Yiyun Li

Where Reasons End

linda

I first heard about this book in the NYT Book Review last month. I generally enjoy reading Asian-American writers, and Where Reasons End caught my eye. I didn’t start reading until today, when I bought the book impulsively from the Kindle store at 6PM. I left the book at 7:50PM, and started reading again at 12AM. It’s now 2AM, and my brain feels like to being pounded by anvils. But I feel the urge to crank out this review while the book is still fresh in my mind.

The Irish Times and the South China Morning Post describes this book as “delicate,” “disquieting,” “harrowing,” “beautiful.” For me, I found this book chilling and numb. The first third of the book, I did not respond emotionally at all. Yes, there were some tender moments, but they were all so mundane. They felt more like any mother’s reflection on her love for her children, perhaps children who had gone away to college or moved far away, not quite like a mother who was grieving. 

I cried for the first time on page 104, when Li was writing about snow. 

“The snow, the first of the season, had begun in the morning. By late afternoon, the tiny prints of paws and the not-so-tiny prints of sneakers, left early on the patio by the dog and J., who had both seen snow falling for the first time, were covered again... Nikolai did not speak. The last time we had lived in a place with snow was more than twelve years ago.”

The second time I cried was on page 150, when the narrator declares that she had taken up baking and knitting - two of her son’s hobbies - as her New Year Resolutions. She then writes, “Nikolai had knitted several scarves. He had worn them in Tibet when he had visited there in the summer, and had planned to wear them this winter, too.”

The whole book is a series of hypothetical conversations, ones the author imagines she would have had. The snow was the same - an encounter Nikolai would have lived to see. We entertain hypotheticals when we feel pain. We are plagued by the would-be’s and could be’s. For the first time, I was struck by the gravity of Li’s loss. 

I am borrowing these words from Li: No parent should be a child’s biographer. No parent should write a child’s elegy. 
I cannot imagine the pain she went through, but I can see this book as a way for her to process her grief. It was the little moments that touched me most: the ones when the author bickers with her son about the precise usage of a word, when they unwrap the Latin etymology, and when the author describes her son as an ”adamant advocate of the Oxford comma.” I was surprised that the narrator did not feel resentment toward her son (or maybe I’m wrong, feel free to disagree), but she just wanted to know why. And that’s where reasons end.

As an Asian-American high school student, I understand the pressures that can drive many teens toward destructive thoughts. I’ve been there. I hear friends say nonchalantly “I’m going to kill myself by working” or “My parents will kill me if I don’t get into an Ivy” on a regular basis. Most of the time, we’re just joking around, but they still reflect the narrow definition of success our parents harbor: academic prowess and admission to a selective university. At the same time, mental health is seldom discussed in Asian families, leading to a toxic brew of anxiety and pent emotions. 

I’ve recommended this book to my parents, and I hope they share it with their friends. I know that they know this instinctively, and I do hope this isn’t too preposterous for me to say, but I do think that they need to reminded sometimes, that when your child is no longer here, what you will miss about them won’t be their perfect report cards or their membership in the State Orchestra. It will be the frivolous moments when they bake a cake for fun, when they ask you to knit octopi for their friends, when they recognize a Dvořák theme during an orchestra class and no one else does. These are the achievements you should be proud of your children for.

Where Reasons End

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