E-Paper
Review: Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li
Beautiful and evocative, the stories in Yiyun Li’s latest collection are bound by the shared themes of guilt, loss and loneliness
Yiyun Li doesn’t miss a beat when writing anything – whether it is a novel, a memoir, a piece on friendship and books, or short stories. Wednesday’s Child, her third collection of stories, is perfect, precise, and depicts contemporary lives like no one else can.
These stories are about angst, alienation, what it means to identify with a place called home, about motherhood and how it hurts, about love and loss, and more than anything else, about how we live today.
Li writes with a touch that is beautiful, evocative and funny when it’s least expected. Short stories are tough to write so it is definitely a feat when an author succeeds in making readers connect to their characters.
Unlike the ones in her earlier collection, these stories aren’t interconnected. But they are cohesive, nonetheless. The shared themes of guilt, loss and loneliness bind them. The titular story opens with a mother taking trips around the world to cope with her daughter’s death by suicide. The pain in each sentence is palpable and Li deals with the emotion with subtlety, grace and profundity. Such a Common Life, one of my favourites, is about the lives of two women, Dr Ditmus and her caregiver, Ida, their pasts, their present, and their plans for the immediate future. Alone, and When We Were Happy, We Had Other Names, both about the nature of grief, are very impactful. The same, however, cannot be said of the story about Trump’s election and the one about COVID. Quite honestly, niether provided anything unique.
The stories in this collection are similar in that they examine how challenging it is to be female and the identities that women are expected to assume. Perhaps drawing from her own experiences and of those she interacts with, Yiyun Li presents us with full-bodied characters – whether it is a nanny or a mother – leading lives marked by a lack of choice.
Though it is melancholic in most parts, every story in Wednesday’s Child is captivating, authentic, detailed and a pleasure to read. Li’s stories don’t punch you in the face with the obvious; there are no surprises or shocks. It is about life making its way through the ordinary and sometimes, in the process, encountering the extraordinary.
Vivek Tejuja is the author of ‘So Now You Know: Growing up Gay in India’. Besides men, he loves books, food, and cats, and in no particular order of preference.
