living room, gesturing for her husband to join her. Li already sensed the devastating news they had come to deliver, even though she couldn't fathom it. The detective confirmed the worst. Her son James, a freshman at Princeton University, had died, struck by a train near the campus. The policemen said they were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death and avoided calling it a suicide. But Li and her husband knew it wasn't an accident — that James had chosen to end his life, in the same way his older brother had. A little more than six years earlier, James's brother Vincent died by suicide at age 16, also killed by an oncoming train nearby. That night in 2017, Li had arrived home to find two detectives waiting for her. The police suggested she sit down before they told her about Vincent, which is why she did so instinctively when they came to deliver the news about James. After the officers left, Li and her husband, Dapeng Li, sat in their living room, stunned. She felt like time was collapsing around her, as though she was stuck in an eternal present. The detective's statement — 'There is no good way to say this' — struck Li, an acclaimed novelist, as both a cliché and undeniably true. No words could capture the devastation she felt, losing both of her sons. Shattering, wrenching, aching: Words that came close felt meaningless. But Li knew that words were the only way to anchor her thoughts to reality. Three months after James's death, Li started writing 'Things in Nature Merely Grow,' a memoir about James, Vincent and how their lives and deaths intertwined. In direct and unsparing reflections, Li confronts not only the loss of her children but the limits of language, as she tries to convey anguish that defies description. The closest she can come to relaying her loss is to say she lives in an abyss, a murky place where no light can penetrate. 'All the words that have come to me: Many of them fall short; some are kept because they are needed to hold a place for James,' she writes. 'Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.' In some ways, Li's memoir is a radical rebuke of the conventions surrounding grieving. Early on, she warns those who expect a narrative of healing or solace to stop reading: This is not a story about overcoming loss or moving on. 'I don't ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children,' Li told me when we met on a sunny day in April at her home near the university, where she teaches creative writing. 'This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don't want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that's something bad, it's an illness or affliction.' Li was at home with her husband, a software engineer, and their dog Quintus, a white cockapoo with cloudy cataract-filled eyes, who bounded into the living room, still exuberant at 13. Quintus joined the family when the boys were 7 and 10; Vincent chose his name, Latin for 'fifth,' because he was the fifth family member. Li made me a cup of green tea and led me to the sunny sitting room off her garden, where she spends endless hours tending to plants and flowers. She had just planted some Japanese anemones that wouldn't bloom until the fall, and the yard teemed with vibrant daffodils, hyacinths and tulips. With a hint of pride, Li said she had planted 1,600 bulbs and was pleased that around half of them had sprouted. She fretted about the fate of hatchlings in a wren's nest nestled low in a rose bush. 'You just worry about those little birds,' she said. Li, who was born in Beijing in 1972, has a round, youthful face and speaks softly and deliberately. Though she comes across as serious and cerebral at first, she frequently broke into smiles and laughter. She joked about what a bad swimmer and mediocre piano player she is, and gently mocked people she calls 'silver liners,' well meaning acquaintances and strangers who have tried to assure her there's life beyond grief. 'People always say, you're going to overcome this,' she said. 'No, I'm not.' Li told me she often senses that her circumstances make people uncomfortable, especially other parents. She's also keenly aware that her easy, quiet demeanor and her way of coping by sticking to her schedule — she went straight back to teaching and writing in the days after the deaths of her children — fails to match most people's assumptions about the devastating aftermath of losing a child. 'People expect a grieving mother to behave a certain way, and I never think I can live according to other people's narrative,' she said. 'There is the expectation you will open yourself up, show your vulnerability, show your progress, all these things I don't do.' What's perhaps most surprising about talking to Li is witnessing her ability to exist in two realities that seem incompatible: one where she's living in a desolate state she calls the abyss, and another where she finds fulfillment, amusement and even joy in her work, her friendships and her marriage, in little moments and memories. 'To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you're thinking about,' she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid. Vincent and James remain a tangible presence throughout Li's quiet, spacious home. The walls of her light-filled office off the living room are lined with Vincent's bright, whimsical artwork. Above the mantel is a large painting he made as a young boy, of a child standing in a field with three brown barns and an emerald green pond, against a golden sky. She discovered it after his death, and figured he hid it in a closet because he misspelled his name in his signature. Elsewhere around the house are family photos, school portraits and knickknacks that reflect the boys' quirks and obsessions. She keeps James's collection of pocket watches, the origami animals he folded and the stuffed lamb, named Marmalade, that he got during a vacation to Ireland. She has Vincent's collection of 47 stuffed penguins. Li and her husband have held onto all of their sons' possessions, among them items that were returned by the police — Vincent's phone, fractured at the corner, and James's backpack, which held a pencil that had snapped in half. Even mundane objects have become treasures. James's retainers are in a box on his desk; Vincent's are on his shelf. 'I cannot do anything about them,' Li said of her sons' belongings. 'It's quite painful even to move an object. We have our human limits.' When James was born in 2005, Li's literary career was taking off. She had abandoned a Ph.D. in immunology to pursue writing, and after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she'd published some short stories. In 2005, she released her debut story collection, 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.' She followed with highly praised novels like 'Kinder than Solitude' and 'The Vagrants,' which explored the oppression and paranoia of life in Communist China, and went on to accumulate a string of prestigious awards, including a Whiting Award and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Even as she won accolades for her work and had a fulfilling home life with two bright, curious children, Li fought the pull of depression. During a breakdown in 2012, she felt herself 'slipping into unreality' and attempted suicide twice, a bewildering experience she describes in her memoir, 'Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.' She has wondered if her near suicide influenced Vincent, and how Vincent's death influenced James, but she refuses to dwell on those questions; the only people who could answer them are gone. In a devastating coincidence, Li was working on her novel, 'Must I Go,' which centers on a woman who lost a daughter to suicide, when Vincent took his life in September 2017. After Vincent's death, Li immediately began writing down imagined conversations with her son, telling him about the cheesecake she baked, her clumsy attempt to knit a scarf from the yellow yarn he left behind. The dialogue became Li's novel 'Where Reasons End,' a spare, intimate conversation between a mother and her brilliant, funny, eccentric son who has died by suicide and speaks to her from a vague afterlife. Vincent's voice came so readily, it felt like he was speaking to her, Li said. 'I wanted to have him around for a little bit,' Li said. But after James died, Li found it impossible to conjure him at first. Unlike Vincent, who was artistic, expressive and outgoing, James was introverted, governed by logic rather than feelings. Li felt any attempt to capture James in writing was doomed to be 'a partial failure,' she said. Still, she decided she would rather fail than not try. 'I had all these thoughts after James died, but those thoughts are nothing unless I think them through in writing,' Li said. It took her several months before she found the right language to write about him, but once she started, the words came quickly. 'By the time I started writing, I knew it was going to come out all right,' she said, then quickly corrected herself with a quiet laugh that caught in her throat. 'I keep saying all right, as though everything is going to be all right, nothing is all right.' Vincent's death was shocking, but not entirely unexpected. Even as a young child, he was prone to depression and despair. His fourth grade teacher sent a concerned email to Li about poems he wrote, painful verses reflecting on life and death. A therapist treating him warned Li that he might act on his suicidal thoughts and told her she should be prepared. There were no similar warning signs from James, who was also in therapy and came across as stoic and resilient, and didn't exhibit his brother's emotional extremes or crippling perfectionism. James loved philosophy, linguistics and science. He sometimes stunned his family as a young child, when he would offhandedly explain mysterious quantum particles or the behavior of obscure deep sea invertebrates at the dinner table. He excelled at languages — he studied Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian and Russian — but often kept his thoughts to himself. In kindergarten, James came home one day wearing a sign he'd written that said, 'IM NOt TaLKING Becuase I DON't WaNT TO!' Sometimes Li wonders if she failed to notice a downward spiral because James was so self-contained. A few weeks before his death, James told his mother that he was reading 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' by the French philosopher Albert Camus, which opens with the question of whether life is worth living. Li recalled a conversation she and James had around that time, when she told him that most people endure the monotonous or painful parts of life for moments of pure joy. The last time Li and her husband saw James, when they dropped him off at his dorm after dinner the weekend before he died, Li asked what he was reading. James said that he was rereading 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' Looking back, Li wonders if she sensed something then. But she doesn't allow herself to dwell on whether his death could have been prevented, a trap she fell into when Vincent died, she said. 'When people die from suicide, family who are left behind usually ask, what if? Why?' Li said. 'This time I thought, we don't want to start with those questions, we want to start somewhere else, which was just to accept this is a fact. This was his decision, he died, and there was a reason for him to make this decision.' One thought kept resurfacing: Li was certain that James trusted in his parents' ability to survive his death. That unshakable certainty is one of the things that keeps Li grounded and able to go on living. 'He was aware that we would endure this, because we endured it once,' she said. 'I thought, we must respect his understanding and we must respect his choice.' Experiencing a devastating loss for a second time, Li knew she needed to ground herself in routine, she said. She knew she needed to sleep, stay hydrated, get exercise every day, and to stick to her schedule, continuing with her lap swimming, her weekly piano lessons, her classes at Princeton. She threw herself back into writing, which she does for two or three hours every morning, and recently finished a draft of a new book, a historical novel about a group of musicians, set in early-19th-century Europe. Li and her husband have continued to travel, something they loved to do with the boys, and to celebrate their sons' birthdays with homemade cakes. 'There's only one person who knows how I feel — it's him,' Li said of Dapeng, who prefers to remain private and doesn't give interviews. Li has found support from her closest friends, among them the writers Elizabeth McCracken and Mona Simpson, who organized meals for her and her husband for several months, and the editor Brigid Hughes, who came to stay with Li the weekend after James died and helped with the task of alerting Li's friends and colleagues. A friend later told Hughes that she couldn't make sense of the message at first, and thought a draft of an old email about Vincent's death had been sent by accident. That weekend, Li asked Hughes a painful question: Wasn't she the worst mother in the world? Hughes quickly replied that they both knew the question was outlandish. One thing Li doesn't doubt is the depth of her love for her sons, who she always encouraged to be fully themselves. She's tried to extend that acceptance to not only their lives but their deaths. 'As their mother, I always respected them and tried very hard to understand them,' she said. While writing 'Things in Nature Merely Grow,' Li had doubts about whether she should finish it. At one point, she asked McCracken to read an early draft and tell her if it was worth publishing. McCracken assured her it was. 'I was astonished by what a work of clear thinking it was, about things that seem impossible to think about,' McCracken said. 'To have lost two astonishing children, it's a life sentence.' Sitting in her sunroom, Li told me that there's something she wishes she'd known earlier in her life, so that she could have shared it with her children: that it's possible 'to suffer better,' to be both sad and happy. It's a place she's arrived at in recent months. When she's gardening, when she's reading, or writing, or listening to music, or taking a walk in the woods with her husband, she feels happy, she said. 'We're sad, we're very sad, but we're not unhappy,' she said. 'So long as we live, we carry our love for the children, even though they're not here.' If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to for a list of additional resources.
Zawya
16-02-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Adaverse Saudi Arabia partners with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Adaverse announced a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. This partnership aims to accelerate the development of Web 3 technologies and promote innovation in blockchains in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Driving Innovation in Web3 Technologies This collaboration leverages the Ministry's leadership in national digital transformation and Adaverse's expertise in blockchain investments and technology infrastructure. It aims to equip local talent with access to the latest global advancements in this field. In this regard, Vincent Li, CEO of Adaverse Saudi Arabia, stated: "We take pride in contributing to Saudi Arabia's digital transformation by sharing our global expertise and resources. This partnership will help build a strong Web3 community in the Kingdom and drive innovation in blockchain technology." Key initiatives under this partnership include launching training and awareness programs to equip local talent with Web3 and blockchain skills, alongside organizing community meetups and hackathons to foster innovation and a dynamic tech ecosystem. Additionally, the initiatives focus on providing access to global expertise and cutting-edge technologies to support the Kingdom's tech ecosystem growth, as well as establishing startup accelerators to support entrepreneurs and emerging companies in the Web3 sector. This partnership marks a significant step toward positioning Saudi Arabia as a leading regional digital hub for future technologies and strengthening its capabilities in Web3 and blockchain.
