The New Yorker: "Alone" by Yiyun Li

I'm not sure what to make of this story. It's skillfully written, but it seems to lack emotion. Or perhaps that's the point? (But then, of course, we'd have an imitative fallacy problem!) Suchen is a U.S. resident, originally from China, but she has put China in her past because of an incident that occurred when she was a girl. She and five other girls had entered into a suicide pact—the reasons aren't clear to Suchen and if she doesn't know, the readers certainly don't know—and carried their...