Yiyun Li and the eternal desire to establish contact

It's funny how stories can find you at just the right time.

Yiyun Li's story On the Street Where You Live (New Yorker, 1/9/2017) captures a mother's struggle to calibrate her expectations and ideas in light of her autistic son. Six year old Jude sees two specialists four times a week, crafted a sign for kindergarten, "'I'm Not talking because I DON't WaNt TO!'" and in general seems to prefer a SpongeBob pillow and himself. Parroting a banal children's book, Becky frets, "Oh, the places he'll not go, and the things he'll miss in life!"

Becky works against his wishes, his bent. She keeps a diary for him in which she tries to capture all the interesting people she encounters in her daily life with the aim of one day sharing it with him, to give him a glimpse of the richness of human life he's blinded to in the cocoon he wraps around himself. But, she realizes at one point, this book is for her. An exercise in defining normal, admirable.

She fears she's failing her son. That she lacks the imagination to truly appreciate him as  he is, raising the question of whether any of us truly appreciate the other, the otherness of others.

At the ribbon cutting for an art museum her surgeon husband patronizes, she stands in front of a Jackson Pollock, alongside another spectator, who whispers conspiratorially, "'It makes me angry that I don't own the art work. I'd hate to share with others. They'd never see what I see." Becky is taken aback. The work itself, "a masterpiece staring back in silence," has challenged her. Fixed and unchanging itself, it seems to demand change from her, demand she can't offer-appreciation, understanding, comprehension.

Li has a surrealistic, wacky edge at times. As she continues to stare at the masterpiece, a Sherlock Holmes impersonator comes besides her and asks Becky if she likes the piece. Becky doesn't really say but wonders what "would happen if somebody would splash more colors onto the painting." Faux Sherlock,, with a cool, rational air and elevated vocabulary responds that this would be vandalism causing Becky to wonder if it would be such if one owned the painting. Sherlock asks Becky, Jude's mother, the telling questions: "'Might it be that you perceive imperfection in the painting and want to add your own touch? Or even destroy it?...was [she] an artist?"

Becky defines herself as something other than an artist. She believes she fails her son, fails to appreciate his oddity because she is too normal. She adopts as her own the line of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, "Who knows better'n I do what normal is?" She doesn't know what to do or make of her boy. The exchange with Sherlock suggest there is an art to mothering, to relating to the people around one.  That art does not lie in trying to change what we encounter. In Li's vision, people present a discrete spectrum of difference and the act of imagination is not in trying to erase, ignore and rewrite that difference in acts of vandalism. But, to simply see it and work toward giving it a safe place in the world.

Born in China and a native Chinese speaker, Li writes movingly in the January 2nd edition of the New Yorker (To Speak Is To Blunder) of her decision to write, think, dream and speak almost exclusively in English. She claims that the decision was crucial. According to her, we all require a private language in distinction to the public language we all use. The private language allows us to express our own private thoughts, to capture the nuance, the unspeakable, the vague aspects of our life that would otherwise go unsaid, unnamed. She can only capture memories if she imagines them in English. She can only begin to write of her past if she is writing of it in stories, in English. She can recall memories from her past because "I have given these moments-what's possible to be put into English-to my characters." Writing in English allows her to "feel invisible but not estranged. It is the position I believe I always want in life. But with every pursuit there is the danger of crossing a line, from invisibility to erasure."

The essay gets confusing. Li writes of being confined to a mental hospital twice after suicide attempts. There she finds consolation of a kind in the writing of Katherine Mansfield; she "devoured Mansfield''s words like thirst-quenching poison." Some of the words: "'There is something profound & terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact."

I wonder if Li writes to establish contact with others or with herself. In the story, Jude claims his greatest fear is monophobia, a fear of being alone. Li never clearly articulates the dynamic underlying this autistic boys monophobia. Does he shun others to avoid confirming that he truly is alone? Does he fear being alone despite the fact he equally fears others. I would guess Li feels a deep kinship to the boy. As do I.