Today, a "heavy" news suddenly came on the Internet in my country that the second son of a well-known Chinese female writer living in the United States has died.
The well-known writer is Li Yiyun, a professor at Princeton University, who said that her second son, James Li, was a freshman at Princeton University who died after being hit by a Princeton DINKY train at the intersection of Faculty Road on February 16 local time.
Sources say James Li died after being run over by a train. Therefore, judging from the news currently circulating on the Internet, Li Yiyun's second son is also very likely to die by suicide.
At present, the information publicly available is also inconclusive.
And in 2017, her eldest son, who was 16 at the time, committed suicide. In other words, both of Li Yiyun's sons died, and probably both died by suicide.
Whether the second son died in an accident, someone else, or committed suicide, it is obvious that for Li Yiyun, this is a huge tragedy. It's just that if it's also a suicide, the tragedy will obviously be even greater.
In September 2017, in the process of creating "Should I Go", Li Yiyun's 16-year-old eldest son Vincent committed suicide. Subsequently, Li Yiyun created the latest autobiographical ** "When Reason Ends" based on his son.
According to the current information published on the Internet, Li Yiyun was born in Beijing, China in 1972, his father is a nuclear physicist, and his mother is a primary school teacher. Later, she was admitted to Peking University, where she graduated from the School of Life Sciences in 1996 and went to the United States to study for a doctorate in immunology.
She then lived in the United States and insisted on writing only in English.
In 2010, she was selected by The New Yorker as one of the 20 most outstanding young people under the age of 40 for her short story collection "A Thousand Years of Cultivation and Sleeping Together". Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, but she has refused to translate her work into Chinese.
It was not until November 2023 that Li Yiyun's ** "Should I Go" was published in China that the taboo was broken, and "Should I Go" became Li Yiyun's first ** to be translated into Chinese and published.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Li Yiyun once said that he never used and does not intend to write in his native language. Thinking and writing in English is entirely for personal reasons.
It is said that Li Yiyun's husband, also surnamed Li, is a Chinese engineer. Li Yiyun's education for children is also all English and American.
According to public reports on the Internet, Li Yiyun tried to commit suicide twice in New York and California in 2012 and was hospitalized**. According to the report, she had serious mental health problems at the time, developed suicidal tendencies, and was eventually diagnosed with depression.
So, to paraphrase a sentence from a big host, ask:What was the reason for the death of both sons of this beautiful writer?
Is there something wrong with her mother, or is there something wrong with the family, something wrong with family education, or something wrong with the society and environment in which the child lives?
This is really worth pondering!