A year ago Yiyun Li lost James, her second child, to suicide. Earlier, in 2017, Yiyun’s elder child, Vincent, had also killed himself. In the weeks that followed James’s death, Yiyun would sometimes post on Instagram pictures of flowers in her garden and her captions simply read “Things in nature merely grow.” She has now written a book for James and given it that same perfect title. I finished reading an advance copy of the book today. Yiyun is clear-eyed, her gaze direct and unflinching, and her thinking unfailingly logical and without self-pity. The result is that this book, so much in touch with devastating sorrow, is also full of light. I found the experience of reading the book clarifying. Because Yiyun has looked with such attention at parents and children—and the language we use to frame their lives and deaths—the truths and lies we tell ourselves come into sharper focus.
This is not a review. The book will not be released until May. I just want to quickly note down what I have been thinking about over the last few days. Just the other day I was teaching Yiyun’s short-story “All Will Be Well.” A writer who teaches on a college campus is at a salon listening to a story being narrated by Lily, the woman cutting her hair. Lily wants the writer to make something out of the story she has been telling over our narrator’s several visits to the salon. (“Maybe you can write my story, and then someone will make a movie from it.”) The writer sitting in the salon chair isn’t enthusiastic about what is being proposed by Lily. And then, in the story’s remarkable ending, we get a sense of why:
When teaching my class, I didn’t allude to anything autobiographical implied in the story; instead, I tried to make the students see how our narrator, by bringing other parts of herself to the narrative, that of a teacher and even more of a parent, had deepened our apprehension of Lily’s story about doomed love. I thought of that story when reading Things in Nature Merely Grow. Here, without the framing of fiction, we have a mother’s honest account of love and loss, but what we also get is Yiyun’s portrayal of the brilliant particularity of the boys, their similarities and differences, their truly amazing presence.
In the first social media post that Yiyun had made after James died, she had quoted a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):
This world of dew
is a world of dew
and yet, and yet.
And she had added: ‘One must believe life is extraordinary.’
The haiku doesn’t appear in Things in Nature Merely Grow but I had noted it down in my diary when I read it. I had been struck by the courage and clarity of what Yiyun had written at that time. I remember I had gone looking for the more precise details of Kobayashi Issa’s life: his mother died when he was two; his stepmother was cruel to him and he was forced to leave home; he returned to nurse his father through sickness; when he married at fifty-one, a son was born but died within a month; the same happened to a second child, also a son; his third child, a daughter, was born healthy and lived to her first birthday but then, as a result of having contracted smallpox, she too died. The haiku that Yiyun had quoted is believed to have been written after this child’s death. Issa had further sorrows in store. His wife died while giving birth to a fourth child, a son, who also died in infancy because of a nurse’s mistake. Issa was paralyzed. He remarried but the marriage ended quickly. After he married for the third time, he suffered the fate of seeing his home burn down. He and his wife were forced to live in a storehouse with no windows. The couple had a child, a daughter, who survived into adulthood—but Issa himself had died even before the baby was born.
And yet, and yet. This was the same Issa who wrote bright lines filled with beauty and laughter. This life of wonder and amazement is present also in Things in Nature Merely Grow. In this now and now and now and now, here is another haiku by Issa:
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children
Good Morning! It made my day 🙏🙏🙏
This is so beautiful.