woe is me

as is destined, but mostly because of my own actions

Short Stories, 2023

I’ve spent the better half of my newsletter-allotted writing time trying to find a particular website. It was called something like The Grief Project. Upon opening, it was completely blank except for a little note in the centre written by somebody, somewhere, who was grieving. When you clicked, a new note appeared. It was one of those early Internet spaces that was hopeful, pure, and collaborative—the antithesis of being online today. I’ve tried to find it, but there’s no trace. I’m not sure if it was a hallucinatory memory or a lived experience, but that doesn’t really matter because I remember how it felt to read those notes and to spend my days listening to strangers. 

Wednesday’s Child is a collection of short stories written over fourteen years. In the acknowledgement, Li writes, “During this period, I lost my friend William Trevor, my mentor James Alan McPherson, my father, and my son Vincent. They live among these pages now.” And reading the stories—each brilliant, dense, and intensely observational—feels like sharing your friend’s grief. In the stories, people across the world are trying to make sense of some kind of loss; the sole survivor of a teenage group suicide attempts to understand the event decades later, a woman close to her death begins a new friendship, an old man emails a young woman every year. I almost always find short story collections impossible to talk about for one unifying reason: they predictably vary in quality. But every story in this collection is so delicate and delicious that baser things like plot and character are meaningless in Yi’s exquisite hands. I’m convinced she could turn an air conditioner manual into a profound meditation. 

The title comes from the old poem that I love and hate in equal measure, where Wednesday’s Child is doomed to a life full of woe. Similarly, you can imagine the central characters from each story being born on Wednesdays, doomed to lose. At one point, a character mentions that those born on Wednesdays in the Year of the Snake are the most unlucky. Reading this felt like an intimate insult, because I was born in the Year of the Snake, on a Wednesday. I eventually put the rhyme to the test: Phoebe Bridgers and Bob Dylan are both Wednesday’s children, yet Sufjan Stevens—the most woeful of all—was born on a mere Tuesday. What does this solve? Absolutely nothing. Did I delight in trying to unravel my destiny? Yes, of course. 

Song - Fourth of July

Film - The Farewell