After losing her sons, Yiyun Li learned to ‘suffer better’

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The words grief or the grieving process are not words writer Yi-Yun Lee chooses to describe her own feelings. To her, those words make it sound that at some point you emerge from grief. She prefers to use the word abyss, which is where she expects to be for the remainder of her life. That doesn't mean she's incapable of laughter or even joy, but she expects to return to that abyss. Her teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart. Vincent, at age 16 in 2017, and James, at age 19 in 2024. She wrote an eloquent memoir about that, published last year, titled Things in Nature Merely Grow. It won a Pulitzer Prize. That's among the many honors she's received for her fiction and nonfiction, including the Penn-Faulkner Award, the Penn-Hemingway Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. Her new novel, Music Against the Night, is set in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It's about two music prodigies, Adelaide, who's known as Pechorette, and John. He wants to be the next Mozart and become rich and famous. She wants to find her place in the music world and be recognized for her talent, in spite of how music is a place largely for men. Women can be wives, muses, or mistresses. John and Adelaide are brought together by music and drawn apart because of their musical aspirations. E.E. Lee grew up in China, served a year in the Chinese military, came to America to study immunology, and left her Ph.D. program to become a writer. She's a professor in the creative writing program at Princeton University. I want to let you know in advance that our interview will include a discussion about suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or you're facing mental health struggles, you can call or text 988. To reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, that's 988. E.E. Lee, welcome to Fresh Air. And before we start the interview, I just want to say I'm really sorry about your sons. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Of all the novels you could have written, after your older son's death and your younger son's death, why did you write this one? What was it you needed? My impression is you wanted to. To get out of the now and go to another time and another place. The story in this new novel, it's set in Paris, in India, in Russia, not in the U.S., not even in this century. Yes. Well, I would say I started a novel, and I was in the middle of the novel when James died. But you're right. This is a novel far from my usual interests or concerns. And the reason I think I went back to history is I would like to live again through history, through historical figures, and through my characters living in the late 18th and early 19th century. Some of the concerns, confusions, and just. Thoughts and feelings I have experienced in my life and other people have experienced in their lives. So you're right. I'm going away from this now. But I'm making the past into a new now for myself and possibly for my readers. I have to say, there's so much death surrounding everybody in the story because of the era that it's set in. I mean, death is eternal. There's no century that doesn't experience death. But it's especially, it's like very common in this period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There's a lot of death by childbirth. Adelaide's mother dies in childbirth. There's infant death. There's fevers for which there was no medication. There's war. There's the guillotine, and the characters have friends who are killed by the guillotine in Paris. Did you consciously. Did you want to go back to a time when death was something very common? Well, I didn't go back as a decision to explore death then. I think I was more curious about the characters. But as you pointed out, back then, death was prevalent. You know, illness, childbirth, childhood illness, and revolutions in several countries, and wars across the world. The globe, the different wars. So death was a subject one could not avoid writing about the time. Are these characters based on real people? Yes. So John Field was an Irish virtuoso who spent most of his adult life in Russia. He invented the nocturne form, which was taken over by Chopin. And Chopin made that form popular. But John Field was the first one to write nocturnes, and he was considered the grandfather of Russian music. And Adelaide was his wife, and again, a historical figure. But we did not know much about her. But was she a prodigy like she is in your book? One supposed so, because she had an interesting story. She was an orphan born and raised in Pondicherry, French India. And when she appeared in. In history, she was a teenager in Moscow, and she was extremely talented. She wanted to become a virtuoso as John Field was, but this was 20 years. She was 20 years ahead of Clara Schumann, and women were not encouraged to go onstage. She became an important music teacher in Russia. Yeah, I mean, the beliefs about women that she's brought up with are that you need to learn to sing. You need to learn to smile. You need to be pretty. But the audience wants to feel more intelligent than you are. Yes. And then once you're married, you don't have to worry about music or poetry anymore. Yes, and that was the time of her life. And you're right. They were encouraged to be intelligent just enough, not too much. Right. Not too much to be threatening. Yes, and as her grandmother in Pondicherry said, too much knowledge would be like. Too much spice in the food. It would indicate not fresh material. I think it's interesting that you chose two people who are involved with music, not words. Because you live deep in the world of words, both as a reader and a writer. But music can have lyrics, but classical music, piano music, doesn't require words. Right. Was that a choice that you made intentionally, to write about people who aren't obsessed with language in the way that you are? Yes. In fact, I think I've had the feeling both times after my children's death that words often fall short. And falling short doesn't mean not succeeding. Falling short doesn't mean failing. But when I started a new project, I liked a subject. That words naturally fall short. So music is that choice. You took piano lessons in preparation for the book. Do you still play? I do. I cannot really claim I play. I'm still practicing. I'm a young pianist on the piano. I have been taking piano lessons for two and a half years. I auditioned with my teacher with a book proposal. Right. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. rather than any skill, the piano. Because you'd never played before? No, I've never had any musical background. But I feel that if I wanted to write about two prodigies on the keyboard, I should at least know a few things. So you write in the book that Adelaide teaches her ward how to play piano, and she says it did not matter if the girl had talent or not. In fact, she turned out to be no more than a mediocre pianist. But piano was a good way for her to learn how to count, mark, and endure time. Did you take piano lessons in part for research, but in part to learn how to endure time after your son's death? Yes, I began my piano lesson at the end of 2023, purely to get to know how to play the piano. And James died in February 2024. So two months into my piano lesson, he died. And it occurred to me that piano or music is a good way for me to count time. Because music is about time. It's about counting the measure, counting the rhythm. And also music is about to be engaged with something else. You know, you can sit in your sadness all day, long and doing nothing or crying. Or like me, I could just sit there and just play the same drill again and again as a way to know I was in a way staying in touch with the world. You've brought several themes that you've experienced in your life into the new novel. And one of them is about prodigies, like your younger son was a prodigy. His gift was intelligence. And he was constantly like reading and researching and learning. Give us some examples of how like brilliant he was at a super young age. Right. You know, both my children could be called prodigies. But James, my younger son, our younger son, especially, was extraordinarily odd and brilliant. So I remember when he was three and Vincent was seven or Vincent was six. And Vincent asked James, do you know how babies get born? And James gave his bigger brother a sort of lecture on how human beings reproduce. And of course, we were all shocked. And then he ended the lecture saying, you can find that. You can find that information on page 76 of the Encyclopedia of Human Bodies. And that's the kind of thing I think it was both lovely and odd. What was it like being the parent of a prodigy being so much smarter than most adults in a lot of ways? In terms of his span of knowledge, I wouldn't say he had the wisdom of having lived many years. But he had like the facts at his disposal. Facts that like most people don't know. Most adults don't even know. They know about the facts of life. Yes. But he knew like scientific facts and physics and just like all kinds of things. So what responsibilities or what awe did that bring for you as a mother? I think it brought awe and bafflement. I would say we were greatly baffled. And also, I remember. He was five or six. He said, Mommy, you will never see the world I see. It's full of doubts and squiggly lines. And that, again, was a strange perception of the world, as you say, we adults did not have access to. I have no idea what he meant by that. Whether that was like literal. And if it was, that's kind of disturbing. I don't know. I did not know either. And I mean, he did ask, what is the responsibility or the difficulty of bringing up a child very brilliant? And I think the decision, some people would say, well, you really have to train him to be the next Einstein. But we did not want him to be the next Einstein. We wanted him to be a normal, happy boy living in an ordinary life. You said that you thought your older son was kind of a problem. He was a prodigy, too. What was his gift? He was a brilliant painter. And we still had all his paintings around the house. He was an oboist. And when he wanted to learn the oboe, the oboe teacher said he was a bit young because he was eight when he wanted to learn the oboe. But he was certain because he was like everybody else, was started on the piano. And he could articulate. The piano was not his instrument. He wanted to play the oboe. But mostly he wrote beautiful poetry. He was a great poet. And he was a great reader. So, I mean, I wouldn't call him an outlier as James was. But he was brilliant and fun and interesting. Did you teach your sons to read before they were in school? I did not. It's interesting. I think I did not teach them. They pick up reading by themselves. And I respected their quiet reading time, especially James. James started reading when he was two. So I certainly did not teach him. And he just picked it up. Winston started reading early. We, I think, you know, this stereotypical idea of an Asian-American parent or Asian parent, being the tiger parent, tiger mom. I think I am, I was the opposite of tiger mom. I was sort of free-range chicken, free-range chicken mom. So I raised them as free-range chickens. I'm trying to understand how a two-year-old can teach himself to read. I know. I mean, it's mind-boggling because he's a preschool teacher. I worried at the time. I worried about his potty training, you know, diaper training. And so I always talk with the teacher about potty training. And she was quite relaxed. She said, come on, you know, how many kids could read in their diapers? You shouldn't worry about it. Well, your sons were opposite in one way, in the sense that your older son was, like, very emotional, deeply experiencing highs and lows. And your youngest. And your son withheld emotion. And, you know, I don't know what he experienced, but he apparently didn't express it. Yes. And I think, again, that, you know, having two children, having had two children, sort of quite opposite in many ways. As a parent, I could only say a lot of things were given to them. And they were born that way. And so, yes, I think Vincent was extremely artistic and emotional and joyful and sorrowful. And also articulate. He could articulate all his feelings. And James, as you said, did not want to talk. And we could only just bring them up as who they were, in a way. Do you feel. Do you feel that you were born with a gift, too, as a writer? That that was something innate? You know, that's a good question that I could never answer well. But I wouldn't say I was born with innate talent. But I was born with innate curiosity. And also sensitivity to things that did not quite make sense. So I grew up in China. And, for instance, when I was little, all the adults would say, you know, since you're a child, you have no right to decide who you want to be or what you want to do. And my mother even had a saying, something along the line, that an adult decides and a child follows. I was quite young, you know, four or five. I just couldn't make sense out of all these teachings because I thought I was as capable of thinking. And I thought, well, why did I have to follow them? So I think that sort of sensitivity to things that are very, very nonsensical, I think maybe that's one thing that made me into a writer. What was one of the most upsetting things that your mother commanded you to do that you didn't want to? It's a perception of what mother would know about a child. So my mother's line was, I came from her body, so she knew me through and through without having to talk to me or without having to look at me. She already knew me inside out, which even as a child didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't make sense. It's almost like your mother claimed to have omniscience about you, which, you know, nobody has omniscience about anyone. Your mother was a teacher, but as a mother, she was a mother. Emotionally and physically abusive. What did you learn as a mother from being mothered by someone who was abusive? I had, well, I think my, I mean, early on I said I raised free-range chickens as a joke. And I think mostly I raised my children with utter respect of them as individuals. And they always could say, or they always could say how they felt about a situation. And everything was not dictated from the parent's side. It was always a discussion and a negotiation sometimes. So I think if I did one thing right as a mother was that I did not put my wills upon them. My guest is Ian Lee. Her new novel is called Music Against the Night. Her Pulitzer Prize winning memoir is called Things in Nature Merely Grow. If you're having suicidal thoughts or having. a mental health crisis, you can talk with someone at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Just text or call 988. That's 988. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. So you started your novel, correct me if I'm wrong here, you started your novel when your older son had already died, and then you completed it after your younger son died as well. I want to talk with you about how that changed your life, but first I want to hear how it changed your novel and what you wanted to say. Yes, when I started the novel, Vincent already died, but James was alive. And three quarters into the first draft, James died. You know, earlier we talked about playing the piano as a way of marking time. The day after James died, my best friend said, I suppose I'm going to play the piano. And I said, I'm going to play the piano. Thank you. Why did you give birth to us? That must have left you speechless. Yes, I was speechless. And I was also, you know, I think any mother confronted by this question would think, did I, you know, did I make a mistake bringing these children to the world when the world is falling apart and burning down? I suppose there's no good answer to that. And I still sometimes think about that question, and I still think, oh, I don't have an answer for you, Vincent. What did you, he said you understand suffering so well. What did you tell your children about your own attempt at suicide? Well, they certainly, they knew the fact. But they also knew, and I think my then therapist had a good point, is I should not hide these things from them, but I should work to, I should work on getting better so they would see that someone could come back from this deep depression and suffering and could still have joy in life. And I think that's exactly what I believed in. So. So, I mean, after my suicidal crisis, you know, we went on living, traveling, doing things together, you know, working together, just as a way to say, yes, it's terrible to be in that much pain, but it's also possible to live on. Is that what you meant when you said you can suffer better? Yes. And I realized that's one thing. I did not teach James was after Vincent died, we all suffered so greatly. But James' death taught me to suffer better, is to say, I can do it and I can live with my pain and sorrow without ever wanting to stop feeling the pain. And in a way, I think I said I would be capable and I would be okay living my life out in the abyss. But still having fun and enjoying things and doing things and staying in touch with the world. I think that's important. Are you more resolved to live to keep their memories alive? Ah, yes. I clearly you hear the hesitant hesitancy in my answer. I would say. Someone put this to me and I think it's a, it's a good point. And someone said, said this very wise thing to me and said, you know, so long as you live, you keep the children's memory alive and not to keep them alive because I don't believe, you know, you can keep people alive in your heart, but there will always be me and my husband thinking about this, and I think it's a good point. And someone said, said this very wise thing to me and said, you know, you can keep the children's memory alive and not to keep them alive because I don't believe, you know, you can keep people alive in your heart, but there will always be me and my husband thinking about this, and I think it's a good point. Okay, we need to take another break here, so I'm going to reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Ian Lee. If you're having suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis, there's someone you can talk with at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Just call or text 988. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Of the bomb? Never. For some reason, this is so interesting because I don't think I was afraid of that, or maybe I should put it this way. I think when I was growing up, there were many more concrete harms done to children. So the nuclear weapons were really too far away from our lives. You spent a year in the Army, the People's Liberation Army. Were women drafted? It was a special situation. We were not drafted. We were going to enter college. And this was right after 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. So students who went to my university, which is Peking University, because Peking University was quite active during the pro-democratic movement, the students entering the university would be sent to Peking University. the military, to the army for a year of training. Mostly it's sort of a brainwashing experience. How were you brainwashed? We just learned, I mean, we went there in 1991, which was quite a striking time because Soviet Union just stopped being Soviet Union. So we would just be reading a lot of politics and world affairs, all from the communist point of view. It didn't work. And also, it wasn't easy to brainwash me, I would say that. Yeah, I get that impression. It wouldn't have been easy. So what role were you expected to play as a woman in the army? We did a lot of just physical training, formation training and shooting. And it turned out I was a very good sharpshooter, which was so surprising. Because I was a peaceful, peaceful, peaceful, or I was, I hated, I hated. Everything about weapons, but I was quite good at that. The other thing I was quite good at, which was also I did not take any pleasure or I did not feel proud of, was I was a good propaganda writer. Oh, you're a good writer. What was the propaganda like? Because your writing is so honest and with the perfect word to describe everything. Yes, but I was in the army and I remember my squad leader always assigned me. We have weekly assignment to write some sort of propagandas, sort of army propagandas. And I always got that assignment. And so I sort of protested and I said, it's not fair. It's always me writing this. You have to assign someone else. And my squad leader said that you could do this where you could go cleaning the pigsty or cleaning the toilet. Which would you like to do? Of course, I wrote propagandas because I hated cleaning toilets. We've talked a lot about tragedy during this interview. What gives you the most pleasure now? Yes, gardening. I'm an amateur gardener, but I love gardening. So gardening gives me a lot of joy. And taking a walk with my husband. We call it our daily constitutional. And then just talking with my friends and writing. You know, I do want to make a point. You know, I have experienced many sad things in life. But I always want to make a distinction. I am sad, but I'm not unhappy. And sometimes I think people forget sadness and unhappiness are two different things. What's the difference? I think sadness, oftentimes people are afraid of sadness as though it's something dark or heavy. No, sadness is just part of a life. I think sadness is just an inevitable part of life. And I'm fine living with my sadness. And sadness does not mean you're sad all the time where you cannot find joy, where you cannot tell a joke. But unhappiness, I think. Oftentimes there's this discontentment. And there's this eagerness to change for another life. And that kind of unhappiness is not healthy, I suppose. Ian Lee, thank you so much. I really appreciate what you had to say. Thank you so much for having me. Ian Lee's new novel is called Music Against the Night. Tomorrow on Fresh Air. How the melting of polar ice has opened new sea routes and made the Arctic Ocean a new zone of superpower competition. We'll talk with writer Rana Faruhar. She got an up-close look aboard a Coast Guard icebreaker. She says China has big ambitions and some advantages over the U.S. Her new book is called Sea Change. I hope you'll join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.