Yiyun Li (b. China 1972) is a Chinese born and raised writer now living in the US. Her works are exclusively written in English. Li has received numerous literary awards for both fiction and non-fiction including the Pen/Hemingway Award, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, A Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for her memoir "Things in Nature Merely Grow" (2026). I've read her somber and reflective "Things in Nature..." with is pensive and elegiac prose I found deeply stirring and EXQUISITELY written. I chose to read "Where Reasons End" after having read "Things In Nature...". (2019). "Where Reasons.,," her earlier work, is an ongoing conversation between an unnamed Chinese /American writer and her late son Nikolai after he commited suicide. Li wrote this piercing following her 16 year old son Vincent's death at 16 by suicide. "Where Reasons End" is an exploration into a mother's existence in a world where her son's accessibility is only within a realm that's as unfathomable as a life with solely a tangential relationship to her son. Despite a pervasive melancholia the overriding response is a sense of awe and wonder. However, I feel Li's intent was not directed outward to the reader but rather drew a voyeuristic look into a profound relationship that can never be recreated or destroyed. We are given a perception of Vincent as an intelligent and fascinating young man. Vincent's pursued culinary arts and performing oboe. There's an apparent loving bond between the mother and son while noting an omni- present barrier masking Vincent's deep despair. The mother is admonished at times by Nikolai who lets her know she failed to see. "Fine, Nikolai said. You don't care to understand-how about that? Good enough for you?" And, Nikolai points out other adult failings to his mom. "Grown-ups make the same mistakes over and over, he said. You like W,S, Mewin? What a coincidence-I just read a poem by him. You went to China this past summer? I did too, in 1987. Do you play any instrument? Oboe, how interesting, is that the instrument that looks like the other? Ah yes, clarinet? How wonderful you know exactly what I'm talking about." Li's exercise in keeping her son's memory alive illuminates how hard it is to comprehend someone else as we constantly put ourselves forward - hence, putting up a blockade. Li's writing is woven with spellbinding thoughts which make "Where Reasons End" compelling, heartbreaking and profound. "One can stop being a parent or a child, or a friend or an enemy, one can stop being alive, but one's self does not stop being itself. Even death cannot change that. Death takes so many things away from us, but not that. Death is not invincible."
