There are books that make you enjoy, books that make you reflect, books that make you suffer. Every once in a while, a book comes into your hands—and your heart—that makes you enjoy, makes you reflect, and makes you suffer. This is the case, from my point of view, ofIn nature things just grow, by Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who lives in the United States (published in Catalan by La Otra Editorial, translated by Marc Rubió).
The book is a terrifying witness, because the author's experience is one of the most dramatic a person can live through: Yiyun Li lost her two sons, Vincent when she was sixteen and James when she was nineteen; the two brothers committed suicide six years apart. They were two extremely intelligent boys, who loved madly and whom their parents had cared for with dedication, seeking the advice of therapists and teachers.
Yiyun Li—the mother, a brilliant intellectual who had suffered serious episodes of mental health—admits from the outset that she is writing from the abyss of an emotional abyss. What is most striking about this reading is that this abyss does not place the author in sentimentality or melodrama: Yiyun Li offers us a radically honest and impressive look that highlights her immeasurable effort to express the inexpressible.
From her abyss—which we as readers obviously wish never to know—the author shares some of the conclusions she has been able to reach while navigating the deepest pain. Perhaps the most basic conclusion is that "A mother can do everything humanly possible for a child, and still she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world that this child feels; a mother cannot keep this child alive." And Yiyun Li adds: "All of these are facts that I must live with now, every day, for the rest of my life."
The writer wants to emphasize that she and her husband are still parents, even though their children are no longer here: "And we are parents who can no longer be parents. We are a subject forever disconnected from the verb and the predicate." They live, says Yiyun Li, like someone sets the pace(move your legs like someone walking, but without moving forward).
Regarding the tools that can help them, she says: "There is no real salvation from our own lives, but books offer us something that comes close." And she adds: "Writing also offers us something that brings us closer to salvation."
Finally, Yiyun Li, in the chapter that perhaps draws most on rage, crudely exposes the difficulties our society has in reaching out to people who suffer such pain. In this sense, I must admit that, after reading this book, it will be hard for me to use the word duel. According to Yiyun Li, it's a word that seems to suggest that bereaved parents are expected to go through a dark and trying period before eventually being able to say, "We're no longer devastated by our child's death. We're just like you again, ordinary people. So now we can go on living as if nothing happened, and there's no need to feel uncomfortable."
