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Li, who left China in 1996 and now writes in her “adopted language” of English, doesn’t immediately appear to struggle with inarticulacy. Though she came to the United States to study immunology, Li, who is now 52, has since written five novels, three short story collections, and two memoirs. If anything, one might be more struck by her capacity to metabolize painful experiences so swiftly into words. In the months following Vincent’s suicide, she wrote Where Reasons End—a novel staged as a dialogue between a mother and her dead son, that emerged, she recalls in the new book, “without any conscious planning.” One night, while reading an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, Li comes across the arch greeting “Mother dear”—something Vincent would say—and with those words, “the book arrived, opening with that phrase.” Li describes the act of writing Where Reasons End as almost intuitive, conjuring her son through feeling. But if “the book for Vincent,” as she calls it, came to her with relative ease, “the book for James” presents a different story. Unlike his older brother—a talkative child who claimed “adjectives and adverbs” as his “guilty pleasure”—James has a voice that proves more recalcitrant. For months after his death, Li finds she “cannot conjure him up in any manner.”

The reader senses how Li wishes to invent an entirely new vocabulary for James—one that might capture both his linguistic talents (he knew Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian) as well as his logical mind, capable of envisioning abstract dimensions that exceeded the verbal. “Words fall short,” Li confesses, especially after a catastrophe. But this has rarely stopped the writer from trying: “if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children,” she continues, “an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.” That Li suspects her book for James will inevitably fail him does not release her from attempting to write it. Words not only are Li’s guilty pleasure, but are her way to “make some sense out of this senseless life.”

For the writer, every book poses different challenges, just as, for a mother, every child does. Li recalls Vincent, who lived “flamboyantly and demandingly,” as having been expressive from an early age. He was, in the Chinese phrase, “prone to feelings.” But James, despite his proficiencies with language, was comparatively reticent—the “antithesis of attention,” as Li’s friend puts it. (And after Vincent’s death, Li observes, he grew even more silent.) How should a person speak on behalf of someone who would prefer not to speak for themselves? James’s book required a different framing: Instead of a fictionalized conversation, Things in Nature Merely Grow is narrated in the mother’s first-person voice—a memoir told through Li’s unflinching gaze alone.