“Wednesday’s Child”
by Yiyun Li
from the January 23, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
This story is clearly destined to have some woe. I love Yiyun Li’s work, though I haven’t read as much of it as I’d like. I keep thinking it’s time to sit down and get everything collected and just go through it all. That likely won’t happen soon, but I’m glad to have this chance to dip into her work again.
Here is how this week’s story begins:
The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.
Please feel welcome to comment below. Did you like the story? Do you like Li’s work? I hope all is going well with you!
ask
I love Yiyun Li’s work. I certainly could not do what you are aiming at, “sit down get it all collected and go through it all”. I have to go slowly, her work is dense and mystical. I’ve just finished reading her latest novel, “The Book of Goose”.
Interesting that this story references a European context (Brussels Midi). The Book of Goose is set in France. I think it is the mark of a really great writer to be able to remove themselves from their own milieu and their own backstory and completely imagine a different world. Here is an interesting interview with the author about The Book of Goose.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/18/yiyun-li-the-book-of-goose-interview-being-subversive-important
I guess that after writing about her own suicidal thoughts, (Dear Friend, I Write to You …) and the tragic suicide of her son, (Where Reasons End) she has emptied out her own life of stories, and is using 100% imaginative transfer.
I would really like to read the three books mentioned again, but unfortunately life is too short.
This is really complex in its sense of time and subjective/objective realities. A mother still grieving her teenager daughters suicide a few years earlier thinks things through on a variety of temporal and subjective levels. She recalls conversations from the past while also having current, imaginary conversations with her daughter. She reads a notebook she’d written after the death while currently on a train. She remembers narratives from stories or maybe they’re stories she’d written? She looks at a pregnant woman and thinking about her own 15 years of (and still continuing post-suicide) motherhood wants to tell her that as daunting as it all will be that the woman will get through it and recalls how she did.
There is also her role as writer, mother and as daughter to a seemingly cruel yet strangely loving and now also deceased mother of her own.
I’m glad. read this twice.
The other day I picked up _Where Reasons End_ from a library sale rack. Called a novel, it is imaginary conversations with Li’s dead son who committed suicide at 16, her way of coping with her loss. I’ve read 3 chapters, I get it, but it may not be anything I need to read. Myself, I have never had any inclination to suicide.
Today, I learned from Wikipedia that she was abused by her mother, and attempted suicide herself once. But it gets worse. Earlier this year, another son committed suicide. This may be why her web site “cannot be found”.
I find this very disturbing. I’ve read some of her work, not knowing any of this. I plan to read more, but now I’ll know this isn’t just fiction, but a real and disturbing life her writing is coming from. What could have caused so much pain in her family? What is she going through now?
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