Grief makes us illegible to others. And sometimes, in trying to survive it, we make ourselves illegible on purpose.
In her recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons,” Yiyun Li writes about the unimaginable: losing both her sons, six years apart, each by suicide. The prose is restrained, sparse to the point of frictionless. There are no crescendos of pain, no indulgence in pathos. It is, in fact, a text one could almost misread as dispassionate—until you realize that it is the kind of dispassion one arrives at only after one has been emptied by feeling.
It is also the kind of dispassion that enrages some readers—especially, though not exclusively, many of her readers in Chinese.
Yiyun Li is no stranger to this polarization. For over a decade, she has occupied a curious literary position: a Chinese-born writer who refuses to be the “Chinese writer,” who disavows nostalgia, shuns political commentary, and insists on English as her language of choice—not because it flatters the market, but because it affords her, as she has often said, a kind of self-erasure. English, to Li, is not a bridge. It is a veil.
And that, for many readers—especially those who long to claim her as a cultural interlocutor—is unforgivable.
On Chinese social media, responses to Li’s latest works split into familiar factions: one side accuses her of self-colonization, emotional alienation, and cultural betrayal; the other defends her fiercely, celebrating the radical autonomy of her voice, her refusal to perform grief or cultural belonging in recognizable forms. These arguments, however, are not really about prose style or even personal trauma. They are about something deeper: who gets to speak for whom, and in what language; who gets to grieve out loud, and who is punished for grieving too quietly.
Li’s detractors argue that her English is a betrayal of roots. That she abandoned her mother tongue, and with it, a kind of moral accountability to a nation and its people. They want witness literature. They want confession. They want, perhaps, an act of national mourning through the vessel of her personal tragedy.
But what Li offers is something far more elusive—and therefore more unsettling. She writes not as a voice of a people, but as an orphan of experience. She refuses the grammar of redemption. She declines the narrative arc of healing. Her prose is not therapeutic. It is diagnostic.
There are moments in “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons” that read more like postmortem than memoir: “For years after Vincent’s death, I did not allow James to say goodbye to me when he left the house.” One could call this cold. One could also call it true.
To understand Yiyun Li’s sensibility, one must abandon the Western liberal reflex to celebrate all trauma-writing as inherently virtuous. One must also abandon the nationalist reflex—Chinese or otherwise—that seeks to fold every personal sorrow into collective history. What Li performs, in both her fiction and essays, is a disassembly of narrative comfort. In a world obsessed with visibility, she chooses opacity.
This, of course, is dangerous.
Because grief, when made too quiet, can be mistaken for detachment. And detachment, especially in women—especially in mothers—especially in immigrants—is always suspect. We demand from women who mourn not just suffering, but performance. We want weeping. We want flesh. We want Instagram-ready vulnerability. Li gives us none of that. Instead, she gives us endurance. And there is nothing more confrontational than endurance rendered in prose.
Even Li’s defenders sometimes misunderstand her. They praise her as “brave,” when what she truly is, is exacting. Not brave like a martyr, but brave like a surgeon: she cuts with precision. Her choice to write in English is not a rejection of Chinese identity, but a reworking of it on her own terms. She refuses to translate her sorrow into the currency others expect. That is not betrayal. That is resistance.
But resistance has its price.
Li’s insistence on aesthetic detachment, her refusal to use language as a balm, can feel exasperating—even to those of us who admire her. Her work does not invite intimacy. It denies it. And perhaps that is her greatest risk. In her literary world, empathy is not a given—it must be earned. And sometimes, it isn’t.
So what do we do with a writer like Yiyun Li?
We read her the way one reads the sea during a storm: not for safety, not for consolation, but to be reminded that silence can roar. That language, even in its most refined form, remains inadequate to what we carry.
Li’s prose is a scalpel that cuts away sentimentality. It exposes the nerves. It does not promise catharsis. And yet, in the sheer bleakness of her honesty, there is something liberating. She gives us the right not to be inspirational. She gives us the right to grieve incompletely.
In a literary world that often confuses confession with connection, Yiyun Li remains an author of the unsaid. And sometimes, the unsaid is the only place where truth survives.
