The immigrant experience is exponentially complicated by a far more commonplace predicament: having to care for children. This is one unavoidable takeaway from Wednesday's Child, Yiyun Li's exquisite collection of stories of multipronged grief and dislocation.
The book's 11 stories largely revolve around Asian-born or Asian American women dealing with anxiety and loss in their or their parents' adoptive country, the United States. In "Hello, Goodbye," a Bay Area woman who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants fears that she's doing a terrible job raising her own daughters; "What blind courage," she wonders, "had led her into motherhood?" In "Let Mothers Doubt," a Mongolian American woman visits Paris following the fatal overdose of the younger brother she all but raised while their immigrant parents were running a Chinese restaurant in California's Central Valley. In "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," a woman who grew up in Beijing and is living in the Midwest with her American husband copes with their teenage son's suicide by creating a spreadsheet to track everyone she has known who has died.
Most of these stories aren't about an event that unfolds on the page; they're about the aftermath of something that's already happened. The day's headlines--Covid, California's wildfires, the 2016 presidential election--infiltrate the collection, creating a contextualizing background hum behind the loudly beating heart at each story's center. Li's protagonists can't easily articulate what weighs on them--because it's not articulable, because it's unspeakable, because it's too painful. Still, the women who helm these stories find ways to gain fresh purchase on their lives. For the mother who has lost her son in "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names," the spreadsheet is an unlikely lifeline: "If she could remember a story or two about each of the dead, they would not be reduced to the generally and generically dead." In the book's title story, a writer from North Carolina whose teenage daughter died by suicide several years earlier travels abroad and has the opportunity to help usher in a new life when a pregnant woman on her train goes into labor.
Wednesday's Child highlights the vulnerability of children, but Li (Where Reasons End; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; Kinder than Solitude) allows for quiet acts of audacious resilience by women who have likely been fortified by their previous trials. After all, someone whose heritage lies in another country already has experience with starting over. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: In this exquisite collection of 11 stories, the immigrant experience is exponentially complicated by a far more commonplace predicament: having to care for children.