New Yorker Fiction Review #286: "Wednesday's Child" by Yiyun Li

Review of the short story from the Jan. 23, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

Upon a quick review of my own previous blog entries, this is the sixth short story I've read by Yiyun Lee in The New Yorker. The only other authors I can think of that I've read and reviewed as many times on this blog are T. Coraghessan Boyle, Haruki Murakami, and Thomas McGuane, each having appeared on this blog a whopping seven times. 

I've not always been overly fond of Yiyun Li's short stories, but they have been growing on me the past couple years. Yiyun Li's material is that of womanhood, motherhood, narrative, and memory. Her writing explores how we go about our daily lives and relationships while carrying whatever baggage we carry from our parents, our past lovers, our past selves, tragedies, triumphs, and the choices we made (or didn't make) and have to live with. 

"Wednesday's Child" is a tightly-wound, but in my opinion somewhat sterile exploration of parenthood, loss, grief, and mommy-issues, all rolled into one. Told in close third-person, we get the story of Rosalie, who is on a trip from the Netherlands to Belgium, having lost her 16-year old daughter, Marcie, to suicide fairly recently (perhaps within the last year). 

The short story opens as Rosalie is waiting in Amsterdam for a delayed train to arrive so she can go to Brussels. Why is the train delayed? Because a man (purposely or not, we don't know) walked in front of it and was killed. This is an obvious parallel to the fact that Rosalie's daughter committed suicide by laying on a railroad track. And yet, this grisly coincidence seems to almost go unacknowledged by the main character, although surely not unnoticed. But how would we the reader know without being shown? Told? 

I applaud Yiyun Li for getting this story to operate on multiple levels. For example, the main character meditates on death as well as her negatively-charged relationship with her own mother all while riding through the Dutch countryside on the train towards Belgium. Toward the end of the story, a pregnant passenger's water breaks causing yet another emergency, and another related (even tangentially) to Rosalie's state of grief. It is a Wednesday, and Rosalie's daughter was born on a Wednesday. 

What I think Yiyun Li does well in this story is to create or synthesize the way our internal lives sort of churn things over and over, while life is unfolding before us at high speed (or whatever speed life happens to be unfolding at that particular time). We are all on a high-speed train; there is no time to "stop and figure it all out," as it were. We have accumulated a certain amount of baggage, that we can never really get rid of, only hope to become at peace with, meanwhile new things are happening -- emergencies and otherwise -- that we have to deal with. Some of them are symbolic, some of them mean nothing, but we attempt to draw meaning from all the same. 

My complaint in this story is primarily with a lack of emotion. Rosalie's 16-year-old daughter -- her only child -- has killed herself relatively recently. And yet the story reads though Rosalie is emotionally absent, almost robotic. I've known at least two people who've lost adolescent children; they don't take it as lightly as Rosalie seems to in this story, even years or decades later. And in this story the incident happened just a few years before. Otherwise, I give Yiyun Li a lot of credit for the way she attempts to map the terrain of our inner lives. I think she succeeds in doing this, even if the main character is not racked by sobs of grief. 

Illustration by Camille Deschiens.