In her new book, Dr. Li Yunyun explores how losing a parent early in life, like she did, affects a person’s mindset and sense of identity.
Editor’s note: Devastated by the sudden death of her mother from a stroke in 2014, academic Li Yunyun began researching the effect of parental loss on Chinese adolescents and young adults, for which she eventually received a Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In March, she released her book “Living with Grief,” which is based on interviews with 44 people who experienced such loss, offering insights into the impact early-age bereavement can have on mindset and identity. The following is an excerpt from chapter two.
Research tells us that young people are highly active meaning-makers. When the death of a parent “attacks” their existing cognitive structures and creates disorder, young adults do not passively accept a world thrown into chaos. In our conversations, they shared rich narratives about how they tried to reconstruct order amid the disruption, attempting to maintain the coherence of their life stories. I found that their efforts to rebuild order could generally be divided into three categories: searching for reasons behind the death, reevaluating the impact of the disruption, and adjusting conflicting cognitive frameworks (their understanding of the world).
In the narratives of bereaved young adults, “accommodation” — revising previously held universal meanings or goals to better adapt to traumatic events — is a common theme. For example, 23-year-old Cao, whose father died from liver cancer 18 months ago, shared with me: “You have to understand that not everything has meaning. Some things just present themselves this way at this moment in time, and you have to accept that.” Specifically, when their cognitive frameworks are disrupted by the shock of losing a parent, young adult children consciously work to adjust their understanding of “what life is” and “what fairness means,” attempting to reestablish a sense of order from chaos.
Reinterpreting life
The death of a parent violently shakes a bereaved young adult’s understanding of life. To integrate this disruption into their life narratives, they are forced to revise their conception of what life means. At first glance, these newly constructed perspectives may appear deeply pessimistic.
The first kind of revised understanding is the realization that life is not inherently fair. Qian, 22, whose father died two years ago, recalled how she used to encourage herself with thoughts like, “It’s OK — if I work hard now and endure some hardship, I’ll have a better life later.” But after losing her father in her early 20s, Qian began to realize that life doesn’t necessarily follow a pattern where suffering is eventually rewarded. In many aspects of life, including life and death, fairness simply does not exist. She now fears that unfairness might strike again — for example, she dreads the thought of losing her mother or partner too early — yet she understands that death is beyond her control.
Qian told me: “Maybe you’re just destined to be unlucky your whole life, and maybe others are just destined to be lucky. This discrepancy is a fact of life — it’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is. Some people might live their whole lives without ever experiencing any major hardship. I used to envy those who have never had to go through experiences like these. For some people, these painful experiences are not a matter of sooner or later — they simply never happen. At first, I resented this unfairness, but eventually I realized there’s nothing you can do about it. Some people are just afraid fate will be unfair. I’m only 20, not even married — what if my future partner dies young, too? You just never know with these things.”
Shi, who was in her second year of high school when her mother died by suicide, described herself during that period as “cursing heaven and blaming others.” At the time, she felt that fate had treated her unfairly. But after wrestling with fate for many years, she told me that she can now accept the unfairness in life: “Is life supposed to be smooth sailing? Why should I alone be entitled to an easy life?” Shi, now 23 years old, is particularly fond of the 16th-century novel “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” praising its author Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng for “portraying life and death with equal detachment, as if both were utterly ordinary.” One line from the book especially moved her: “You are urged, in all things, not to be resentful toward Heaven; Heaven’s attitude toward mankind is neither generous nor stingy.” Rather than obsessing over whether life is fair, she now dismisses the question as “not even worth thinking about.” Instead, she chooses to accept the unfairness, adapt, and focus on growing stronger.
The second kind of revised understanding is the recognition that not all of life’s questions have answers. For instance, 30-year-old Qin confessed that she has never been able to fully move on since her father’s death 14 years ago. Originally Protestant, she later converted to Catholicism. Yet despite all her efforts, she was never able to find an answer that could resolve her inner doubts. In the end, she came to one conclusion: “We have to accept that, in this world, for some things there is no answer.”
Qin told me: “Back when I used to do math problems, if I couldn’t solve one, I’d keep trying, right? I’d try two or three methods, and eventually I’d get the answer. But this isn’t like that. I’ve tried so many different ways. Honestly, I’ve exhausted every approach, and I’m telling you — it’s all useless. There are so many things I just can’t figure out. Why did he have to leave so early? I don’t understand why God gave me life only to make me endure all of this — I don’t understand. To be honest, when I ask God, it always feels like He remains silent.”
After the death of her mother and a series of subsequent events, such as losing her sense of security and her father starting a new family, Shi, too, began to think deeply about questions related to life. Over time, however, she realized that such questions might not always have answers — at least not in the same way that other problems in life do.
Shi told me: “I think it’s okay to reflect on a lot of questions, but it’s not necessary to know the answers. So sometimes I just … let them be. There’s this movie called ‘Café Society,’ and it’s about these really complicated love triangles and the emotional messiness of it all. One line stuck with me: ‘Some questions you don’t want to know the answer to.’ You can think about things without having to solve them.”
The third kind of revised understanding for bereaved young adults is the realization that they are not as in control of their lives as they once imagined. Before experiencing the death of an immediate family member, many had a strong sense of agency, believing “I, not the heavens, control my fate.” But after such a loss, they realize that when it comes to death and many other aspects of life, humans are powerless. “Some things, like my father’s passing, are beyond your ability to control. It isn’t something you can change,” says 34-year-old Wang, whose father died suddenly four years ago. “You just have to focus on doing what you can. So, no matter what happens, just keep doing what you need to do. As for the outcome — you can’t control that.”
Jiang, 29, whose father passed away suddenly a year ago, also had a similar realization: “The choices and outcomes in our lives are the result of countless influencing factors. Some you can control, but the rest, you just can’t.” She had to admit that in the face of uncontrollable events — her father’s death, and later learning that a high school classmate had died in a car accident — “you just have to accept it, there’s no going back.”
A question of fairness
When parents pass away in their prime, leaving their offspring experiencing bereavement at a relatively young age, these events strip their children of nearly all of their expectations about fate, life, and growth. This avalanche-like disruption pushes them to confront the question of how to coexist with chaos. Perhaps because the sense of disorder is so overwhelming, even after reconstructing their understanding of life (acknowledging that life is neither fair, nor answerable, nor controllable), many bereaved young adults still cannot fully accept the disruption. Instead, faced with the loss of their sense of fairness, they are compelled to attempt to reconstruct the sense of fairness that has been deconstructed.
The first form of reconstruction that bereaved young adults attempt is to address the perceived unfairness of death as it pertains to their deceased parent. Upon carefully reading their narratives, I was struck by how many of them independently arrived at a similar approach to cope with this disruption — namely, the idea that “fair or unfair, it’s not up to me to judge.”
According to traditional Chinese cultural values, once parents raise their children into adulthood and retire from work, they are meant to enter a phase of life in which they enjoy peace and leisure. Bereaved young adults often speak of this unfulfilled promise with deep regret. “It feels like such a waste,” says Pan, 27. “It’s like they made it through such a hard, exhausting time in their life — struggled through the first half of their journey — and then, when they were finally supposed to enjoy the rewards of all that effort, they didn’t get to. It just feels like it wasn’t worth it, like everything they worked for just disappeared.”
Wang initially had the same sense that “everything was for nothing.” But over time, he began to differentiate between his father’s perspective and his own, acknowledging that evaluating whether or not a life was “worth it” is a subjective judgment that belongs to the individual who lived it — not to him.
Wang told me: “I used to think my father’s life wasn’t worth it, that everything had been for nothing. But then again, whether life is ‘worth it’ or not — that’s an external evaluation. I may label life and death as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but in reality, maybe they’re not what I think at all. Only my father knows whether he had a good life or not. Maybe he had regrets. But I can’t think on his behalf, I can’t evaluate his life because I’m not him, right? I can only judge my own life from my own perspective; I can’t judge his. Maybe he thought — maybe — that if he hadn’t died then, it would’ve been better. But what if, later, he was bedridden and half paralyzed? Wouldn’t that have been suffering for him? You really can’t say whether something was good or bad at the time because so many things are uncertain and changing. How can you know how it would’ve turned out in the end? So, you just can’t judge it.”
Zhang, a 21-year-old whose father died two years ago, also gradually came to understand that she could not make judgments on her father’s behalf. On one hand, in terms of the outcome, her father experienced something deeply unfortunate. But on the other hand, when looking at the journey of his life, he was also incredibly fortunate — he was loved deeply by his wife and daughter. At the same time, Zhang admitted that part of her was continuously trying to convince herself that the world is fair.
Their next attempt at reconstruction was to address the unfairness of death in relation to themselves. At this stage, bereaved young adults consciously work to narrow the gap between themselves and their peers, downplaying the sense of unfairness caused by the loss of a parent to rebuild a sense of order within their cognitive framework.
Wei, who was 18 years old when she lost her mother, told me that when her boyfriend invited her to join a campus Christian fellowship, she initially didn’t want to talk about her mother. But she later discovered that many others had had similar experiences. “All of a sudden I realized that so many people had gone through something like this — it felt kind of comforting,” she said.
Many bereaved young adults also turn to reading to reduce the sense of isolation. Hua, 32, whose mother passed away from rheumatic heart disease 17 years ago, said she felt a rare sense of resonance — something she couldn’t find in daily life — while reading the 1991 essay “The Temple of Earth and I” by Shi Tiesheng. She felt that “Shi wrote about his mother and said something like, ‘God saw that her heart was too burdened, so He called her back early.’ That line really left an impression on me. It made me feel less alone. When you see your own experience in someone else’s writing, it becomes a collective experience.”
Many bereaved young adults also try to soothe themselves. A common interpretation they adopt is: “Everyone goes through this eventually — I just went through it earlier than most.” Pan, whose mother died 18 months ago, smiled bitterly as he asked me: “I’m still just a kid, why do I have to go through this?” But later, he talked himself through it, reasoning that saying goodbye to one’s parents is inevitable.
Pan told me: “Losing a parent is something everyone has to go through. The main thing is just that, for me, it happened a little earlier. Everyone goes through it. We all have to say goodbye to our parents. In the next 10 or 20 years, I might have fewer opportunities to communicate with or receive guidance from older family members with more life experience. But apart from that, I don’t think I’m all that different from most people.”
Another common interpretation is: “Everyone goes through their own kind of suffering.” Zhang, a 21-year-old whose father died two years ago, said that she used to feel a deep sense of loss and sadness — not only because of his death but also from the feeling that her family was different from others. But she gradually developed her own way of interpreting things.
Zhang told me: “(In the beginning) I felt like everyone around me had whole, happy families, going through life together as one complete unit, while our family just wasn’t whole — it was broken, incomplete, imperfect. Now I think it’s fine. Maybe everyone goes through some things as they grow up. For some, it’s the loss of a loved one; for others, it might be the breakdown of family relationships. It just takes different forms. I grew up with love and attention from both my mom and dad, so I don’t see anything to feel inferior about. I was raised in an open-minded, close-knit family. There’s no reason for me to feel like my family is worse than others. I’ve grown, I’ve matured, I’ve gotten stronger. So, now I feel we’re just fine.”
Some bereaved young adults go even further and believe that the differences between themselves and their peers will eventually disappear. Qi, whose dad was murdered 12 years ago, shared that as a child, he often felt ashamed and insecure because he had no father. But by the time he reached graduate school, he felt that “everyone is pretty much the same.” The reason for this fading sense of difference, the 24-year-old explained, is that at this stage in life “everyone has become self-reliant.” His peers, like him, had moved far from home to pursue education and opportunity, many coming from suburban places in inland provinces like central Henan, northwestern Shaanxi, and northern Shanxi. “Nobody’s really depending on their families for support anymore,” he said.
In a way, when these bereaved young adults reach adulthood just as their peers are beginning to experience separation from their own parents, it levels the playing field and blurs the differences and feelings of unfairness. “I don’t feel like I’ve got much less than my peers,” Qi said.
(All names are pseudonyms to preserve the anonymity of participants. All ages provided are correct to 2018, when Li conducted the interviews.)
A promotional photo for the book “Living with Grief.” Courtesy of the publisher
This article, translated by Carrie Davies, is an excerpt from “Living with Grief,” published by Guangdong People’s Publishing House in March. It is republished here with permission.
Editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.
(Header and in-text images:Vectorstock and 500px/VCG)