Read: 2026-02-24
Recommend: 10/10
Courage is a rare quality, yet it is deeply evident in Yiyun Li’s life. She possesses the remarkable ability to confront reality exactly as it is, rather than how she wishes it to be. In this book, Li writes candidly not only about the tragic loss of her two children to suicide but also about surviving a difficult childhood with a “mad” mother.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies. Writing this book is a way to separate myself from that strange realm while simultaneously settling myself permanently into that realm.
But that thought of having nowhere to go, just as the statement that no one would surprise me after Vincent died, was an expression of hyperbole, which is unavoidable in anguish: feelings, unexamined, present themselves as thoughts; even, facts.
Death, particularly suicide, cannot be softened or sugarcoated. After Vincent died, a couple of mothers asked me if they could tell their children—Vincent’s peers—that he had died in an accident. That they preferred to lie to their children, even though the truth would surely reach those children through their friends, baffled me. I explained to the mothers that their proposal seemed to me a disrespect of their own children and a violation of Vincent’s memory. Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.
I’ve in the past quoted Montaigne: “To philosophize is to learn to die.” And I now know there are other variations: To philosophize is to learn to live with deaths. To philosophize is to learn to live with those deaths until one dies. To philosophize is what one can do while living in an abyss—not lost, but found.
I explained to him that it was natural that we should worry that a pink dress might lead to bullying by his schoolmates. Vincent laughed off my concern, and said if there were idiots who dared tease him, there was all the more point in wearing pink. “Just so I can be in their face,” he said. I was full of admiration for Vincent. I felt unease, too. We parents could only do so much for our children, to raise them to be bold and free, but the world outside this bubble we called our family was often not a kind place.
Another mother, plagued by postpartum depression, leaped out of the building with her newborn child. These stories in the news tend to be called tragedies, or senseless tragedies, but only a careless writer, possibly a careless writer who has never been a parent, would use those words so unthinkingly. Senseless? There is always some sense in a parent’s intuitions. The real tragedy is not death itself, but a mother’s difficulty in knowing when to trust her intuitions and when to let them go.
My most humiliating writing experience took place in fourth grade. For a school writing contest, instead of turning in a patriotic essay praising the glory and beauty of our mother China, I wrote a piece decrying the hypocrisy of such contests, and then elaborating on the ugliness of life a child experienced while being forced to lie about it—“ugliness” was the word I used, more than once in that essay. The acts of writing the essay and entering it in the contest were not done out of courage—I wasn’t brave; rather, I was ten, and I was feeling suicidal despair.
It’s been my experience, both as a child and as a parent, that adults—at least those specializing in arrogance and ignorance, and those who easily forget or else write off their own childhood memories—are extremely good at underestimating children. A ten-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness. Only, most ten-year-olds have not found the language to articulate their feelings, and very few of them have the ability to find a way out of that all-encompassing bleakness unaided.
It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives. (Love does not guarantee understanding or respect. I cannot challenge my mother’s claim that she’s loved me more than she’s loved anyone—more than she’s loved my sister and my father, but perhaps not more than she’s loved herself. “You love your children more than you love me” was a complaint she made when my children were young. Two years after Vincent died, she informed me that there was some karma in my losing a child: I had failed to return her love for me.)
That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”
I don’t swear, I don’t scream out in pain, I don’t smash plates or bowls, I don’t bang doors or punch walls. I have always known that I can keep my body still and my mind clear, a skill that I must have mastered from being the daughter of my mother, who had done all the screaming and banging and crying and swearing when I was growing up. A few days after James died, I remembered once again my mother’s wrath when she whipped my shoulders and back with a metal pencil box or a broomstick, not because I had done anything unforgivable, but because she was angry. The longer she beat me, the angrier she became, because I was neither crying nor trying to escape her beating. “I just don’t believe I can’t make you cry,” she would swear, hitting out of a blind rage. I would sit in the chair, wooden-faced and dry-eyed, knowing that other than exhausting herself, there was nothing she could do to claim victory over me. Life has stunned me, but I prefer not to give life the pleasure of boasting that it has defeated me, just as I did not give my mother the satisfaction of knowing that her beating could break me and bring tears to my eyes.
Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population. But sometimes children die before their parents. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options: they either live or follow their children down to Hades. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.
Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because that’s the only way for them to go on loving their children, whose deaths easily turn them into a news story one day and gossip the next day, and then, eventually, statistics. Children die, and parents go on living, except they go on living in a different way than they did before. It’s like living with “a new knowledge of reality,” I wrote to my friend Deborah a couple of weeks after James’s death, quoting the last line of the last poem of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, titled “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.”
The saddest and yet the most irrefutable truth: when you lose a second child, you have already learned a few things about losing a child from your previous experience. The second time around I knew neither to battle life nor to battle death: in both endeavors, there would be unlimited exhaustion and very little to gain. If death is one reality and life is another, I would rather they were like two hands placed next to each other—barely touching or with fingers intertwined. The two hands are not arm wrestling; they cannot beat or dominate each other.
The worries, the frustrations, the joys, the surprises—parents rarely know enough about parenting, and yet children, somehow, offer parents the assistance they need; they help themselves grow up. The death of a child is a newborn, too. The death of a child is a newborn that does not grow or change. And those children, gone from the world, are no longer able to help their parents.
I did not stop writing or take time off from teaching when Vincent died. Writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry—all these activities are time-bound, and they do not compete with my children, who are timeless now. There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life. And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual. I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.
After James died, someone sent me a picture of spring flowers and touted “earth’s regenerative power.” That kind of language, like the encouragement from people who cheerfully predicted that I would soon reach “the end of the tunnel,” makes me conscious of how people fall into the trap of using clichés to express care. Clichés are not merely flabby words used to express unimaginative thoughts; rather, clichés corrode the mind. Flabby language begetting flabby thinking seems a more alarming prospect than the opposite, flabby thinking finding refuge in flabby language. My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed. They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature.
In London the same old joke came back; it was while queuing in the Science Museum that James, aged six, invented the “most insulting insult” that made Vincent bend over with laughter: “Mommy, you’re so dense that if we put you next to a black hole, you would not be sucked in by the black hole, but the black hole would be sucked into you.” Little did James know, and little did I know, that someday I would live with a black hole inside me, the precise shape of my two children.
To the people who asked me how many children we had, I reproduced the psychologist’s words verbatim: “We had two children, but lost one to suicide. I hope you understand that I’m not ready to discuss it.” People tended to retreat to a respectful distance, nodding with understanding or confusion—who could tell.
The psychologist, who had taught me how to answer the question about how many children I had, also told me an important thing when I had an interview with her before sending James to see her. “Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.”
How could you come to a piano lesson right after your child died? I don’t remember what answer I gave Cristina, but it doesn’t matter. The only answer, to many similar questions, is the same: What else can I do but to go on with the things I can do, to keep my body nourished and active and my mind occupied and sharp?
People sometimes say of those who’ve attempted suicide or succeeded that they are selfish, or feebleminded, or attention seeking. People feel hurt, are offended and angry, perhaps out of fear or incomprehension, or perhaps because for once they cannot claim the center of someone else’s story: suicide is among the most absolute and exclusive actions in life. (My mother said to me about my attempt: “Why did you do that to me?”) Those who’ve attempted suicide or succeeded in suicide are not necessarily eager to kill themselves; rather, the pain can be such that nothing short of wiping out their physical existence can end their suffering. People don’t call those with cancer or other illnesses selfish or feebleminded or attention seeking, but in my experience, people tend to be harsh and critical of those who suffer from suicidal depression or other mental illnesses. Is it a sense of superiority that makes people insensitive, or, more precisely, a deep sense of fear—where you are is where I don’t want to be, so I had better condemn you first to ensure my safety.
Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn’t always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it. The gap between worth doing and being able to do is where aspiration dwells for the young and decline lies in wait for the old.
I know suffering, and I have written well about suffering, but I also know that one’s relationship with one’s suffering can change. For Vincent, I don’t think life would ever have become easier. However, I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering and inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists.
True compassion takes courage.
People sometimes feel awkward or apprehensive around grieving parents, particularly if the children died from suicide, perhaps infinitely so when a family lost two children to suicide. I wish people had the honesty and courage to say, I’m not capable of handling this difficult situation, or, I’m uncomfortable because I don’t know what to say, rather than telling themselves that they are absenting themselves out of respect for the bereaved parents. The notes and letters coming in after both my children’s deaths: the most comforting ones were those that expressed shock, confusion, helplessness, and the pain of not having the right words. All those feelings were close to ours. I cannot think of a more consoling connection I felt after both boys’ deaths, than when I read those notes. Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.
Inevitably there were people who wrote that they understood our pain because, though they hadn’t lost a child or they didn’t have children, they had lost a parent or a beloved pet. Kindhearted and well-intentioned people: don’t make those comparisons. These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic. It’s all right not to understand the situation—neither do the parents! And it’s more than all right to acknowledge that you cannot find the right words—I, a professional who has worked with words for twenty years, can’t either. It’s not quite all right when you make yourself the center of the message: no need to remember your own losses, and no need to provide advice about how to overcome grief from your own triumphant experience.
To people who have written to offer your prayers, your goodwill, and the sorrow you have felt on my behalf: allow me to thank you here. But strangers, more so than friends, sometimes have unrealistic expectations. People wrote to offer friendship, leaving their phone numbers for me to call, some venturing to tell me that their friendship was what I needed at this difficult time. To those who have written with your numbers and your wish to talk to me on the phone about my life: it was kind of you to offer, but friendship takes years to cultivate, and deep, mutual understanding, and a bereaved mother’s priority is not to start a friendship from scratch. (My husband, as logical as James was, did point out that such offers also reflected the fact that I am a public figure. No doubt there are people in worse situations than I, who don’t get these zealous offers from strangers.)
For the stranger who wrote to say your life was more tragic than mine, who asked me to call you—“at your earliest convenience”—so that you could tell me your story as an inspiration for my writing: I’m sorry to hear that you have experienced tragedies in your life, and I’m afraid that I won’t make the call. And for those kindhearted people who were keen to offer silver linings on religious, spiritual, and other grounds: I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Sometimes there is no silver lining in life. Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline. Grief cheapened by cliché, by wishful thinking, and by self-centeredness of various kinds—this is another reason I never use the words “grief” or “grieving” when I think about my children. “Grief” is a word used often in those emails sent to me.
We like to set our hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle or pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed. Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.
I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.
I’ve known people—in China and in America—who treasure their malevolence, and who revel in the pain they inflict on others. Whether they do this out of profound unhappiness or a profound delusion of power (or both) I do not know; what I do know is that they cannot be helped, and they cannot help themselves.
Children die, and parents go on living in an abyss, but that, I now know, is not the worst thing. Beyond that abyss is yet another abyss, and one has to rely on one’s thinking to stay in the more meaningful abyss. People can hurt only our feelings, not our thinking—not unless we let go of the independence of our minds. And people who intentionally or unintentionally hurt other people: I have come to the conclusion that they cannot help themselves, and they cannot be helped. This is only an acknowledgment, and it is not understanding or forgiveness, neither of which I will give.
When we were growing up, my mother dictated that my sister and I must serve as her targets anytime she felt angry. And she seemed to be full of unpredictable rage in those years; any little thing could lead to an explosion. I once got beaten after I received high scores on a school exam, and the reason she supplied for this beating was that I looked too smug for her liking when I reported the news.
A question my mother liked to ask us when we were young: do you want a dead mother or a mad mother? According to her, a mad mother would be better than a dead mother. I was never asked what I thought. What would a mad mother do to me? Beat me, berate me, tell me that I was responsible for her bad mood and, especially, that I was responsible for robbing her of her youth. All because of you, she would scream at me, because I had to give birth to you I’m now growing old. Even at seven I knew her logic was horrendously flawed. What would a dead mother do? Certainly not prophesy that I would be her murderer. When I was a teenager, I was told repeatedly by my father that because my mother loved only me, it was my responsibility to maintain the peace in the family by keeping her happy. I remember on a particularly difficult day—my sister and I were both teenagers then—my sister said to me in a dark despair: “She’s gone mad. I think she’s gone mad for real this time. Remember, she’s your responsibility. You have to keep her alive and happy.” Nobody knew that I had always thought a dead mother would be better than a mad mother. That thought, too, was on my mind when I felt too bleak to live: it’s not my children’s job to keep me alive; in fact, it’s my job to protect them from myself, if I cannot save my sanity.
I have shared very little about my past with my children—I did not want to be one of those mothers who feel compelled to take center stage in their children’s lives.
Children of abusive parents might grow into rebels, or they might become escape artists. I have never been an overt rebel, but I have honed my craft as an escape artist all my life. “That need only children of abusive parents know,” I said to my husband. “The need to keep one thing to yourself and making sure no one can take it away from you. You have it, I have it, but our children didn’t have it. If they had had that, they might not have chosen suicide.” “But how much more they’d have suffered,” my husband said. “And we didn’t want them to suffer.” “No,” I agreed. And yet they still suffered. Only, not under tyrannical parents. We had spun them cocoons and fortified them. And in the end, our endeavors did not keep our children alive. They became escape artists, too.
Those who have learned swimming in their childhood tend to swim unthinkingly. For some people, the same must be true in life; for them living is a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children.
That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive—this is a fact that eschews any adjective. Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.