Yiyun Li, the Chinese-born American novelist and short-story writer, won a Pulitzer Prize this year for Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir about the suicides of her two teenage sons, Vincent and James, seven years apart. In October, the author will visit Notre Dame for a public reading and on-stage discussion of her work organized by the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies as part of its distinguished speaker series, coinciding with the launch of her new novel, Music Against the Night.
I first encountered Li’s name a few years ago. Recently, social media led me to excerpts from interviews with her on Chinese podcasts. In anticipation of her campus visit, I wanted to read her work and learn more about her.
In 1996, Li came to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa, but she soon found herself drawn to writing and enrolled in the university’s prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut book, the short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, was published in 2005, the year her younger son, James, was born.
Finishing that collection, I turned to Wednesday’s Child, her third collection of stories, a Pulitzer finalist for fiction, published in 2023 when Li was 50. By then, Li had also published five novels and a memoir and had taught creative writing at Princeton University since 2017, the year she lost her older son, Vincent, at age 16.
Often featuring American or Chinese immigrant women as protagonists, the stories in Wednesday’s Child explore the lives of contemporary women through themes such as motherhood and loss. The title story begins with Rosalie, an American woman traveling alone in Amsterdam after the suicide of her teenage daughter. Li distills the uncertainty of parenthood thus: “Parenting is a trial. The lucky ones were still making a case for themselves, with cautious or blind optimism. Rosalie and Dan had received their verdict.”
The theme of raising a child is also present in “Hello, Goodbye,” where a woman reflects: “What can parents do for children? Things go well for a child, or things don’t go well. We know it’s really just luck.”
Throughout the collection, women’s encounters with children in different circumstances become catalysts for introspection. Observing an intelligent girl, one woman imagines that being her mother would be like being nothing more than “a frog trapped in a pot of water.” A child who dies by suicide leaves a mother questioning the reasons for the child’s death and her relationship with her own mother.
Li structures several stories are around the contrasting lives of two women. In “Such Common Life,” both protagonists have devoted themselves to work, yet their lives unfold differently. Dr. Ditmus lives alone until old age makes independent living impossible, while Ida, an immigrant, spends decades raising children who later prosper in America. Ditmus occasionally imagines the life she might have lived. Li writes, “One’s way of living determines one’s way of dying.”
“A Sheltered Woman” pairs Auntie Mei, a live-in nanny who cares for newborns during their first month before moving on, with Chanel, a young mother. Auntie Mei has chosen to forsake human attachment throughout her career. She “wondered if knowing someone — a friend, an enemy — was like never letting that person out of one’s sight. Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else’s thought.” Yet when Chanel refuses to care for her baby, Auntie Mei struggles between loving the child and suppressing her feelings.
While reading “On the Street Where You Live,” which portrays a mother raising a child with special needs, I was reminded of “After a Life” from A Thousand Years. In the earlier story, Mr. and Mrs. Su endure an isolated existence in a small apartment, bound by the need to keep their daughter, Beibei, hidden behind a thick curtain. Born with severe physical and mental disabilities, Beibei consumes her parents’ daily lives with her unpredictable needs, leaving them ashamed of wishing for her death. Mr. Su’s suggestion that they have another child only deepens the couple’s divide, as his wife sees it as his desire to escape their life in search of a more “normal” family. In the latter story, Li shifts her focus to the perspective of a woman who imagines herself as “a mother who would rearrange the world” for her autistic child.
Through her sharp, often detached style, Li raises hard questions about life. Her characters endure pain and grief, yet they continue living with unresolved emotions and uncertainty. “What’s the point of a lesson? There’s no makeup exam when you fail something in life,” one says in “A Sheltered Woman.” Elsewhere, another asks, “You think you have a problem with postpartum depression? Think of the goldfish, living one day in a paradise pond and the next day going to Heaven in the stomach of a passing egret.”
As I read the stories, I became immersed in the characters’ lives and the truths they uncovered. The line, “One’s way of living determines one’s way of dying,” lingers in my thoughts, reminding me to live more intentionally.
Compared with her debut collection, Wednesday’s Child relies less on dramatic plots and explores darker themes, with death haunting many of the stories. Whereas her debut spans China and America by following Chinese citizens and immigrants whose lives are shaped by modern Chinese history, Wednesday’s Child mainly focuses on the experiences of modern women living in America.
The collection concludes with “All Will Be Well,” told from the first-person perspective of a writing professor and mother whose 16-year-old son has died — a detail that naturally invites readers to draw connections with Li’s lived experience. The story first appeared in 2019, the year Li wrote Where Reasons End, a meditative novel featuring an imaginary conversation between a mother and her teenage son, who has died from suicide. Reflecting on significant people in her life whom she lost while writing the Wednesday’s Child collection, including her son Vincent and her father, she poignantly writes: “They live among these pages now.”
Chloe Li is a freelance writer, pianist, and adjunct assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame.