Yiyun Li's deeply moving account of losing her sons to suicide challenges conventional notions of mourning. Instead of framing her experience through grief, she focuses on raw facts, emphasizing the impact of their deaths. Her sons, Vincent and James, are remembered not just for their tragic departures but for their passions and intellectual pursuits. Li, who left China to study immunology, found solace in writing in English. She crafted literature that explores unanswered questions about loss, aiming to articulate the inarticulable and connect with others in their pain, defying societal expectations of how a grieving mother should behave.
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.
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.
Li refuses to use mourning or grieving because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience.
Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to, she writes.
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