Ambiguity, subtlety are great - but engage us more! : New Yorker stories

Y Li's story "The Science of Flight" (?) in the current New Yorker is a very good character sketch but as a short story it feels a bit underbaked. A story that presents a credible character and within the tight frame of a short story gives us a sense of her history, her personality, her fears and struggles - that's no minor accomplishment. But does a story, like a novel, need a plot? We've been reared, spoiled, by literally generations of New Yorker stories that simply create a mood, a set of nuances, and end on some minor chord, or a single ambiguous note/image. Li's story feels more traditional - a 30ish immigrant from China working in an animal lab with two male coworkers, very different from her, and she has a secret she's kept from all, that she has never known her parents and that her visits "home" to China are not really to see them - but it does feel that Li is unwilling to push this story to its limits. In the interest of subtletry - generally an asset in fiction - she makes the story too flat and inconclusive. It is possible that this is, as are so many other New Yorker stories these days, a part of a longer work, a novel, so maybe the issues that Li raises will get further explored and developed elsewhere. But what would I say if I'd read this story as part of a writers' group? Make something happen. Tell us what happens on her promised trip to London - does she, to her own surprise, find she's rented a place in the village where her friend lived? (Li drops a hint in a reference to a man with 6 fingers - maybe she sees him.) Or: don't tell us the character (Zaichin)'s secret - she doesn't know her parents - until the end of the story. Engage us more - and then the moving story will be much more powerful and memorable.