Book: Things in Nature Merely Grow (Yiyun Li)
Things in Nature reads more like a therapeutic exercise than a polished work of art. Reading it feels almost voyeuristic, commenting on it presumptuous. Who am I to pass judgment on a family I know naught about, except that their life has “entered the realm of Greek tragedies”? What kind of monster must I be to psychoanalyze “a mother who can no longer mother,” or to disapprove of her choices? When the subject matter is this hefty, is it too flippant to comment on the writing? (I will anyway, albeit briefly: as usual, Yiyun Li’s prose thrums with a sense of rhythm that I love. She manages to bring the judicious brevity of good Chinese writing into English).
There are contradictions in Things in Nature that I struggle to understand. Most notably, it was gestated as “the book for James”: James, who “resisted drawing any attention to himself,” who “would prefer not to.” How would he have felt about the book’s publication? About snippets from his life being aired for the world to see, and his mother’s subsequent acceptance of the very public Pulitzer? In any case, the book for James ultimately became a book for the living: “for Dapeng,” according to the dedication note, and certainly for Yiyun Li herself as well.
The book for Vincent, Where Reasons End, is still shielded by a thin veneer of fiction. It is sad, but the sadness there is tinged with whimsy and playfulness. It centers Vincent and feels like a celebration of him. By contrast, Things in Nature is a much tougher, heavier read. Yiyun Li couldn’t reach James emotionally or mentally during his brief sojourn on earth, and so the memoir centers the mother’s experience instead. It offers a glimpse into the immediate aftermath of tragedy: the numbness, the anger (despite Li’s claim of detachment from it), the effort of going on with life, the loneliness at the bottom of the abyss, the way tears come out when one least expects them. Some of these experiences are articulated so cogently, and devastating in their naked simplicity.
And yet the omissions are also clamoring to be heard. In my limited experience, guilt has always been a prominent thread in grief, and its absence is the elephant in Yiyun Li’s garden. Guilt surfaces briefly but poignantly in Where Reasons End (“Is that how a mother loses a child? Is that how any person loses any person?”). In Things in Nature, it remains essentially unexpressed and unexamined. Is this someone in extreme pain compartmentalizing one part of the tragedy in order to make it survivable? Or is it wilful ignorance, part of a long-established pattern? Li’s psychologist told her to not feel obliged to show her pain to the world. Indeed, and neither does she owe the world any expression of guilt. Yet this book is not a private therapeutic exercise; it is published, and now extremely public. When it is replete with examples of her trying to do right by her children (lunchbox notes, love yous, three different meals for a family of four, radical respect — and I’m sure she did), but devoid of any personal failings, it can come across as defensive.
I have many more questions about the book’s contradictions and omissions, but I’d rather keep them to myself and my friends. Above all, I can’t imagine how much pain the children and their parents endured. Simply reading the book made my chest tighten.