“A year ago, Jiayu’s mother had called to report the death of Yingying. Ovarian cancer, forty-three, her daughter just starting middle school. Jiayu could not see her childhood playmate as a woman in a coffin, a mother’s lost child, a child’s lost mother. But what difference did seeing make? Perhaps grief was nothing but disbelief.”
—“When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” Yiyun Li