This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Yian Lee read her story,

When We Were Happy We Had Other Names, from the October 1st, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Lee is the author of two story collections and two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude.

She's been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 2003.

Now here's Yi Yun Li.

When we were happy, we had other names.

The funeral director would be right with them.

A woman's voice said through the intercom when they ran the bell.

After standing on the porch for a minute and then another minute,

Jia Yu and Chris sat down on two weaker chairs,

a small round table with a potted yellow crescentium between them.

It was a cloudless day. The sky intensely blew.

A pair of squirrels were chasing each other on the lawn, and some unseen birds

in the trees, which had yet to change colors, made loud noises, a game of hue and cry in a quiet

neighborhood. Perhaps the real setting of every Shakespeare play, Jia Yu thought, is a wallless waiting room like this,

live as an antechamber to death.

That thought, four months later, struck Jia Yu as unnecessarily theatrical.

Who was she to talk about Shakespeare when the last time struck Jia Yu as unnecessarily theatrical.

Who was she to talk about Shakespeare when the last time she had read him was in college, in Beijing, for an English degree she had made little use of?

Now when Jia Yu thought about the sun-soaked days immediately after Evan's death,

...