26 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
PERSONAL HISTORY
MAKE MY HOUSE YOUR INN
The words that went unspoken.
BY YIYUN LI
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKYUNG LEE
I
’ve been ghosted, I told a friend on a
Friday afternoon, when I hadn’t been
able to reach Julia for days. The follow-
ing week, I would be out of town, and
Julia—I have changed her name—was
scheduled to take care of our dog and
our younger son in the hours before my
husband got home from work, but she
had not replied to my messages for
confirmation. It was unlike her. The pre-
vious two summers when we’d travelled,
she had sent multiple photos and video
clips, from our home in New Jersey, to
let us know that the dog was happy and
the garden was prospering. On the days
that I was away, she picked up our son
from school and had dinner with him.
She transcribed their conversations,
about history and politics, physics and
feminism, Internet memes and Tokyo’s
rush hours, and sent them to me, ac-
companied by emojis.
Our little cockapoo was attacked by
a pit bull when he was a puppy, and sub-
sequently lost his courage, like the lion
in “The Wizard of Oz.” Our younger
son is a reticent boy, and the person clos-
est to him—his older brother—died by
suicide shortly after we met Julia. She
had befriended both the boy and the
dog as no other adult had.
The calls I made to Julia went straight
to her voice mail, which was full. In-
creasingly agitated, I Googled, and found
a two-sentence obituary. Death, in the
past sixteen months, had not been a
stranger, having taken my elder son, my
mother-in-law, and my father. I had not
cried the day that Vincent died, or later
when first my mother-in-law and then
my father died. But, seeing Julia’s obit-
uary, I broke into uncontrollable sobs.
A friend listened to me cry on the phone
and told me that I was crying for the
others, too. Another friend wrote to me
that night and said that she, too, be-
longed to the “delayed crying club—
and those tears do collect interest.”
M
y father had heart trouble for
more than half his life, but he
had stayed active until his last weeks.
The day before he went into heart sur-
gery, from which he would never regain
consciousness, he told me that he was
prepared for any outcome. I had the
urge then to confess to him the loss of
Vincent, his eldest grandchild. I had
flown to Beijing, where I grew up and
where my parents still lived, when his
health declined.
My mother-in-law, who also lived in
China, died not long after Vincent did.
We had kept the news from her, for she
was already frail. The thought that she
did not have to suffer the insufferable
was a small solace. But the reason I didn’t
tell my parents was murkier. The day
after Vincent died, my friend Edmund
White texted me from New York: “Come
to the city. I’ll hold you and we’ll grieve
together.” A friend’s mother e-mailed,
“I wish I could be with you tonight so
I could put my arms around you and
try to soothe your pain.” My mother is
not one to put her arms around me. My
father was not one to express his feel-
ings easily.
In the weeks after Vincent’s death,
I thought of telling my father and ask-
ing him to keep the news to himself.
But that would’ve been the cruellest
thing to have done to him, even though
he was among the most stoic people
I’ve known. When my mother finally
learned of Vincent’s suicide, she left a
phone message: “All children should
love their parents. I just don’t under-
stand how a child could do that to his
parents.”
That I shed tears for Julia did not
mean I knew her well. These are a few
things I remember: she once told me
that she felt more comfortable with an-
imals than with people; the first sum-
mer she dog-sat for us, she asked me to
pick ten novels from my shelf—she read
