Vincent is Yiyun Li’s older son, a flamboyant and artistic individual whose presence is defined by intellectual and emotional intensity. Described as living “feelingly,” he was a precocious child with a love for language and a theatrical personality, once protesting that “‘adjectives and adverbs are my guilty pleasure!’” (19). Vincent’s brilliance and expressive nature, however, were coupled with a deep despair that Li recognized from an early age, forcing her to live in dread of his potential suicide for years.

His death at 16 is the first catastrophe that shatters Li’s world. In its aftermath, she could continue their relationship through writing; her novel Where Reasons End is a book-length conversation that captures his voice and wit. In this memoir, Vincent represents an articulate presence whose loss is a wound but whose memory remains accessible through words and feelings. He is the child whose love for life’s beauty and drama made his decision to leave it an agonizing paradox.

James, Li’s younger son, is a quiet, intensely private, and logical thinker who stands in stark contrast to his expressive brother, Vincent. Preferring silence, he once wore a kindergarten sign that read, “IM NOt TaLKING Becuase I DON’t WaNT TO!” (31). He lived “thinkingly,” possessing a formidable intellect and immersing himself in the works of philosophers like Wittgenstein. After Vincent’s death, James’s stoicism deepened, becoming both admirable and impenetrable to his mother.

James’s suicide at 19 plunges Li into a new, more absolute abyss. Unlike Vincent, whom she could conjure in fiction, James’s private nature makes him impossible to bring back through words in the same way. Li recognizes that writing a book for James requires a different approach, one grounded in the philosophical rigor he applied to his own life. James thus represents the limits of a mother’s understanding and the challenge of honoring a child whose essence was to turn away from the world.

Yiyun Li’s mother is largely discussed in the text through her legacy of abuse, which fundamentally shapes Li’s understanding of suffering, cruelty, and motherhood. Li’s childhood in China was defined by her mother’s unpredictable violence and psychological manipulation. Her mother justified this cruelty with a warped logic of love, creating an environment where affection and pain were intertwined. This forced Li to develop emotional restraint and intellectual stoicism as survival mechanisms which, in some ways, influence her response to the losses of her sons.

In the memoir, Li’s mother functions as important backstory, contextualizing Li’s own struggle with her mental health and her parenting philosophy. Having survived this childhood, Li was determined to provide her sons a safe and comfortable home. This history illuminates Li’s fear of her own periods of mental illness and her decision to mother with careful respect. Her mother represents a baseline of human cruelty from which Li built her own life.