Latest news with #YiyunLi
Washington Post
5 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
A mother pays tribute to the sons she lost
'No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of 'I love yous' we can say to them,' writes Yiyun Li in her memoir 'Things in Nature Merely Grow.' I love you is the parent's salutation, three parting words uttered via texts, before leaving on trips, at school drop-offs. An utterance so automatic that few of us, Li included, would give much thought to saying it for the last time. We may know the days are coming when our children will outgrow us, but it is beyond us to consider their permanent departure.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li review – a shattering account of losing two sons
In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use 'mourning' or 'grieving' because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both,' she writes, and words can only 'fall short'. She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. 'Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,' she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the 'abyss' she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane. Language, of course, is vital to this project. Having emigrated from China to the US in 1996 to study immunology at the University of Iowa, Li moved to the creative writing programme and was taught by Marilynne Robinson, among others. After that, her literary ascent was rapid. She received accolades for her nonfiction and novels, including The Vagrants, set in post-Mao China, and her short story collection Wednesday's Child. Choosing to write and publish in English was a 'crucial decision', she wrote. She banished Chinese with determination and now thinks and writes only in English. For Li, linguistic choices are always significant: 'Where else can my mind live but in words?' In the aftermath of Vincent's death, Li published Where Reasons End, a novel that takes the form of an intense, sparring conversation between a mother and son after his death. She wrote it to feel her way to 'unanswerable questions', having found little to console her in the existing literature of grief. But writing to – or for – James is a different matter. 'It will have to be done through thinking,' she concludes, and even then, it will be 'an approximation of understanding'. James, with his gentle smile and understated sense of humour, is depicted as a brilliant, autistic, self-contained, somewhat unreachable person who 'thought hard: deeply, philosophically, and privately'. Months before his death, he reread Albert Camus' play Caligula 'a bit obsessively', and watched English, Spanish and Japanese productions of it online. Now, with hindsight, Li homes in on a particular line: 'Men die; and they are not happy.' She repeats this phrase, considering it a possible key to James's thoughts. Li understands that nobody can know the precise reasons a person chooses suicide but, still, she circles back towards the same thoughts: did James 'back himself into a corner' through his readings of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula? Was the decision he made connected to Vincent's death? Trying to comprehend, Li experiments with painful variants of the refrain: 'Children die, and they are not happy'; 'Children die, and parents go on living'. This cannot be a conventional memoir, but Li takes us back to her childhood, and to her own mother who plays cruel, psychologically damaging tricks on her. Glimpses of the abuse she endured explain why being 'orphaned' from her native language and from China were, in fact, vital acts of self-preservation. The story shifts briefly to Li's own period of suicidal depression, depicted in her 2017 memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and the correlations and questions remain Li tells us is so terribly, 'epically' sad that it can only be conveyed through a restrained and astringent English. The effect does not distance the reader, though; instead, there is an almost unbearable intimacy. Alongside references to Euclidean geometry and Shakespeare's King John are domestic details that remind us that Vincent and James were boys, in a loving family, on the way to becoming young men: Pokémon, socks, pancakes, phone passwords, the family dog Quintus (the fifth one). These fragments of life before, imbued with everyday love, are achingly poignant. Society prefers grieving mothers to act a certain way. Literature, too. 'Those mothers in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies voiced their sorrows at a higher pitch than mine,' Li writes. She is aware that her instinct to use intellect to navigate grief can arouse suspicion, hostility even. Towards the end of the book, Li addresses the treatment she receives from the Chinese media, whose message is, terrifyingly, that 'a traitor deserves to be punished'. She insists that she is not angry, but anger is evident nonetheless. Not at her sons: for them there is love and respect. But towards her mother and China, both epitomising cruelty and shunning. And there is rightful indignation at hurtful and insensitive things people say to the grieving; this book should be read not least to gain an understanding of how to speak to a bereaved person. Instances of thoughtlessness are offset, thankfully, by stories of immense kindness from lifelong friends, such as editor Brigid Hughes, and the writer Elizabeth McCracken. Grieving is not a useful word for Li because it implies an end point, a release from the loss. There is no redemptive moment of healing here; things in nature merely grow, they are not automatically resolved, wounds are not neatly sutured. But growing is life and Li is, and always will be, a mother. Her book is a meditation on living and radical acceptance that has the potential to offer deep solace; comfort from the abyss. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Suzanne Joinson is the author of The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things (Indigo Press). Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
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.
