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.
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. 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. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer