Things in nature merely grow

Reading Li Yiyun's <Things in nature merely grow> is a challenge, it was so hard, tears kept coming as I went. Only someone who has truly seen the vastness of the world and tasted the full bitterness of life can really understand the sense of reality - and the helplessness woven all through it.

I cannot understand how anyone could say the author is profiting from her own son's deaths - feeding, as the old saying goes, on a steamed bun soaked in her children's blood - or could go on denouncing her for standing by, in the name of her children's free will, as both sons walked one after the other toward death.

A mother who had never tried with all her heart to love her own flesh and blood - how could she have summoned the patience, day after day, years after year, to cut a perfectly symmetrical apple for her elder son Vincent's lunchbox, or to take such pains to make pancakes in every shape for her younger son James? The details. Learn to read the details.

To me, not every mother is capable of such devotion. Of course, the unkind may read it instead as indulgence - spoiling the children, yielding to their every whim until they grew so unrestrained that they ended their own lives. But if life could be held entirely within our control, where would the sudden and the unforeseeable come from?

Who among us could ever be a perfect mother? I am in no position to judge. After all, in Hong Kong, just rencently, two lives were lost: a 48-year-old mother, after quarreling with her 12-year - daughter over a matter of schooling, went back to her room and jumped from her bedroom window; that same night, the daughter ended her own life in exactly the same way.

Surely someone will leap in to say: parents, don't be so strict with your children - too much discipline is wrong; too much freedom is wrong too. To be a parent is simply too hard. And the world's idle chatter is too rampant, is it not?

What else might be done to change, or to prevent, a child's turn toward suicide? There is probably always a great deal - yes, surely there is; everyone thinks so - in the books the sons chose to read, say, or in other things one might gently steer. But did the author do all she could, in that moment, at that time?

I believe she did. After all, here is a mother whose own childhood had left her, to one degree or another, shadowed by her own mother's near-cruel upbringing; who as an adult had herself known depression and attempted suicide; who had long been in the care of a therapist.

Such a mother could hardly have remade her children into people who were bright and untroubled, who took whole delight in life and felt every living day was worth it. It is not as easy as we imagine. And yet we are always so good at appraising other people's lives without the slightest effort, from the comfortable clarity of the onlooker, as though we alone were the appointed spokesmen of truth.

When will we learn not to pass glib judgement on anyone - or to behave like the bewildering strangers the author describes near the end of her book : the self-righteous ones who would exploit her name for their own gain, or who, over some absurd and childish trifle, would denounce a mother who had lost her children and, in the same breath, denounce the dead children too?

I have always held to the belief that to write is to open the heart of one's truest self - and so , too, is to live. We live not for anyone else, but for ourselves. Only once we grasp this can a book like this one let us understand all things, and cherish all the more the present we already hold. And in the face of so much we are powerless to change, we accept the present, and drift with the current, each of us toward our own separate end.