When We Were Happy We Had Other Names by Yiyun Li, 2018
The magic trick:
Building the protagonist’s feelings of grief through a web of other pain and loss
Y is for Yiyun.
This one reminds me a little bit of “My Father’s Friends” by William Maxwell. In it, our narrator processes his father’s death through visits with some of his father’s friends. They refract the light back onto his own feelings for and understanding of his father.
Here, Li does something similar. A middle-aged mother processes her teenage son’s death by creating a spreadsheet of people she’s known in her life who have died. The exercise leads her down several memory rabbit holes. Her grief leads to a more nuanced, more felt emotion for her late grandfather, which in turn helps her better grieve for her son.
Like the Maxwell story, we see death as a web of connections and emotions.
And that’s quite a trick on Li’s part.
The selection:
All things had seemed in order under that scholar tree. Jiayu was an ordinary child, easily contented; her grandfather, a man with a well-lived life. Life was supposed to be like that, each generation reaching a gracious end when it was their turn. Yet this order, disturbed by Evan’s death, made Jiayu uneasy. If she had taken it for granted that Evan would lead a long and happy life, like her grandfather, could she not have made similar mistakes in blindly taking everything for granted?
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