Dialogue with the dead

When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never write or be published in it again. She has described this decision as being like a suicide. In languages, she suggests, we form our identities. Leaving one behind is a death of a version of our self; and starting afresh in a new language is a kind of rebirth.

In Where Reasons End, the English language, in which Li has made her name as a Chinese-American author, has transformed into something the narrator can no longer depend upon. She stumbles over words, recognising that she no longer knows, or perhaps never knew, their true meanings, struggles to remember adjectives, and cycles through etymologies, searching for deeper understandings of words she has used for years (‘I looked up the word suffer. It comes from sub, from below, and ferre, to bear’).