We all know the personal tragedy Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University and acclaimed author Yiyun Li carries — the deaths of her two children James and Vincent by suicide, one after the other. To that, she has written many stories about coping with her grief, managing her writing after her sons' deaths.
A recurring character in her stories is Lilian Pang, a woman in her early fifties who has also lost her two sons Oscar and Jude within six years of each other. And Lilian Pang is the protagonist in this story as well. We also see bits of the author's life and thoughts in here. This is 'Calm Sea and Hard Faring' Yiyun Li, published in The New Yorker on March 1, 2026.
This story takes us back to 2015 when Lilian still has her younger son Jude alive and in fourth grade in NorCal. She agreed to be chaperon, along with six other parents, to 40 children on a five-day school trip to a learning center helmed by two naturalists. These parent-chaperons had to drive the children around in mini-vans, feed them, keep them entertained, clean and safe. Wow.
Martha, one of the mothers, came over. “Five days, fifty people per meal, three meals a day,” she said. “The cooking and the cleaning are all on us. And the driving and the babysitting. We were crazy to sign up for this.”
Then of course this trip was painful since a kid Hazel went missing for a few hours before being found. She didn't have an accident, she wasn't injured. She was found sitting against a tree at the bottom of slope, very much uninjured and alive; she simply wanted time to herself and not return to reality. She wanted to escape this world on her terms. The situation was thankfully resolved after Hazel allowed herself to be coaxed.
Jeremy, in his calm legal voice, told the girl that she should take her time, that they would wait until she felt ready. They could send for a blanket and a pillow, and they—Jude’s mom and he—would stay with her. They had all night and half of the next morning, until eleven o’clock, when they needed to be getting on the road, because all the parents, including hers, would be waiting for the arrival of the caravans at the school by two o’clock. “It’s half past nine now,” Jeremy said. “For the next thirteen hours, we will defer to you. We won’t force you. We won’t abandon you. But by ten-thirty tomorrow, if you cannot make up your mind, I’ll be obliged to carry you back.”
They waited, and perhaps Hazel was waiting, too, but, when neither Lilian nor Jeremy said anything further, Hazel opened her eyes. By breaking down the wall between that night and the next day, Jeremy had annulled the child’s resolution to dissolve life. Lilian could recognize the despair in Hazel’s eyes, just as she would later recognize it in Oscar’s. The unsaid words in those young eyes were what some parents would not understand, and other parents would never hear, but, even if a parent did hear and understand, what could she do? The Hazels and the Oscars and the Judes of the world, children mid-journey in their hard-faring, were asking the same question: How can you mandate hope and optimism when no one can save us from our outliers’ lot?
This story lost me slightly before mid-way. It rambled a little to elephant seals and the musings of a mother watching the kids around the bonfire.
I have zero interest in reading about parents' feelings as chaperons or their feelings towards their children or other children, and all that musings. She remembers the conversation with Jude before his death in his freshman year at Princeton. They don't appeal to me. Like I said, I have no empathetic maternal bone. And I have absolutely no clue about the depths of the grief of a mother who has lost her sons to suicide.
It was on that trip, spending all her waking hours among the children, that Lilian began to study them closely, trying to imagine a future for each one. Some would grow up to be Annas and Marthas and Gretchens, some, Mikes or Phillips or Jeremys. There would never be a shortage of Ginnys, so Ginny might not have to confront loneliness. But some children—Hazel, Evan, and, of course, Jude—baffled Lilian. Was there ever a calm sea for children who could not or would not be molded into an acceptable shape, who did not fit nicely into the safe and inclusive part of the bell curve? Do outlier children meet outlier fates?
One day—some time after Jude’s death—Lilian looked at the pictures taken on that trip. She was surprised by how young the children were: the boys lining up by piling onto one another like bear cubs, the girls with their cloudless faces. And yet pictures could lie. That a picture is worth a thousand words was only an advertising slogan from the nineteen-twenties—those thousand words were not always ones that could stand the scrutiny.
