“All Will Be Well”
by Yiyun Li
from the March 11, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
Yiyun Li is one of my favorites. It brightened my day when I saw that this week’s selection was another of her stories. As the story began, though not much is happening, I knew I was in good hands. Just look at how Li creates a physical space:
Once upon a time, I was addicted to a salon. I never called ahead, and rarely had to wait—not everyone went to Lily’s for a haircut. The old men Lily called uncles sat at a card table, reading newspapers and magazines in Chinese and Vietnamese. The television above the counter was tuned to a channel based in Riverside, and the aunties—related or not related to the uncles—watched cooking shows and teledramas in Mandarin.
Once this is establish, Li goes on to introduce us further to the narrator, a writer, and Lily, the woman who runs the salon, and what this space means for them.
I was the only customer under sixty, and the only one who spoke in English. With others Lily used Vietnamese, Cantonese, or Mandarin. The first time we met, I lied and said that I had been adopted by a couple from Holland when I was a year old and that we moved to America when I was in middle school. Lily forgave me then for not being able to speak one of the languages she preferred. Brought up by foreign devils, she told a nearby auntie in Cantonese. Half foreign, the auntie said; hair still Chinese. Half devil, Lily said; brain not Chinese. Both laughed. I smiled blankly at Lily in the mirror, and she smiled back. What do you do? she asked, and I lied again and said I was a student. She picked up a strand of hair and let it fall. My hair had just begun to show signs of gray. What subject? she asked, and I said I’d gone back to school because I wanted to become a writer. Will you make money being a writer? she asked, and I said not really.
Those are the first two paragraphs of the story, which plunges into the pasts of Lily and our narrator and how they come together in this space, seemingly set apart from the turmoil elsewhere: “Still, the world was full of perils. Some rather real, some rather close.”
I’m still processing what we have here, but I liked it very much. In her interview, Li brings up I.B. Singer’s “The Cafeteria,” saying she wanted to write a story that could “enter into a conversation with” Singer’s story. I don’t believe I’ve ever read “The Cafeteria,” so there’s a nice follow-up to this story.
I hope we can talk about Li’s story and Singer’s story below. Please feel free to leave your thoughts!
Trevor, I hope you find time and feel moved to write something more about this story. I have had mixed feelings about the previous Yiyun Li stories I have read and my main reaction to this one is indifference. I’m much more interested in thinking about the stories in Fen, which I am working through this month for the GoodReads discussion and I’m also getting back into Deborah Eisenberg’s collected stories. As a result, I don’t have more to say about this one, but would welcome someone giving me a reason why I should think more about it.
Definitely flows and is pellucidly clear in the telling, almost too much so.
When Li allows her style to be a bit more undulant and winding is when she’s at her best, be it in her fiction or her essays.
The elder son’s death seemed an unnecessary addition, I must say.
The literary allusions were a little lazy too. Another story about a contemporary writer who teaches (written by a writer who has taught)? ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I definitely would rather hang out with Lily than with the narrator, even though Lily probably watches absolutely horrible movies whereas the narrator has read “The Dead,” though maybe that’s part of what Li is getting at. Pragmatism > Semi-autobiographicalism.
I dug a number of Lily’s lines. She’s a very well-drawn character. Some faves were: “We’ve waited for this for so many years. We can’t waste our time crying” and “We aren’t the kind of people who take time off from work, and he lives in Vietnam” and “His wife said, ‘You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.’ No one has ever said that to me.” Her insistence that her narrative should be a movie is also consistent with her character, as is her directness in asking if the narrator knows anyone who can make it into one.
Tuan’s daughter and wife were an awesome invention, they saved the story when it was looking most like it was going to be a boring academic piece of crap.
The real vs. unreal story stuff was too spelled out.
The paragraph where Li attempts to describe the photograph of Lily and Tuan is pretty dreadful. Li has a lot of tremendous gifts as a writer but here she fails miserably. It’s just not in her skill set to rend a visual image in a trenchant way that abuts the earnest and evocative (Unless this is somehow intentionally bad, a way of incarnating the later lines by the narrator: “I could not make a romance out of Lily’s story. She was not the first person I had let down with my writing.” It doesn’t make it a genius move, but it would give it punk-rock points at least).
The tragedy/comedy line was also a classic example of overwriting. Let the reader do some work.
The section about the narrator’s inability to write the note is much better, consistent with the character’s personality.
The self-recrimination seems like the wrong place to end. Should’ve ended with the narrator pissing Lily off and Lily locking her out of the salon.
Still, there’s more to like in Li’s writing than to disdain, and the flaws didn’t ruin the story.
I’ve liked some of Li’s past work–including her previous story in the magazine–but his one didn’t live up to expectations. Indifference, as David mentions, seems an apt way to sum up my take. I agree with Sean that much of it is overly spelled out. Moreover, what is spelled out is a bit bland. In many regards, the various pieces of this puzzle didn’t end up fitting together in a compelling or coherent way. Felt like a lot of needless loose ends and tangents but no driving life-force. All the same, Li is generally a deft writer, and I’ll be happy to give her the benefit of the doubt whenever her next piece is published.
I had a much more positive reaction to this and, unlike with the Lethem story which seemed to lessen when I read the comments on this site, I will stand by my response. I thought of this as a story about a writer trying to learn how to write about profound, powerful subjects. While Lily sees these things as beyond her, something detached from reality–yet what makes life worth living, the narrator is a writer. I think her bringing up her son is completely relevant because this will be the moment when she has to deal with something much deeper. Perhaps the story is schematic–both Lily and the narrator live a fairly quotidian work/family-based life–yet the narrator can possibly use her art for therapeutic or enlightening purposes, while Lily can only hope for a film-adaptation. Yet…just as, and I know this is big compliment, Proust ends with his alter-ego character/the narrator being able to write the novel you’ve just read, here the narrator character is finally ready to start dealing with deeper issues, and, in fact, just has done so. I also found this very powerful and moving.
I don’t know when this story was written in relation to the suicide of the author’s teen-aged son in 2017. It seems somehow present throughout this story.
The narrator says “I did not know sorrow then, and later, when I did, after my elder son’s death, I thought that Lily’s young lover had been fortunate to have so many tears in him. Sorrow only desiccated me. Tears came to an end. Desiccation persisted.” That could be Li herself.
The last words of the story are even more wrenching than they might otherwise seem, thinking about them as an expression of Li’s anguish over the suicide of her son.
I haven’t gotten on here to explain my own positive reaction to this story, and I apologize! I will try to do so soon!
mehbe, I did not know her son committed suicide, but I suspected as much after reading this story because her previous story in The New Yorker, “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names” from September 2018, starts with a couple dealing with the suicide of their teenage son. Once is simply a plot idea she came up with. But twice? That suggests there is more to the story.
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I understand, of course, that writers write about events from their own lives all the time and also, of course, there can be great therapeutic value to the writer to do it, but as a reader it makes me uncomfortable to know about it, especially when the events and writing are so recent and the events are so awful. It makes me feel like maybe I can’t criticize (or even read) the story just as a story anymore and pulls me out of being engaged with it. For example, with “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names” I commented this:
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The one element of the story that did not work for me was the spreadsheet. It seemed to me like merely a writer’s device and entirely unrealistic. It is one thing for the death of her son to cause Jaiyu to want to reflect on all of the other deaths that have been a part of her life. But to want to write them down in a list cataloguing them, and not just as a list, but on a spreadsheet, suggesting many different sortable columns of information about each, strikes me as almost pathological behaviour (and no, not of the sort that can be excused by the irrationality of grief).
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Now, on reflection, I wonder if making a spreadsheet really is something Li did after her son died. If so, my comment on her story is basically saying I think Li is pathological herself, not just the character. It goes without saying that this is not a comment I would have made had I thought it might be taken from her real life.
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If anyone has not read the novel Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, I highly recommend it because it is excellent. But late in the novel there are some pretty serious and grim events described that became hard to read for me because I knew they were similar to real experiences the author herself had. I had to make an effort to read it just as story not to get lost in worrying about her or wanting to just stop reading. Like I said, writing their experiences might be importantly therapeutic for the writer, but it can (and for me, sometimes does) put a burden on the reader that goes beyond responding to a work of fiction.
I agree with David in that, had I know the more harrowing details of the story were pulled so directly from Li’s personal tragedies, I would’ve been more sensitive with my previous comments. This gets me thinking, and I’d like to share my thoughts quickly.
It’s a tricky thing, writing, reading. As we all understand, writers often use their work as an opportunity to grapple with their own inner complexities and struggles, laying bare what can be very intimate feelings, opinions, and personal histories. Most of the time, however–be it out of the author’s desire to protect their/their close relations’ privacy and vulnerability (note to Karl Ove Knausgård) or simply to allow a narrative to take on a life of its own–there’s a degree of distillation that takes place in fiction, which allows for the emotional undercurrents of a piece to ring true to an author’s experience while the particular circumstances are fictitious. As readers, I think the tendency for some of us is to assume that’s always the case, to take for granted the autobiographical distancing that many authors inject into their work. Consequently, it seems to me that we then come to feel entitled to critique the end products of the writing process with our own dry, analytical distance, presuming that such fiction is a strictly intellectual affair, designed with the intention that its prose and structural elements and thematic motifs be broken down and coldly scrutinized and for its own sake or our abstract pleasures. Of course, it’s a false assumption–one I’m too often guilty of–which this story and situation reminds me.
Unlike genre or pop fiction, the beauty of literary work is that, when done in earnest, it’s intentionally and profoundly humanist at its core. It’s a process of personal reflection and self-discovery. The psychic energy underpinning every story is rooted, at least in theory, in the emotional sincerity that an author channels when crafting their piece. It’s art–fundamentally human and humane. Unfortunately, not everything published in the New Yorker and other lit fiction publications meets that high threshold; much of it is gimmicky or churned out or merely another brick in the citadel of one’s career. However, as this story underscores for me, we shouldn’t let ourselves fall prey to assuming such pieces are the norm. We as readers should approach each piece in good faith, assuming that it is a form of deeply personal expression and engaging it with the generosity and tact required whenever someone has the courage to open themselves up to other. That’s not to say every sincerely written story will speak to readers or that we can’t offer insight on why we failed to to connect with another’s work. It’s inevitable that a lot of stories won’t appeal to us. In the case of this piece, for example, knowing that it has a more autobiographic edge doesn’t change my reading outright; the particular articulation of its emotional energy and reflections still don’t totally resonate with me on a visceral level–this being less a critique and more a reflection of the fact that I simply haven’t shared similar experiences as intimately. But it make me want to apologize to Li for saying that I felt indifference, as if her process of coping with her son’s suicide isn’t worth my time or consideration. That just feels callus in retrospect, and I think it’s a result of my having gotten too comfortable with the assumptions outlined above.
Okay, rant over. Sorry for the soap boxing.
PS: Ken, your reading was very enlightening for me. It goes a long way in helping me appreciate some of the potency of the story. Thanks for that.
“Reader”: I’m glad my reading was helpful but I really wanted to write and thank YOU for that incredibly sensitive, well-articulated “rant” (which it is not) about increasing our readerly sensitivity. Interestingly, I did know about Li’s son’s suicide, but the story still resonated for me anyway and for the reasons I stated above.
I guess the appreciation is mutual, Ken. It’s nice to have a forum like this!
After seeing the reference to Singer, I linked up to David Margolies reading his story. Very arresting. Then I read Li’s story. How was this a “conversation” with Singer, I asked myself. Kind of like a conversation between my 8-year-old grandson and his father. Obviously Li was not paying attention during the putative “conversation”.
BTW, it is irrelevant to our reading a story whether the author really experienced what she is writing about. Li’s son committing suicide should NOT be factored into how we evaluate this story.
I would normally agree with you, not caring a ton about authorial intent, but I’m not sure I do in this case. Why shouldn’t it be factored in? We often factor in external political/cultural/historical/etc. knowledge to understand what a story is doing, so I’m not on board that the author must be cut out. I know some people won’t know background facts, but I’m not so sure they should always be catered to. In this case, that knowledge deeply enriches the story, makes it take on tones and shades it doesn’t otherwise have. Should the author simply find ways to incorporate that explicitly? Sometimes, sure. All the time? I don’t think so. I’m in the same boat when it comes to Segal’s story from this week. The story would be different, and not as effective, if the author had to explain the background. I’m sure this diminishes the pool of readers who will respond, but, again, I’m not sure that should be avoided at all costs to make a story self-contained.
Trevor, if I am interested in the life of an author and, say, reading a biography of that author, I can see how I will be quite interested in connections between the content of the author’s stories and life. Knowing about those connections can help better inform me about the author. But they don’t inform me about the story. Political, cultural, or historical facts can help when they fill in a broader context that the story takes place in or when comparing the world of the story with the real world can illuminate the story, but that is a different matter.
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Little Steven has argued that actors should never give interviews because the more we know about actors as people the less able they are (or the harder they and we have to work) to get us to see them as just the character we see on the screen in a film. I would say the same about authors. The less I know about the person who wrote the book, the better it is for me as a reader when I read the book. It was only after I finished reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline that I first learned that Faye was strongly based on her own life. I was most of the way through Freshwater before I knew the character and author were closely related (and I wish I had not known in the latter case).
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Since I mentioned films, let me also mention a pet peeve of mine about songs. If a song is written from the perspective of a woman who is in love with a man and a male singer sings it, I find it silly to change names or pronouns in the song. Not because it should be ok for a song to be about a man who loves another man, but because the singer is just telling a story and its silly to think of the singer as the subject of the story. Joni Mitchell has said that when she writes songs she feels free to write from the perspective of a character of any gender or age because it’s all storytelling. That’s the only perspective that makes sense to me.
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In short, never confuse the storyteller with the story, no matter the medium of storytelling.
“We often factor in external political/cultural/historical/etc. knowledge to understand what a story is doing”
Like “Cat Person”?
David —
I liked your comment —
“In short, never confuse the storyteller with the story, no matter the medium of storytelling.”
I could write a tome about this, but I’ll just say: does the fact thAt Chekov never served on a Navy ship make “Gusek” less of a story?
Yes. It doesn’t meant the result is always going to be great. But yes. And:
This seems to conflate a bunch of issues. No one above, that I can see, is arguing that an author has to have personal knowledge of something in order to write about it. I can see a vague relationship to what we are debating, but this is a different issue
I have a similar response here. If a reader finds a story is enriched by knowing what the author has been through, it doesn’t follow that the reader is confusing the storyteller with the story.
David and William, your responses feel rote and dogmatic. It could be I’m out on a ledge here or am not stating my ideas clearly, so do forgive me, but I’m trying to work through something different here.
Is it irrelevant to our reading of the story that Li’s son committed suicide (and that she herself has attempted suicide more than once)? It can be irrelevant, if our goal is to isolate the piece from the author and seek some elusive objective hierarchy of writing. That is just one approach, though, and one I think works in general. It also can be relevant, and a piece can be enriched by that knowledge, perhaps to the point that the piece itself becomes meaningful to certain readers. I’m not sure what’s wrong with that. On the contrary, I know there is nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to find the piece better because of this knowledge; many of us did find it more interesting, better, meaningful, or something.
We are not limited to any one school of literary criticism here. So I’ll end responding a bit to this:
I don’t actually believe this. It seems aspirational, and above I’m trying to suggest that this aspiration is not shared by all. There are thousands of stories out there — told in prose, verse, song, film — that are not limited to their text. There are authors whose biography is central to the artistic qualities of their work. When I watch the films of Ingmar Bergman, I can appreciate them on my own, or I can see how the artist was working through dozens of his own issues on screen, his uncertainty on display. If I read Alice Munro, I can of course get a lot out of reading one story on its own or I can see her develop and explore themes she’s struggled with in the past. “The Peace of Utrecht” is a brilliant story all on its own, but it becomes even more complicated when we know what Munro went through with her own mother. I don’t believe I’m guilty of the fallacy of confusing the story with the storyteller when I, as a reader, explore how an author has dealt with his or her own life through art. For many of my favorite authors, their work was an essay about sometimes personal demons and never led to any solid conclusion or resolution.
With the above, I run into the danger of over-defending Li’s story. “All Will Be Well” is not the key to unlocking Li’s life, nor is Li’s life the key to finding the story is a masterpiece. It is not. But it is good, and there are layers and complications that become visible when we know more about the story’s provenance, perhaps seeing how the story itself is more of an essay than a conclusion.
By the way, thanks for the responses above — this has been fun and interesting. I’m sure I’m not adequately stating my case or responding to your assertions, but it has been nice!
Trevor, your last long comment is very interesting. You have added a third dimension to how one can view writing, but I don’t think it is quite how you have described it. So let me recap the other two before getting to that one.
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If readers read a story and come to the conclusion that the main character acts cowardly and deserves our scorn, but the author says “I was trying to depict a hero we should admire”, we can and should give no weight to the author’s comment. In a case like this the author’s intention is not part of what the story is and so is irrelevant to the assessment of that story. On this I think we agree.
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If a reader is interested in the life of the author, then reading stories they write and knowing which bits are drawn from real life experiences can help inform you better about that author as a person. The fact that, for example, Li chose to write about her son’s suicide in at least two stories now tells us something about how she deals with that grief. And things she says about how her characters deal with grief might inform us about how she has dealt with her own grief. But that is not about reading a story as art. That is about reading it as a document that provides information about the life and character of the author. It’s a very different thing from viewing the work as art.
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There is a third way to read a story that you have mentioned through talking about Bergman and Munro. Let me quote you and highlight the phrases I think are key: “When I watch the films of Ingmar Bergman, I can appreciate them on my own, or I can see how the artist was working through dozens of his own issues on screen, his uncertainty on display. If I read Alice Munro, I can of course get a lot out of reading one story on its own or I can see her develop and explore themes she’s struggled with in the past. “The Peace of Utrecht” is a brilliant story all on its own, but it becomes even more complicated when we know what Munro went through with her own mother.“
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The first and third parts I highlighted read to me as comments that fit the thing I just discussed, reading a text as source information about the biography of the author. But they also might be ways of looking not at the author’s intention, but at the author’s motivation. An author saying “I was trying to depict a hero we should admire” is an expression of their intention and “I was trying to work through some issues with my relationship with my mother” is an expression of motivation, but in the latter case it is just as external to the story. Then there is the middle highlighted comment. That is a different thing.
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The idea of reading a work and in so doing seeing how an author has developed or comparing it to similar themes in other work by the same author is a legitimate literary engagement with a text. It is similar to the idea of a text as source material for an interest in the biography of a writer, but importantly different because the interest is in the writer not as a person in general, but as an artist. The ways that a story can show signs of growth, development, maturity or regression and decay are real literary engagements with writing, but they are ones where the artist is the focus of the examination and the art plays a supporting role. Comparing stories to other stories, whether by the same author or not, is something we do all the time. Looking at stories for evidence of an author’s development is also something we do all the time. These are real literary questions.
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You also wrote, “I don’t believe I’m guilty of the fallacy of confusing the story with the storyteller when I, as a reader, explore how an author has dealt with his or her own life through art.” I think you are making a confusion here, but it might be one of confusing an interest in an author as a person and an interest in an author as an artist. Depending on which interest you have will determine what from a story is relevant and whether it is a literary engagement with that story or not. But when you say, “For many of my favorite authors, their work was an essay about sometimes personal demons and never led to any solid conclusion or resolution,” the words “essay” and “personal” suggest to me a reading of a text as an artifact that informs a biography and not a literary engagement. Yes, many great authors used their writing to work out personal matters, but whether the work was great and whether the writing did help work out those matters are two very different questions, one literary and one not.
That’s a fair way to separate the various things we are talking about. I’ll have to keep ruminating on this to see how I can keep this debate going!
I don’t know anything about Yiyun Li’s own life – or I didn’t, until I glanced at some of the comments above – and I don’t mind whether or not there is or isn’t an autobiographical element to her story. I found it stood on its own really well and for me it is one of the best New Yorker stories in a very long time. It is poignant and haunting and wonderfully crafted. I was intrigued by the way that the narrator is mainly only the reporter of what she has been told by someone she encounters, as that approach reminded me of Rachel Cusk’s latest work. Like Cusk, Yiyun Li seems interested in what fiction is, what we are doing when we tell stories and whether storytelling is a means of constructing reality for ourselves. I find that very intriguing.
When I first read this story, I did not know about the son’s suicide. I found that out within an hour after I finished reading the story. That knowledge changed my perception of the story, both generally and in one very specific way.
The specific way was in regard to the passage I quoted earlier – “I did not know sorrow then, and later, when I did, after my elder son’s death, I thought that Lily’s young lover had been fortunate to have so many tears in him. Sorrow only desiccated me. Tears came to an end. Desiccation persisted.”
When I first read the story, those lines caused me to stumble. They felt oddly out of place, as if referring to something other than what was in the story, but I didn’t know what. That was the one and only mention of an elder son’s death. What was it doing there? It seemed both intense and peculiar.
Then, when I read about Li’s son, it suddenly made sense. Not in the context of the story, but in my understanding of why Li might have written those words. And suddenly, because of that, the story became much more “personal”. I’m not saying that is good or bad; it just is.
That’s a kind of flaw. I understand that. Stories should be utterly self-contained, in theory. But theory isn’t art, right? If the storyteller’s own story becomes part of the fictional story she tells, why is that a problem? And for whom?
The basic question, in various permutations, turns up in all of the arts, and it turns up quite frequently, it seems to me. As it happens, I was recently reading a transcript of an oral history interview with the photo-realist artist Robert Bechtle (there is, by the way, a fantastic trove of oral history transcripts at the Smithsonian, which is where I found this). The interviewer states at one point that Bechtle uses his own family as models in some of his painting, and mentions that Bechtle has stated that it shouldn’t matter who these models are. Bechtle’s response is that indeed it shouldn’t matter who the models are, not to the viewer – but to him, it does matter.
I thought that strange, because it does matter to me, the viewer, that the models are his family. One of his most famous paintings is “ ’61 Pontiac” and it shows the artist, his wife, and their two kids posing alongside the eponymous car. Now, if I didn’t know who these people were, the painting would still be a great painting. But since I do know who they are, the painting acquires a whole extra element of feeling; it can’t be helped. And it matters. I really don’t understand why it shouldn’t, since it does. What is a poor viewer supposed to do? I can’t somehow not know what I do know, just because the artist doesn’t want it to matter to the viewer.
With LI’s story, though, I have no idea what she thinks about this issue. Does she want it not to matter, and think the connection between the story and her life should not make any difference to the reader? Or what? She must know that some readers would know about her son’s death, and others would not. How does that knowledge affect what she writes? Or doesn’t it make any difference? I don’t know.
All I know is that knowing what happened in her life did a difference to my perception of this story.
mebbe —
Very nice observations. Longish, but readable. Clear, and without ideology. I think you are right, that issue does come up in much art. Jeff Koons has a painting in which he and his wife of the time are both naked. It matters that the man in the painting is the artist, in a way that it does not matter who the model is in Manet’s Olympia. Also there is a woman who photographed her children naked (sorry, forgot her name) and it matters that they are her children. To me it would matter if we found out that Diane Arbus’s photo subjects were posed models. And what if we found out that Kafka actually had woken up one morning as a cockroach? (Sorry, bad joke.) Anyway, thanks for that comment.
I read the prior comments on this story and found them very interesting. I think Li has distanced herself from the events of her own life and yet subtly incorporates them beautifully into this story. I kind of literally interpret stories and missed the subtext of her son’s death but definitely felt in the presence of a writer trying to deal with tragical aspects one might confront in life or less so, as a writer (such as if what’s a writer writes or means in their writing will not get through).
I think this story conveys a lot that helps me better face life sort of like “Catcher in the Rye.” The writer wants to seem in control but is at loose ends trying to make sense of what has no sense. That has value. Not for everyone because we look at the same specifics in different ways.
“Read a book for what it is, I admonished the student, not for what you want it
to be.” This seems the most revealing line in Yiyun Li’s “All Will Be Well.” It might mean live one’s life for what it turns out to be not how you want it to turn out to be. Or write about what is, rather than what you want what “is” to be. Or read a New Yorker short story for what it is, not what you want it to be.
There is such a nice tension in this story about how things actually turn out “in real life” versus how one wanted them to be or what everyone thought would happen. It’s difficult to tell what good writing should be. Or what a good life should be. Yet when something read, feels like truth, that’s when the writing and one’s life, seems best.
A good short story is like a lie that tells the truth. And any upset is when one feels not on the way to truth or to a good ending. That somewhere it all fell apart. Someone died young, someone got a bad doctor’s diagnosis or deep love goes unfulfilled. Yet, that is all part of real life even if it doesn’t make a good story.
Some people see life as quite beautiful in its possibilities and yet very dangerous in it’s possibly brutal outcomes. Li sorts out the questionable prognosis of the title, “All Will Be Well,” in the ethnic Chinese Lily’s story of her young love for the Vietnamese boy, Tuan. The author of this story who is addicted to Lily’s (beauty) salon is a teacher, who also writes.
Li faultlessly points out the built-in limitations on our most basic idealistic assumptions. “Love doesn’t put rice in the cooker or a roof over our heads,” and at another time when Lily asks her, “Will you make money being a writer? she asked, and I said not really.” And she undercuts the optimism of the title with truthful limitations such as “Why would anyone lie to anyone? But people do, I thought, all the time.”
Lily’s “love” story doesn’t go the way one thinks such stories should go and yet it goes it own way which may or may not have any worth for the reader. There is still an optimism that one sees in many Asian stories that one wasn’t born to live a life filled with pain or where nothing works out or it does but in a most unsatisfying way. There is almost always a tilt toward the optimistic, which some people (foreign devils or those schooled by them) hate in things such as Bollywood films.
The worst thing is to be forced to lie. As in this story the protagonist author cannot bring herself to lie to her children in a catastropic care package note. The fictional author of this story tries to figure out a general principle on which to write and on which to live, her “canon”. The student who wanted to dislodge the teacher’s beliefs ends up communicating enlightment from what her teacher taught about “what real life was.”
The former student sort of said, “I thought your principles were nonsense but I still learned from them. That kind of predicts one reaction the reader can perceive at the end. The optimism of the title may seem ironic but it is very empowering if it can be seen in that way.
I enjoyed this story. I felt part of the narrator’s world right until the end. It felt like an attempt at redemption, trying to process the guilt etc via storytelling. Perhaps being unable to tell her own story, the narrator offers Lilly’s story instead, a life that spans decades with a love story that has a bittersweet ending. More sweet than bitter in contrast to the narrator’s life.