thoughts about and beyond Yiyun Li’s books
| name | value |
| location | Melbourne |
| date | 2025-09-02 |
| dateFormat | dd-mmm-yyyy |
| slug | absurd_growth |
I once compared my love for someone with a plant in its natural habitat, where no one trimmed it down. So it grew, so it thrived.
My depression, too, is a growing thing.
By "my depression" I also refer to my perception of it, my relationship with it, and suicide; it is almost identical to my state of being.
How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves.
The person I have loved unreservedly, betrayed me, us, our love, and needless to say, the plant. However, way before that, the plant already started to wither, under diminishing care, active neglect even. As low-maintenance as it was, it didn’t thrive but still survived, even after it was unrooted. It died eventually but it took some time.
Just like any other plant.
Even the longest living plants may one day die. In fact, the very definition for living organisms is that they grow and metabolise. Growth has limits; metabolism entails consumption of one part and the production of another, death and birth. As a result, essentially what defines the living, is the inevitability of its death.
Reading is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.
I do not know how to recommend Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow just like I do not know how to openly and faithfully (openly, yes I do that; faithfully, yes in my writing; though not both simultaneously) talk about my depression with someone who’s not lived the majority of their life in an abyss, thinking mostly metaphysically about the abyss.
It is an illusion that writing, like reading, gives one freedom.
I used to keep my writing to myself and only to myself, especially my journals. In that way they contain my truest thoughts and feelings uncensored. Only as I feel closer and closer to having my self erased, I feel the urge to make them open to the possibility of being read by another person.
I want to be understood, posthumously.
Words are to be interpreted, hence destined to be misinterpreted.
It then occurred to me that perhaps this wish of being understood through my writing after my death, is not so different from the wish of leaving a legacy behind, even though whenever anyone expresses the latter, I find it amusing. Rather, absurd. For the insignificance most individuals are to the vast universe, the desire to be significant is absurd. However, in my defence, me throwing my writing into the hand of probability, is an acknowledgement of life and randomness; I am not chasing nor expecting an understanding. If anything, posthumous misunderstanding does not bother my inorganic ashes at all.
Randomness, the miraculous randomness. What are the odds that you have come to this world and become this you right now? Why don’t you honour this rarity of everything coming together to have shaped you? Unfortunately, I have been trained to think mathematically and I cannot bring myself to give any randomness special meanings. No particular outcome is more special than another. Yes, the probability is low for an incident to occur but equally low is the probability of its alternative. I do not understand how to honour certain randomnesses but not the others.
This is not the first book of Yiyun Li that I read.
After Where Reasons End I opened a new document, typed (in Chinese) in the title section "自殺者one who commits suicide" with subtitle "和不自殺者and one who doesn’t”. I was only mildly depressed then, not depressed enough to articulate my thoughts and I aborted the writing after a few lines. That book is categorised as “a novel”, but only because the dialogues between her son (given a fictitious name in the book) and her are fictional—it was written because Vincent died. It made me wonder, what draws the line between fiction and nonfiction memoir? Don’t people also recount their thoughts in memoir, that are not necessarily reflection of true events that have taken place? If one remains transparent about what are fantasies and what are facts, then why wouldn’t what one writes be nonfiction?
Things in nature merely grow.
I, too, often hear this sentence circulating in my mind. I notice the first sprout of the tree I walk past everyday, I notice the tree that blooms first on the same street. I pay attention to the different species of plants wherever I go.
Spring is here, I thought, just the other day when the ume flowers caught my eye. I stopped and looked up to study them more closely. Complemented by the dark blue sky they looked quietly gracious.
Friend said to me that just like it felt like everyone was a bit depressed around May, it seems like now everyone is regaining some strength perhaps for that winter is finally approaching the end. I replied in a joking tone: I feel left behind. Time might not be linear, but it definitely is impartial. It does not show extra mercy just because I cannot keep up.
When I saw the blossoms, I felt the world is moving on without me. The abyss I dwell in does not observe season changes.
No one commits suicide unthinkingly.
I try to stop describing myself as “too much”, as it is taking too much blame on myself and giving other people too much excuse to hurt me. I tried, but to no avail. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that I so do not want to live my life, unless I accept the simple explanation that, I am too much. I think too much; I feel too much. I think too much only because I feel too much and I have to think even more to outspend my feelings so I don’t get immediately overwhelmed and want to kill myself every second. But then thinking too much also might kill someone.
For a very long time I didn’t want to believe that Vincent Van Gogh shot himself, and chose to believe every evidence supporting otherwise. Simply because I could feel how much he loved life, how much he loved, how deeply he felt and understood love. Surely a man like that would not abandon life, teenage me advocated that. I attempted suicide when I was about 16, or 15, I can’t quite remember. I didn’t have a phone or blog; I only wrote about it in my notebooks, which I didn’t keep. I didn’t love life back then; I didn’t have the chance to see the world yet.
That has changed. I now know how much I love life, how much I love, how deeply I feel and understand love, yet I still don’t want to live. Life is worth living, objectively, but it is not liveable for me. Even if Vincent didn’t shoot himself, I imagine him feeling relieved when he realised that the gun wound was going to take his life. Loving life and loving one’s life, are two different things.
In my case, the reasons I love life are precisely the reasons I cannot love my own life. I doubt I hold any originality in this cognitive experience. Perhaps that was also what Vincent Van Gogh had felt.
It is almost a tragic coincidence that Yiyun’s older son is named Vincent, and her description of her Vincent really sound like he was a lot like my Vincent. Yes, I would like to call Vincent Van Gogh my Vincent, for how much he’s shaped my view of life and art during those excruciating teenage years.
Eileen Chang didn’t kill herself. She died alone in her apartment.
I sometimes think about this fact, trying to convince myself that if I truly love her so much that I feel she flows in my vein, then perhaps I should also try to live until the natural end of my physical body. I do not always think I am capable of that.
“You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well; why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.
I had the same question before I read this book. As someone who never wanted to have children simply because of how I observe that generational trauma renders us, I found a depressed, suicidal person’s decision of having children puzzling. Not to accuse her of being selfish, but even the mere effort of raising another human being, surely is too taxing for someone who cannot even naturally live their own life.
Then through reading the book, I think I somewhat understood. Even though it is only my own interpretation, most likely me projecting, I think she wanted to love and have something, or someone, to live for.
To love and have something to live for.
Surely that’s too much pressure on the children, as I shared this point of view with a friend she exclaimed. Indeed, I agree. No matter how hard one tries to hide this deep desire, it is too much weight, not necessarily on the children if one hides it well, but it is still too much weight on this relationship.
I, too, have been searching for something to love and live for. Several times I thought I found one, but only to realise later that, nothing is indestructible enough to bear so much weight. The weight of my life. Things usually sustain a little longer than people, but ultimately, they can’t hold the weight of an average-length life. I suppose the only way to make it work is to accept this fact, and renew the thing one loves enough to live for every few years. I don’t think everyone has that capacity, objective or subjective.
There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it.
The very first proper conversation that was not about maths with J was not long after we started Honours. Wanting to learn more maths was the first time I felt like I could live for a little longer; that was the first time I thought I would give life another chance. I told J this, and said that the day I am not allowed to do more maths would be the day of my death. He probably thought I was joking, or just silly exaggerating.
Days are counting down till the end of my PhD, which is a natural end of my maths journey if I don’t actively seek more jobs. Probably because of it, I have been procrastinating and not making progress as I should in finalising my thesis. I dread this ending, as I don’t quite see a new beginning following.
A literary writer turns to mathematics for consolation. I turn to philosophy to find refuge when my mathematical home already feels shaken. Even if, say, I have a glorious career lying ahead of me in mathematical research, this home can never be stable enough. Trained to think mathematically, my ultimate desire for logic and the use of it to find solution, proof, optimal decisions is my natural tendency. However, this world comprises not just mathematical truths. There are humans; as if the mathematically inexorable uncertainties and randomness of the natural universe aren’t enough to make life impossible to live, there are humans everywhere to interfere with objects and events with utterly ill logic and unkindness.
Oftentimes I feel the world is crushing in and I am being compressed into a thin slice, completely immobilised.
All that is to say, maths does not shield me from the absurd life. I cannot think of a more natural way to make sense of this world unless I turn to philosophy. Even though already it is crystal clear to me that life can never be deconstructed with logic or philosophy. My persistence in trying, is my absurdity.
To philosophise is to learn to die.
Li’s portrait of her two sons, invokes empathy and resonance in me. I think to myself, no one will write like this for me after I die. No one will have tried so much to understand me, to understand my death, to feel so much pain and refuse to put a timeframe of grief, to think of me every single day, for the rest of their life.
I suppose the essence of my suffering, at least part of it, is the utter loneliness that comes with this realisation. Am I capable of doing so for someone else? Oh absolutely. And that’s what makes it so unfair for me. The only thing that could come close to mitigate this unfairness is to write for myself. I will grieve for my own death. Only me, would see and hear and understand me.
He then said, despairingly, “She’s going to kill you.“
When R and I were still friends, he once said to me, "Every time you go to your parents‘, I have to go through this fear of losing you to suicide.“
R had seen me since my first depression episode and had been there for me through every crisis. He was the person I wanted to see and said proper farewell to before my second suicide attempt. He was the only friend I ever reached out to when I had suicidal tendencies. For a long time I thought R understood me. In fact to this day I think he was the only person who came close to understanding me. We loved each other, but at the wrong time. Wrong in the sense that our timelines didn’t align, and also in the sense that we were at an age when we didn’t quite understand love and life yet, and he didn’t know how to love without hurting me, while I didn’t know how to love with tolerance.
Now I do know tolerance, but it still got me nowhere. If anything, it has been throwing me deeper into the abyss, which I didn’t even think was possible. But I suppose the abyss could always stretch further down; perhaps it is a blackhole, bottomless.
Which was the real me: the one who had always striven to be wise and kind and calm, or the one who felt a profound indifference to all those efforts?
My perception of suicide is a constantly evolving thing. I didn’t want to believe that my Vincent had shot himself for I didn’t think he actually wanted to end his life. I used to think the fact that I didn’t want to live anymore was a byproduct of my depression; now I think it is the impassable chasm between my violent wish of death and my love for life that is making me depressed. Cognitive dissonance, as they may call it.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
For a very long time I had this quoted on my social media profile. It was maths, Der Steppenwolf, and Sisyphus that had convinced me to give life another chance last time. I have not yet found an equivalent this time. Suicidal thoughts seem to be louder and louder as days go by, and my mind has been sharper and sharper.
The spathiphyllum on my desk looks a bit sad right now, but she only has herself to blame. Last spring when I brought her home, she got too excited about the bright sunlight and warmth, for six months she only grew flowers, bloomed and bloomed. Now she is suffering from the lack of leaves to photosynthesise. It is all a vicious cycle now: she doesn’t have enough chlorophyll for photosynthesis, and so lacking the ability to shoot out new leaves, but the old ones were dead or are dying. I think to myself, ah, she is just like me. Or, I am just like her. Only, she has me to still take care of her, trying hard to understand her and keep her alive, observe her and give her what she needs to survive. There exists no such an entity in my own life.
Things in nature merely grow.
They sometimes die, too.
Perhaps that is an unfair conclusion—my peace lily is not in her natural habitat, but she is caged, forced to be living in this tiny pot on my desk. How dare I say she only has herself to blame?
If there is next life, I wish I could be a plant. A tree somewhere. Maybe that’s too much to ask, a person died of suicide doesn’t deserve any good afterlife in any known religion. But how about a potted plant? Is that punishment harsh enough? Or, turn me into a tree in hell, how about that? A perpetually burning tree? Unlike Camus, even being a tree cannot make me feel justified in my existence.
If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation.
It’s not news, that nothing exists for me to live for. All the projects, responsibilities, connections, relationships, are merely strategies to stall. To live one more day, one more month, one more year, to read one more book, to see one more play, to watch one more full moon, to chant at one more protest, to have one more meal with the person I love. That’s how people live isn’t it? Moment by moment, small triumphs. I see it, I can see it, that’s practically how I survived my twenties.
R set “25” as his contact name when he was 25. That was also the year when we erased each other’s existence in our respective lives. That “25” still lies in my contact list; he hasn’t changed it since; we haven’t spoken since. It feels like he’s died. In essence we are both dead to each other, but the fact that even that number representing his age at the time, remained in time, feels like a certificate of our deaths. He could be dead, factually, I thought to myself. Though it is no longer an option to open that chat box to ask him if he is still okay. Funnily enough, all those years when we were close, I was the one we both thought would die abruptly at some point.
R is slim and tall, always seems somewhat frail. Sometimes his image is superimposed with a plant, rainforest type, perhaps a monstera, or a small palm. Light green. Occasionally I think of him, other than which there is nothing I can do. It was a conversation about literary translation that led to our parting.
Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.
In her earlier memoir which she wrote after her own suicide attempt, Li already explained in a way why writing provides refuge to the tortured soul. I cannot disagree with this statement, even though I’m tempted to argue for more room for thinking in this statement. Then again, I fall back to the conclusion that one who identifies as a thinker only thinks so much in order to think their feelings away. Overthinking is a byproduct of feeling too much.
Yet the converse isn’t necessarily true: feeling too much doesn’t necessarily renders one a thinker. There are many other means other than thinking one might resort to in order to escape their feelings; it is an active choice that one opts to make life less unbearable by living it thinkingly.
They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.
Li’s reference to Camus inspired me to reread The Myth of Sisyphus myself. Hoping it would provide some strength like it did seven years ago, I went against my routine and spent sometime that was meant to be spent on my thesis, to get a physical copy of it. I carried it in my chest pocket, feeling it tangibly close to my heart.
Both books, the Myth, and Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, resonate so much with me. I experience such excitement upon reading some of the lines, that I am on the verge of tears.
I read this passage over and over again, just to experience yet again the spark of joy that comes from the delusion of feeling seen and understood, eluding momentarily the ever-present loneliness.
It is when reading books like this I register a sense of escaping solitude. Then I realise it is for the same effect I reread my own writing—who sees and understands me better than myself? Even though my current self already doesn’t remember most of what my past self felt propelled to write about, from my past self‘s writing I recollect, see and understand my current self. That visibility, makes me feel less lonely.
Li hypotheses that memory is melodrama; melodrama preserves memory. Whenever I find myself surprised yet comforted by a journal entry, I am reminded of how forgetful I am. The natural question following is then, how much I think I remember is unaltered by time and will? Only what is written down remain timeless, protected from the fluid mind and changing self.
I used to take photography as a creative tool, a motif, an artistic outlet and no more. It just happens so naturally that the outcome also serves to be documentary, for how I know so well when I see each shot what is behind that moment frozen in time.
To capture a moment—of life, of history—is less a reason to write than to return to confront the melodrama, to understand how illusions beget illusions, memories eulogise memories.
Only in the recent year I finally shifted my perspective and one day I wrote, Without writing and photography, how do I know my memory is real? The truth is even with writing and photography, one cannot be certain about what one remembers. Memories are only melodrama; they are products of personal interpretation of the incidents, nothing more. I could remember loving a person and being loved, but all that could be a mere illusion. Curtained by time and distance, it is even more difficult to discern lies.
Writing, too, offers the approximation of salvation.
As I am writing this text, I cannot decide whether or not I leave it public so I put it up on some days and take it down at a flash of change of mind. Do I worry about being exposed and subsequently being judged, by putting my journal entries and reading notes up? No. I do merely worry that an overwhelmed, kind reader might want to talk about things with me.
I remain truthful in my writing, and stay open to talk, but I am not yet able to openly and faithfully talk about the most irrefutable truth in my mind.
That fear, is most likely paranoid, given how few people read these days, let alone reading a nobody‘s blog. But isn’t life about possibilities? Only death is deterministic.
This text is still reading notes, and it only stays evolving for as long as I’m still reading the books. When I’m done reading Dear Friend and The Myth, this note would have to also see to an end.
By elementary logic and basic statistics, even at an early age I knew no single incident in my life would be unlived by another human before; if one has to claim originality in their lived experiences, the only hope would lie in the arrangement of these events. Thereby I acknowledge the difference it makes, that the feelings and the consequential experiences post such permutation would be vastly different. Many people seek uniqueness as an inner drive for essentially all decisions they make in life. I cannot exempt myself from that, though there was a clear point I completely gave up on that motivation. It was when I read Hermann Hesse‘s The Steppenwolf, line by line it is proven to me that not only the means of my suicide was not original, but the precise details of the failure and my thought process regarding it were also nothing new to written words.
For this reason, originality is an illusion; for the same reason, everything is cliché. Though unlike expected in melodrama, such realisation did not invoke a crisis, despite setting me to an even more pessimistic mindset. Since then I found a new purpose in reading: I’ve always been drawn to books growing up but I hadn’t realised that besides providing the opportunities to experience a life elsewhere, they also provide a home, which I am not yet capable of building on my own, for this exact life I live. The acceptance of the improbability of originality guided me to find home. What’s the use of originality if great writers already have timeless writing that speaks more eloquently about my own feelings than what I’m able to, that is readily there for me to pick up and build my own house?
I see the lack of originality as a bliss, and I see great minds and words before me as ready-made materials for me to utilise to build a shelter. A pragmatic thought. When I read Where Reasons End I wasn’t seeking refuge, and then I described my reading experience as plucking a double base, feeling the vibration through my entire body as the instrument hums.
共鳴 (resonate) is such a beautiful Chinese word, it literally translates into, making sounds together.
Like two birds perching on a tree, quietly chirping.
Sometimes I have no words but sadness, and that sadness hums.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
This line is wide-spread enough that I don’t think one needs to know of Marianne Moore to have heard it.
My suicide thoughts are getting more and more pragmatic. I’m getting more and more practical with logistics. I told Fei that as responsible as I am, I am not gonna leave things unfinished if they involve other people. Today I was thinking about how to bid farewell to people who had been unconditionally supportive to me and let them know how grateful I am. And there’s nothing more they can do. Planning my scheduled emails. These people matter so much to me, that I can die for them if such a situation occurs. Though I can’t live the rest of my life for them. I wish I could.
This morning, the sun is bright and warm. I checked my spathiphyllum and found her shooting out new leaves. One that gloomy day when I thought she was dying and compared myself with her, I thought to myself if she died then it would be an extra sign for me, given how she’s beating me out by having me taking care of her. I suppose she is not dying at all. With me still breathing, I will keep taking care of her and she, mere grows. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this. Or do I even feel anything about this? She is my responsibility, but I also don’t feel guilty for having to leave her to survive on her own.
While I count it as nothing to die for you, I refuse to live for you.
No a single person in the world yet is worth me living for. This is my sin, my selfishness. No matter I much I love Fei, I cannot promise I’ll live for her, knowing there’s not binding contract for her to love me the same way until the end of our lives. To avoid the pain inflicted by losing something or someone, the only way is to take the preventative measures to let them lose me first, now that attachment is already there.
Nothing matters. I care less and less about my health, mental and physical. The bodily pain flaring up is just another thing to endure, which I see as an inevitable consequence of my not choosing death. Still trying to justify that choice, I do my best to care about whoever needs my care. A new office mate needs to rant, I lend my ear. Friends need someone to be with them for something, I make time.
It was as if he were making indescribable, desperate efforts to force his way through some tiny chink into her little peaceful world, hoping to find a home there if only for a brief hour.
Then I reread this line in Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Every moment feels stolen. A betrayal. To the person I have been when having those intense thoughts about executing my death. Yet I am still breathing. Still living. How can I even make sense of this? If I truly do not want to live anymore, why am I still here? The only way to solve this logical and philosophical inconclusiveness about living, is to make up one’s mind. Choosing to live, however, still doesn’t solve the problem, as the inconclusiveness remains ineluctable, and one has to reencounter it over and over again, and make a verdict every single time. Thus, the only sensible choice is to take the leap and forever be free from this. Camus would argue this is the utmost acceptance of life.
The love I had for that person, turned out to be some pernicious weed. I thought it died. In fact when it was withering in winter, I thought I would set off this controlled fire to exterminate it and make room for new life and new growth. It did look like it died. But like all monstrous weeds, it is so resilient and can’t be killed by even a wildfire, let alone a controlled one. It has found its way slithering back in, pushing its roots deep into every single tear of my wounds—whether shallow scratches or gaping lacerations. It drinks my agony like nectar, siphoning my blood, my breath, my will, to fertilise itself. It coils around my bones, parasitically, burrows into my organs, spreads like a plague. The constant vexation of its growth resembles some sort of medieval torture. It’s obscene. Inhumane.
These are the moments I wish I can regain my magic power of blocking my feelings. I long for the numbness to shield me. I wish I could blind myself to the sight of this weed sprawling across my existence, strangling every inch of me. I beg for the growth to cease.
What I crave even more violently, more viscerally, is my own annihilation.