Yiyun Li

you would think the same calamity should never strike a family twice

They could read your verses back to you

Jokes have barbs

Had I been a tempestuous person, I would have cut in and told M. Devaux that he was as

We, like the pigs in the sty and the sparrows on the windowsill and the crickets in the grass, were on the other side of where he was.

Stop being morbid

bouquet of wildflowers on his counter

HE WAY WE LIVED BACK THEN—the stench and the filth, the animals running amok, and the people crazier than animals—these things I had not found extraordinary until I was told, later in Paris and in England, that they were. In fact, those words—stench, filth, amok, crazy—were not mine, but other people’s.

And then tomorrow morning, when you looked at your mud-colored coffee, glistening bacon, and runny yolk, you’d remember the maggots unearthed by the torrential rain, or the screeching of the butchered pigs, their panting replaced by a liquid hiss, or the chickens that were half hatched and then died in their shells.

each had their own brood of children