With the title of her new short story collection, the first since 2010’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li offers us a typically finespun hint at what we’re in for. The stories in Wednesday’s Child take as their subject the state of motherhood: its weight and its potency; the questions it raises, and the sacrifices and sublimations it exacts.
But more importantly, these haunting, harrowing tales are – without exception, and whether their characters are prepared to acknowledge it or not – full to the brim with woe. In Li’s telling, it is loss – of self, of love, of youth; most agonisingly of all, of children – that is motherhood’s defining characteristic, and grief for these losses quietly but entirely saturates the collection.
“Grief? What is grief?” asks Jiayu, the bereaved mother in When We Were Happy We Had Different Names, as she lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. The story is one of several that deal with the aftermath of the death, by suicide, of a child. In her acknowledgments, Li says that, in the 14 years of the book’s creation, she herself lost a number of people, including her son, Vincent. Those people, she tells us, “live among these pages now”. The unwieldiness of such a grief, the baffling, muffling, all-encompassing vastness of it, presents a logistical challenge to a short-story writer. How to compress something so prodigious into the form’s narrow confines?
Li’s response to that challenge sees her effect a delicate but wholesale inversion of our ideas of what stories are made of. Rather than focusing on the significant, storylike event – the moment, as it were, of the bomb going off – these tales dwell instead on the unremarkable details of the lives people are obliged to go on living afterwards, amid the wreckage. Jiayu’s son, Evan, dies off stage, in circumstances that are only hinted at – “‘I didn’t see it coming, did you?’ ‘No, I thought it was adolescence.’”
Rather than attempting to use the story to contain the immensity of his death, Li invites us instead to experience, alongside Jiayu, the smallness of life without him. With her, we wander through days in which “she cleaned the house tirelessly, or chopped onions until they became a translucent puddle”. By her side, we endure the enervation that sees her abandon her car in front of the garage door, because she lacks the will “to push the button to open it”. She herself likens this affectless half-state to “her first transistor radio”, which stayed in tune “for no more than a few minutes before it began to … drift into static”.
In Let Mothers Doubt, Narantuyaa, who lost the brother she “brought up more than her parents had” at the age of “twenty-two years and one month”, is able to reflect on his death only obliquely, through the prism of a listless affair with a married man whose sole purpose, for her, is that of “placeholder”.
In the collection’s title story, the suicide of the central character’s 15-year-old daughter surfaces in a series of glancing reflections over the course of a stuttering train journey. Like the sun, these losses are too big and bright to look at directly; their proportions can only be understood by the shadows that they cast. It is testament to Li’s skill that she makes the shadows of those days, the static of lives which the owners themselves aren’t convinced are worth living, both intelligible and deeply, terribly moving.
“The world was not new and offered little evidence that it would ever be new again,” reflects Jiayu. “Perhaps grief was the recognition of having run out of illusions.”
The women (and it is always women) at the heart of Li’s stories are united not just by their losses, but by the way in which those losses appear to have triggered, in them, a sort of dawning hopelessness: a creeping realisation that control is an illusion; that our lives are a series of accidents, or unconsidered choices; and that comfort, if it exists, is vanishingly hard to find.
If there’s hope to be taken from these bruising, beautiful tales, it’s in the fact that, despite all of this, the protagonists choose to carry on: to continue with their daily lives; to put up the Christmas trees and hang the stockings, as they always had done. For if the children of this collection are Wednesday’s children – full of woe, and choosing, often, to remove themselves entirely from the world in order to escape it – their mothers are, to a woman, Thursday’s children: in it for the long haul, condemned to keep going, because motherhood, once embarked upon, cannot be forsaken, no matter what is lost.
As Jiayu muses: “‘Always’ was an untrustworthy word. Still, what could one do but abide by the rule of ‘always’? In a fallible life, it was a path no better or worse than any other.”
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li is published by 4th Estate (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
