Living Alongside Suffering: A Review of Things in Nature Merely Grow
The book arrived as a gift after I got back from a trip to Taipei, where I had visited the dormant volcano, Seven Star Mountain. The mountain reminded me of the volcano goddess Pele in Hawaiian mythology. I was amazed by how Pele traced herself in every crack of rocks and every droplet of sulphur in air, while nature found its way to bloom. Silver grass waved in the wind, bamboo bushes rustled, butterflies danced around chafer beetles. When the book arrived, it felt like goddess Pele speaking back to me, reminding me that life grows alongside the scars.
Things in Nature Merely Grow is about a mother’s suffering after losing her children. It is a collection of short essays written by Yiyun Li, an acclaimed writer who came to the US from China as a student, but later quit her PhD program in immunology to pursue writing. She has since received numerous literary honors. She writes in English rather than her mother tongue, Chinese, a choice that echoes her complicated relationship with her mother, as described in this book. She wrote the essays after the death of her second son, James, who took his own life at the age of 19, seven years after his older brother, Vincent, took his own life at the age of 16. Li became a mother without children. As a disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Li writes, “This book will not provide the easy satisfaction of fulfillment, inspiration and transformation.” It is not a book to offer redemption but to record her thoughts, emotions, memories, and presence. Rather than guiding her readers through loss, Li writes to them from inside “the abyss,” as she puts it, without seeking an escape.
I should admit, while I am drawn by the book’s title, I’m also deeply unsettled by the unimaginable tragedy of Li’s loss. Reading this as a mother, I found myself wrestling with a question I know I shouldn’t ask: What is it, in her mothering and family dynamic, that might have led to such loss? Li says, “A mother must restrain herself from foreseeing.” Yet it is the mother’s instinct to foresee and hope to predict, as a way to protect her children, to keep them alive. This is a voyeur’s curiosity, a discomforting impulse I know I must suppress, but one that many mothers may recognize. With such ambivalence and moral struggles, I opened the book.
What stands out to me is her parenting philosophy of complete honesty with her children. This is illustrated in a poignant conversation with her first son, Vincent. He had once asked her, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well; why did you give birth to us?” When she advocated for the possibility for change, Vincent pressed on, “But do you really believe that things will get better?”
“That I did not lie blatantly and offer Vincent blank and vain promises—in retrospect this gives me some solace. I said I could never say things would get better for sure, but that his feelings might change, and he might think differently at a later time.”
Many parents tend to shelter their children from reality, to avoid the sword-point sharpness that life thrusts upon us. But from Li’s conversation with Vincent, I see a tender, loving mother who humbly accepts her child’s question, and does not shy away from the hesitation to hope or the uncertainty of life. Later, after James’s death, her thoughts on her relationship with suffering continued to evolve. “I do believe that we learn to suffer better,” she says. “Suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists.” By writing this book, Li holds space for the honest conversation between her and her children, about the suffering of life, about the “weak” wish that these thoughts would have helped her children—and that is her way of staying true to herself.
When my three-year-old asked me what I was reading, I had to tell her the truth and explain the word “suicide.” I hold firmly to Li’s belief that children have the full capacity to face life as it is, and by trying to conceal it we conceal ourselves too.
Paradoxically, the more I find myself agreeing with her parenting philosophy, the more I circle back to my original question while reading Li’s book: Since I see so much of myself in her as a mother, will my child one day follow the same tragic path as her children? Li’s memoir gives voice to the underlying fear that my choice to be honest with my child will one day wound her.
The next question is, when tragedy and suffering dominated, like goddess Pele’s sweeping presence after a volcanic eruption, how did Li continue living? She herself asks, “Is life livable?” This question appears multiple times in her book, even though it is one query her therapist advised her not to raise.
To answer this question, I searched in Li’s past. In the passages about Li’s interaction with her mother, she describes horrific scenes of her mother abusing her while insisting on her love. Yet Li, since childhood, has fiercely refused to lower her head.
“Life has stunned me, but I prefer not to give life the pleasure of boasting that it has defeated me, just as I did not give my mother the satisfaction of knowing that her beating could break me and bring tears to my eyes.”
My heart ached as I read more. “Life is stubborn,” she says. “So am I. I have conceded to make this abyss my habitat, every single day, for the rest of my life. But I shall live in this abyss only on my terms.” I found myself wondering, could this powerful resistance, which she once used to survive her mother’s abuse, be the sustaining fire that fuels her will to continue living now?
From the abyss that Li has found herself in, she writes about poems, words, and sentences that speak to her, sometimes from her own reading, sometimes from friends that supported her through feelings of extreme isolation. She writes about continuing her piano lessons shortly after the death of her second son and practicing at home, making sounds that drive a friend to retreat behind a closed door. She writes about chasing away bunnies in her garden and eventually letting them chew away her flowers’ petals; she silently wishes that it would have “changed Vincent a little, had he had the opportunity to work on the garden with [her] for a season, several seasons,” while reminding herself that “wishes are but artificial flowers.” She calls it “time marking” after the death of her child, similar to the time after the birth of a child when the mother counts the hours since the last feeding. She writes about her doing and thinking, but more importantly, she uses these writings as the marking of time that makes up her being. These moments live alongside her memories of her lost children, making up the fabric of her life now, giving the abyss texture, weight, and sometimes a flicker of light.
To ask what Li might have done differently stems from a mother’s deepest fear of losing her children. To reduce Li’s living to a survival mechanism originating from her traumatic childhood ignores the visceral texture of her daily life now. Li writes, “A mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can’t keep the child alive.” A mother is never a vessel whose sole purpose is to carry her children, and a stubborn refusal to get out of the abyss is never the whole of what keeps the mother alive.
Is life livable? It is a question that we all carry.
One night after reading the book, I had a dream of my daughter stepping off a staircase three stories high. I woke with the fear of not being able to save my child and also the fear of losing the livability of my own life. Reading Yiyun Li sometimes feels like a curse, as if her spirit could seep through the words into me and my child. But through her words again, I see her presence as a mother, “holding on to everything and nothing that is called now and now and now and now,” and I recognize that her spirit is already in me. It is the spirit of stubborn maternal instincts, of goddess Pele’s lava streams, penetrating the vast lands and splitting open every crack, exposing our vulnerabilities with force, heat, light, and truthfulness. This is what I think the title means: nature does not bother waiting for the wound to close before growing again. Like the silver grass in the wind on top of the Seven Star Mountain, life grows alongside the scar, with fear, with suffering—and Li lets us see it: the rustling bamboo, the dancing butterflies and chafer beetles. We fear, we suffer, and still, we live, because things in nature merely grow.
4 replies on “Living Alongside Suffering: A Review of Things in Nature Merely Grow”
What a beautiful, nuanced review. So glad we got to publish this!
I am glad you published it too.
My heart surrounds this grieving mother. Her reference to the abyss is exactly how I felt after loosing my youngest brother to suicide 3 years ago and this past December, my oldest brother to cancer.
Grief demands to be present and it is unimaginable if it your child or children…I admire the author’s courage and honesty in sharing her heartbreaking experience. May she and her husband along with all that knew these precious souls, Vincent and James, be surrounded in love and peace always.
This is a wonderful review of Li’s book. You have a masterful way with words, as does Li.